Incremental Epic Hero 2

Greetings

Hello everybody!!
This is Hitan from the Hapiwaku development team of Incremental Epic Hero (IEH). Thank you very much for enjoying our games!

We are so pleased to announce the launch of Incremental Epic Heroes 2 into Early Access on Steam!!!

We started this project exactly one year ago this month, and thanks to all of the wonderful feedback we’ve received, we feel we have created a true successor to the original IEH1, and we hope you think so too!

Thank you to everyone who has supported the game throughout our playtesting, and welcome to all new players fresh to the game! 😆

Please join our discord server to get the latest updates, report any bugs you find, get general tips about the game, and maybe find a spouse if you haven’t already got one!

Stories behind the development

Introduction of the Hapiwaku development team

Let me introduce our Hapiwaku development team!

First by myself, I’m a Japanese 25-year-old indie game developer. I started learning programming when I was a university student at 22 year old. Together with Kei, who I met in university, we created our first game IEH1. We released IEH1 on Kongregate.com in April of 2020 and we achieved 1 million plays in the year. After releasing IEH1, he established his own company and keep making multiple idle/incremental games with other indie game developers. He is currently the main developer of IEH1 and preparing for the future updates too. On the other hand, I kept learning programmings by myself and made our second game Incremental Epic Breakers (IEB) with my high school friends in May 2021.

When creating IEH1, I learned programming knowledge from Kei, who had studied programming a year earlier than I did. So IEB was the first game to me that I actually made as the main developer. There were a lot of try and errors. I know there are both positive and negative ratings for IEB but through the development of this game, I was able to refine my programming skills and game development know-how, which lead to the true successor IEH2 😆

My best friend Loren, or Morkyl in Discord, is the other developer of IEH2. He joined IEH development when the first IEH1 alpha was released in January 2020. At the time, idle games were not popular in Japan so it was challenging for us Japanese to develop idle games. Also, we were hardly familiar with English, so the text in the game was originally messed up. He helped us to refine the in-game texts, and gave us a lot of amazing ideas of game content. IEH success cannot be described without him.
He left for a while after releasing IEH1 but he came back to me on development of IEH2! I was very sad when he left IEH due to the circumstances that arose between Kei and him, but I am truly happy to be able to work with him again now in this way and thank him for his support.

Before talking more about IEH2 development story, let me introduce our Hapiwaku artwork team as well!

I got married 3 years ago. My wife, Wakana, is 19 year older than me. By the way, Hapiwaku is originally the word that she and I came up with when we got married, which means “happy and excited” in Japanese word.
I have a 15-year-old step-daughter, Arua. She mainly draws the artwork of IEH. Since we started our first game 3 years ago, she started drawing wonderful artworks for IEH when she was only 12 years old! All the attractive characters of IEH are drawn by her 🙂

I have a younger sister, Nohn, a university student. Wakana and Nohn also draw some parts of IEH artworks. A lot of fascinating monsters and bosses, unique equipment, the fantasy world map and backgrounds, every icon in game, etc are drawn by our ‘family’ artwork team, Arua, Wakana and Nohn!

The IEH2 development through the human life and death

It was just a year ago July 2021 that I actually started the development of IEH2. Through IEH2 development, I experienced a lot of precious things.

First, my little girl, Yuni, was born in June of 2021. I was present at the birth and witnessed the birth of a new life.

It’s like a charmed life to me that I gradually grow up as a father, feeling Hapiwaku to see her growing up. I started the development of IEH2 with the hope that this feeling of happiness and excitement would be incorporated into the creation of the IEH2 game and transmitted to the world, so that every player who plays this game will experience the feeling of Hapiwaku with us. IEH2 is the same age as Yuni, that has been grown up together with her and me as a father 🙂

Before releasing the beta version of IEH2 this year, in fact, there was another major event for me. My father was ill and passed away this past January. It gave me a very good opportunity to re-think about my own life, taking a break from game development for a while. I was thinking various aspects of my life in the future with my family, that let us feel that an every single day is a full of wonderful happiness. I decided to take this opportunity to really ‘enjoy’ the development of IEH2 more and to preserve our daily Hapiwaku in one supreme work of art!

I have kept developing IEH2 not only with my family and Hapiwaku development team but also with our Super Testers, Ringold, McNutty and SharkBite in our Discord! Thanks to them, I was able to concentrate on actually writing codings. They helped us for not only testing and debug but also moderate our Discord and supported a lot of IEH players, that’s how I think we’ve got solid community. You know our development team is so small like a family, but I realize that all of you, the IEH players, are the development team members! You have been given us wonderful feedback. Particularly, as more people participated in our playtest than we originally anticipated, you have helped us to make many positive changes to the game toward the Early Access launch! Thank you so much again. And I would also like to thank the super testers, who have made this community such a great place to live.

Now the launch day!

A happy launch day of IEH2 and our Hapiwaku life!
We are nowhere near done and will continue to add a lot more content over the remainder of the year. Thank you all so much for your continued support! Please stay tuned for our future updates 😆

Again, please join our Discord Server and contact us!

Lastly, please post your review on Steam so that more and more people can find us and join IEH2 Hapiwaku life!

Thank you,
Hitan

Bonus Code

Input IEH2hapiwaku into Settings>Bonus>Bonus Code to get our appreciation gifts for you!