Devlog #3 — Heroes Have Names

Posted 2026-05-22 · Foundation MVP phase, week three

Last week the skin. This week the soul.

For five weeks Stand Eternal had workers — anonymous figures chopping wood and laying stone. They did the work, they slept, they ate, they died and respawned. Functional. Forgettable.

This week they became heroes. They have names. They have lore. They have rarity. And losing one is supposed to hurt a little.

The first ten

Every hero in Stand Eternal now comes from a catalog. No procedural names, no random stat rolls. Each one is a deliberate character with a top role and a story:

Commons — the four every starter House meets in its opening hours:

• Bjorn the Stout, a woodcutter who could outdrink any soldier
• Greta Stonefoot, who raised three walls in one summer
• Magnus the Tiller, who knows when the wheat will rise by the smell of morning air
• Tilda Quickbow, whose quiver never runs dry

Rares — three veterans of harder roads:

• Ragnar Ironhand, who lost a hand at the Battle of Long Pines
• Mira Deepvein, who reads ore like other men read books
• Brother Anselm, who walked from the southern abbeys with a lute and a vow

Epics — two masters of their craft:

• Brunilda the Smith, who forged the blade that broke the Storm
• Captain Hael, who holds the line where lesser men flee

Legendary — one, for now:

• Eira Stormborn, last daughter of House Stormborn, who bears the Crown of the Worthy on her brow

Ten heroes is the founding cast. The catalog scales over time — but every entry will be hand-written, named, and slotted into the world's history. No filler. No randomly generated "Hero #4729."

Twice a day, the boxes open

Every twelve hours — midnight and noon UTC — a free hero box appears for your House. Open it and you draw a hero from the catalog. Common, Rare, Epic, or Legendary — weighted, but always possible.

If you draw a hero you already own, the duplicate converts into files for that specific hero — the currency that unlocks higher star tiers down the line. No hero is ever truly wasted. Pulling Bjorn for the fifth time means a stronger Bjorn for the first.

Two boxes a day. Use them or lose them. No skip, no paid catch-up, no premium box variant. Everyone earns at the same pace.

A roster you have to manage

The catalog is open-ended, but the field is not. Your active slots are gated by your Keep tier — start with two, climb to more as your seat of power grows. Every hero you collect beyond that limit goes to the Roster: frozen, accounted for, ready to swap in.

The swap has weight. A five-minute cooldown between hot-swaps means you can't cycle heroes every fight — you commit, you live with the lineup. Roster strategy isn't just who do I own; it's who do I bring.

Heroes can die — but they don't disappear

When a hero hits HP zero they walk back to the Keep, invulnerable, and go down. KO, not dead.

To bring them back you pay food, and you wait. A Common revive runs 50 food and thirty minutes. A Legendary runs a thousand food and four hours. The cost scales because the loss does — losing Bjorn is a setback; losing Eira is a campaign.

And if you're truly out of options — zero active heroes, no food on hand — there's a fallback. You can revive at no cost, but it takes twice as long. The game won't soft-lock you. It will, however, make sure you feel it.

Behind the curtain

This was the largest single push the codebase has seen since combat landed. Seventeen commits across five days. A full schema migration, four new game systems, end-to-end tests on every layer. Ninety-two new test cases passing — the safety net thickens.

One bug in particular bit hard during testing: heroes coming out of KO were being hit with the five-minute hot-swap cooldown, even though their KO wasn't voluntary. Players who'd waited thirty minutes for a revive would click Activate and be told to wait again. The fix was small. The lesson was bigger — involuntary state changes can't share punishment with voluntary ones.

On the trailer

I owe an honest update. The teaser was supposed to drop this week — it didn't. The cut still has three polish passes ahead of it, and shipping a mediocre trailer to save a self-imposed deadline serves no one. Next devlog. Patience is part of the craft.

Join the journey

This is the week the game stopped being about units and started being about people. Bjorn isn't a worker anymore — he's your Bjorn. Eira isn't a unit class — she's the one you pulled on day fourteen and never quite let leave the active slot.

That shift, more than any feature on the roadmap, is what makes a House a House.

Long live the Houses.