Hero Lab on Android

[Colen]

Regarding the kickstarter - it's a great idea, and one we'll be considering at the appropriate time. The problem we're currently facing isn't just a money issue, it's also a time issue.

Even if we raised the money to hire a new employee to work full-time on an Android port, there's always a lot of time that needs to be spent to bring someone new up to speed, make sure everything is being done properly, and so on. This is especially true when you have hundreds of thousands of lines of code to work with, as Hero Lab does.

Even if we hired a great Android developer (and finding a great anything developer is hard enough as it is) that person needs to understand the RPG industry, understand what the product needs to do, understand how it works on current platforms, figure out how to re-use all the necessary code on the new platform, and decide how anything that doesn't directly translate should be represented on that new platform.

That process took months to get through for the iPad port, and that was with me writing much of the code that would be used on the iPad, and already knowing how it worked. If we got someone new in to work on the Android version, simply getting that person up to speed on everything they'd need to know would take a huge chunk of our time for the next few months.

That's time that currently needs to be spent on some badly-needed features for Hero Lab on the desktop, adding missing features to Hero Lab on the iPad, etc. Over the last couple of years we've found that it simply isn't practical to do all that *and* have a new person working on something that needs a lot of supervision.

I understand that you guys really want to use Hero Lab on your android tablets - I totally would too if I had one. But trust me, if there was an easy way to get an android port up and running, we'd be doing it.

We need to spend some time polishing Hero Lab on the iPad, getting it to the point where we're happy with it. At that point we can consider what the next steps are, whether that means adding other game systems, supporting additional platforms like android, or something else. Doing otherwise just means we're not serving our current users as well as we should.

Hope this helps explain why we haven't made any specific android announcements yet. It bugs us that Hero Lab can't be used on android tablets as well, the reality is just that we can't do everything at once, so we need to wait until we can do things properly.