Hero Play — documentation

The five games

Hero Play is not one game — it is one engine with five games in it. Every game shares the same free pass, the same world, and the same controls, so you can switch between them without reloading the page.

Only Sandbox is playable end to end today. The other four have their rules finished and tested but are not yet connected to the world, so the hub labels them honestly rather than letting you click into something that does not work.

Overview

Hero Play is an original voxel engine built by Hero Studios and rendered with WebGL2. It is not a copy of any other game and it ships no third-party code or assets: the terrain comes from our own noise functions, the textures are generated procedurally at runtime, and both the patterns and the colours are driven by the Hero Studios design tokens. There is a full day/night cycle, distance fog, and a configurable render distance.

Controls

Blocks, inventory & crafting

Breaking a block drops it into a 36-slot inventory (9 quick-bar + 27 backpack, stacks of 64). Press E to open it: click a stack to pick it up, click again to place it, shift-click to send it to the quick-bar. Only placeable items can sit in the quick-bar, and placing consumes one.

Nineteen placeable blocks ship today — grass, dirt, stone, sand, log, leaves, planks, brick, snow, plus glass, moss stone, obsidian, lantern and the Hero Block, and the working stations furnace, chest and bed. Underground you will find coal ore and iron ore, and caves are carved through the stone for you to explore.

Recipes are wired up for planks, sticks, glass, bricks, lanterns, Hero Blocks, the full wooden/stone/iron tool set, and the furnace, chest and bed. Iron ore needs a stone pickaxe; coal ore drops to any pickaxe.

Furnaces, chests & beds

Right-click a placed furnace, chest or bed to use it (hold Shift to place a block on top of one instead). A chest holds 27 stacks; click a stored item to take it, click your own to store it. A furnace takes an input, a fuel and an output — it smelts raw pork → cooked pork, iron ore → iron ingot and sand → glass. Coal burns for 60s, a log 24s, planks 18s and a stick 6s, and each fuel always finishes a whole item. A bed sets your respawn point, and sleeping at night skips to morning and heals you.

Missions

Eleven missions track real progress — first steps, lumberjack, builder, craftsman, explorer, glazier, night owl, well off, and the mining chain: ore, smelting and sleeping. Completing one pays out items, Hero Coins and, for some, a free pack. Press Q to see them; the next objective also shows on the HUD.

Water & swimming

Water is swimmable — you move at about half speed, Space strokes upward and Shift dives. Outside it you sink slowly rather than falling. Your breath meter appears above the quick-bar once your head goes under and drains over roughly twelve seconds; when it empties you take damage until you surface. It refills in open air, and you cannot drown in creative mode.

Health & hunger

You have 20 health (hearts) and 20 hunger. Falling more than about three blocks hurts you, and hitting zero health respawns you back on the surface at full health. Hunger drains slowly — faster when you move. A full bar regenerates your health; an empty bar starves you.

Food: apples drop from leaves. Press F (or the Eat button in the inventory) to eat the first food you are carrying. Bread and cooked pork exist too — try /give bread 4.

Profile & worlds

Press P for your Hero Profile: your name, lifetime stats (mined, placed, crafted, distance walked, deaths, missions) and world slots you can create and switch between. It is stored locally, and is the seat the Hero Account will sync into.

Packs — zero-restart

The pack hub sits next to the game. Activating a pack rewrites only the colour buffer, so the running world restyles instantly — no page reload, no interruption. 6 packs are free for everyone; 4 are part of the studio tier.

The free pass

Everyone gets a 15-minute free pass. The window is issued by our own gate (/api/play/session) as a signed token, so it cannot be stretched by editing the clock, clearing storage or duplicating the tab. When it ends the world pauses — your build is kept — and a modal offers the upgrade. Unlocking Premium removes the limit and opens the premium packs.

Honest limitation: the pass is enforced per visit. Limiting repeat visits would need a database of issued passes, which is not wired up yet.

Saving

Everything you build is saved to your browser's own storage (IndexedDB) as a compact list of edits, and restored when you come back. Reset in the session bar regenerates the world from scratch. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.

Performance

The engine watches the last 120 frames. If the average drops below 45 FPS it steps the internal resolution down to 0.75× and then 0.5×, and steps back up once you clear 58 FPS — so it stays responsive on shared lab machines instead of stuttering. Chunks outside the render distance (and behind you) are skipped entirely, and only the area you edit is re-meshed.

Once the page has loaded, a service worker keeps it available offline — Hero Play still opens if the connection drops.

Presentation: blocks use a runtime-generated texture atlas with per-face shading and ambient occlusion, under a day/night sun with distance fog. Whatever you look at is outlined, breaking blocks throws particles, and every sound is synthesised in the browser — no audio files ship with the site.

Playing together

Open Hero Play in a second tab or window on the same machine and you are in the same world: block edits sync both ways and you can see the other player. It needs no account and no server. Playing across the internet needs the relay service, which is on the roadmap.

Creatures

The world is inhabited. Pigs and sheep wander the surface, and zombies and creepers hunt you — more of them after dark. Creepers explode: they damage you and blow a crater in the terrain. Look at a creature and Left-click to attack it; it takes five hits to bring one down.

Gamemode & commands

Press / (or T) for the command console and type /help. Survival is the default; /gamemode creative gives you flight (Space up, Shift down) and unlimited blocks, with no fall damage.

FAQ