- Unity Engine Patch Notes - 20 October 2025
Greetings, HRO Officers! 🚀🚀 We have just deployed a new patch for HRO, applying a fix for the Unity Engine vulnerability. As you are likely aware, recently Unity announced that a long-standing security vulnerability that was discovered in their engine. They released a patch for it and as such we have applied it to our latest build. After some internal testing, it appears good to go. I've just deployed it to Steam. Naturally, we suggest you update the game as soon as possible. Cheers! -Eric
- Patch Notes from Space Armada - 31 October 2023
Happy galactic autumn, HRO cadets! Today we're pushing a small update with a few fixes and various improvements: small tweaks to music in Episode 03 adjustments to audio mix content edits and logic adjustments to character conversations As always, thanks so much for playing HRO! Be sure to enjoy the climate simulator and see some of those colorful leaves before winter arrives.
- HRO Hot-Fix - 18 August 2023
Hello, SpaceArmada HROs! Today we're pushing a quick hotfix for an audio bug in Episode 03. As you were!
- Patch Notes from Rapturia Prime - 16 August 2023
Hello, SpaceArmada HROs! Today we're pushing a patch with a few iterations and fixes for various improvements: iterations on underscoring in various cutscenes replaced musical stingers in gameplay fixed a bug whereby the game would save without naming the file improvements in the ACCESS panel when hacking various ship systems adjustments to core audio settings As always, thanks so much for playing HRO! Be sure to take your R&R leave. It doesn't roll over to the next space-time year, you know!
- AdventureX 2023 - 15 August 2023
We’re excited to announce that “HRO: Adventures of a Humanoid Resources Officer” will be one of only twenty adventure games invited to appear at this year’s AdventureX convention in London, England. The festival runs November 4-5, 2023. We hope to see you there at what promises to be an amazing international weekend for lovers of adventure games!
- HRO will be at Play NYC - 17 July 2023
Play NYC will be in-person this August 5-6, 2023 at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City and "HRO: Adventures of a Humanoid Resources Officer" will be there! Check out the details of this one-of-a-kind Playcrafting event at https://play-nyc.com/. We hope you'll join us there and stop by the W&M booth to say hello and save the Endeavor's crew from certain doom!
- Patch Notes from Space Armada - 6 July 2023
Hello, SpaceArmada Cadets! 'Just a few tweaks and improvements in this update. edits in text and timing for subtitles updated ending cutscene video As always, thanks so much for playing HRO. As you were, Cadet!
- HRO Livestream with Cocktails & Consoles - 23 May 2023
Hello, SpaceArmada friends! Join us tonight when Cocktails & Consoles starts her playthrough of HRO:: Adventures of a Humanoid Resources Officer! Join us on the Endeavor starting at 10:00pm Eastern. We'll see you there! Don't forget your official HRO lanyard and crew ID! Link below! https://www.youtube.com/@CocktailsConsoles Like watching Julia Child play Mortal Kombat Welcome! Bringing you custom cocktails based on your favorite games & characters. Join us for lively libations and bar-like humor.
- Patch Notes from the Engineering Level - 22 May 2023
Just a few optimization improvements in this patch: added a frame rate limit included a possible fix to prevent cutscenes from being unintentionally skipped
- HRO: Adventures of a Humanoid Resources Officer has Launched! - 21 May 2023
It's official! HRO has officially launched! We are super excited for everyone to experience their own story in our bureaucratic universe. Cheers to HR folks everywhere! This one's for you. Many thanks to our team, and to all our supporters. This is our biggest project yet at W&M, we're very proud and very excited for you to play! Be sure to join us tonight on Twitch where BogusMeatFactory will attempt to navigate the HR nightmares of HRO. https://www.twitch.tv/bogusmeatfactory Cheers and hope to see you there! -Eric & Marc
- gettin’ figgy with it - 17 May 2023
We’re so excited to announce that “HRO: Adventures of a Humanoid Resources Officer” has been chosen to appear in this year’s Boston Festival of Independent Games. This online community event will run Saturday, May 20, through Sunday, May 21, 9AM-5PM ET. Stop by our virtual booth during the “showcase” hours on Saturday (noon-5PM ET) and chat us up about game development or HRO and play a demo with us! Tickets are free and available on Eventbrite. And speaking of this weekend — HRO will be releasing on Steam this Sunday, May 21! We’re so excited. Hope you are, too.
- a box full of immersion - 12 May 2023
Back in the day, games were shipped to physical stores. On floppy disks or CDs. In a box. And if you were really lucky the box would also contain stuff. In the industry they’re referred to as “feelies” and they were things like maps and notebooks, or — in one particularly memorable instance — a set of cardboard glasses attached to a plastic pig snout. Of course, we’re distributing HRO: Adventures of a Humanoid Resources Officer via an online merchant, but we wanted to try to capture some of that world-building excitement we felt when we opened video game boxes in the eighties and nineties. So we produced a limited run of physical boxes, complete with an HRO “Orientation Guide” and your very own CSS Endeavor crew ID lanyard. There’s also a link to a special microsite where you can create your own custom crew avatar and identity card to print out. (You can check out the microsite at tinyu…
- it's not fire… - 4 May 2023
Before I started working on video games I was a writer and a performer — and I’ve always had a fascination with comedy. How it works. How it’s structured. How to get the unexpected laugh. That sort of thing. One of my favorite comedic devices is the callback. A callback is a joke that works because it refers to an idea or event that happened earlier in the same script, or — more commonly today — an idea or event that came up in an earlier episode or season of a show, or in a previous film in a series. The joy is in the connection. The audience gets to put the pieces together in real time and feel the thrill of making the association (“I’m wicked smart to get that!”) and the thrill of sharing the inside joke (“the writers were wicked smart to put that Easter egg in for the loyal fans!”). A well-crafted callback can also add to an audience’s sense that the fictional world is vast, living…
- a musical interlude - 23 April 2023
We’re breaking with our blogging tradition this time and welcoming Worthing & Moncrieff’s resident sound designer, Eric Hamel, to talk about composing the score for HRO and how he sees the role of music in the larger development context. So if this post is mysteriously more coherent and less snarky than our usual fare, you know who to blame… Music has long been an integral part of the gaming experience. It’s an essential tool for immersing players into the game world, enhancing action, and shaping the emotional tone. But composing game music is uniquely challenging because the player has control over the action and events the score is intended to complement. When composers score a film, they know exactly when events take place and how the action will change. Game composers don’t have that same luxury of predictability. On a practical level, structuring the music in HRO has been an exerc…
- playing favorites - 2 April 2023
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. MARC: This is the blog post where the developers of HRO talk about our favorite characters in the game. And I thought it might be interesting for us to say who our favorite recurring character is and who our favorite “guest star” is. ERIC: Love it. Yes. MARC: So my favorite recurring character — this will hardly be a shocker — is the science officer. Commander Kondor. Just a little background, Stella Kondor is a Chirchirroid, which is one of the alien races in HRO. They are fanous as the sticklers of the galaxy — the rules followers and the referees and they’re the people who point and say “six items or fewer in the express checkout line!” ERIC: And they’re very unpopular as a result. MARC: But that is like, definitely, totally me. I really dig the whole “let’s have rules and let’s all follow them” thing. So I have a soft spot for her…
- a little showing off… - 18 March 2023
So this week is PAX East here in Boston! As part of the week-long festivities, Worthing & Moncrieff will be showing off HRO: Adventures of a Humanoid Resources Officer at the Made In MA at PAX East 2023 Party on March 23rd. We’re really excited to get the current build in front of players and to connect with our local friends and colleagues. So if you’re in Boston for the big show, we hope you’ll come by, have a drink with us and play some games. We’re also pleased to announce that W&M’s own Eric Hamel will be participating in a PAX East panel on voiceover best practices. Check out their website for more details.
- notes for the constructive crew - 26 February 2023
There’s a terrific episode of Will & Grace in which Jack is so wrapped up in his acting career that he doesn’t notice his best friend Karen’s life is falling apart. A few dozen punchlines and one really amazing epiphany scene later Jack course corrects. For me, this is a perfect metaphor for playtesting. It’s a scheduled period for me and Eric to stop, step back, and listen to what our players are saying. At W&M we’re big believers in the power of playtesting to identify problems. We’ve found that when a player finds a problem they’re always right — there is always a problem. How that problem gets resolved falls to the dev team. The key is figuring out why the player was prompted to say what they said. The right fix requires us to balance the original vision for the game, the technical constraints we’re working under, and the larger game experience as a whole. Perfect solutions are some…
- Milestones, Millstones and Lodestones - 10 February 2023
We’ve been working hard on HRO even if we haven’t been talking about it much. So here’s a few things we’ve been thinking about and implementing over the last six months or so: The main way players affect the HRO universe is by doing bureaucratic stuff — we call them “actions” — including things like requisitioning exotic equipment, assigning crewmembers to specific roles and tweaking the meeting snack budget. A lot of time recently went into creating all the permutations. The game has about 215 distinct administrative actions a player can take across the sweep of the game. Getting them all to work mechanically and getting them all to work narratively within the framework of their stories was kind of a bear. When we started this project we were committed to the idea that a player’s choices should have consequences. Because of actions a player takes, characters in HRO can die, careers can…
- Beta testing starts 01.29.23 - 29 January 2023
We are just about to enter one of my favorite phases of the development process —beta testing! Yay! We’ve been working hard and HRO is, officially, feature complete. So now it’s time to hand it over to friends and generous volunteers to “stress test” our baby. This will be the first time anyone outside the W&M team will be able to play the entire game through and we’re really looking forward to the player feedback. In an ideal world, we would be playtesting the game at a show or festival in addition to distributing keys for people to play on their own time in their own homes. The advantage to the in-preson festival-type testing is that the feedback is immediate. We can see how far a player gets, where they laugh, where they get stuck and we can learn a lot from the questions they ask. Our playtesting philosophy is to be as hands-off as possible and just watch players play. It’s observat…
- HRO Release Date Announced - 14 January 2023
It’s our great pleasure to announce that our retro sci-fi visual novel has an official Steam release date. HRO: Adventures of a Humanoid Resources Officer is currently slated to release on May 21, 2023. Yay! We couldn’t be more excited to share this with you. All of us here at Worthing & Moncrieff are grateful for the help and talent of so many fine collaborators — and for all the stuff we learned along the way! Boy, this one really stretched our horizons. But the finish line is in sight and the game is in great shape. Stay tuned for more news as the big day approaches.
