Introducing Hero Generator

Introduction

Hi! I would like to publicly announce that I am starting work on Hero Generator.

Hero Generator is a tool that allows you to take a screenshot of your character from a video game (such as WoW) and generate a high-quality image of your character. My goal is to provide a tool that is easy to use, fast, and provides a high-quality output for any character, be it from WoW, Diablo, Guild Wars, miniatures, or anything else.

The idea

Imagine you have made a character in a video game, built them up, found cool gear, but the graphics are… well, pretty basic. Let’s just say they are not up the level of showing off how you already imagined your character.

Personally, I was always interested in how my equipped character alts from WoW, Skyrim, and all of the other games would look in a high-quality rendering (in “real life”, you know?).

Of course, as games get better graphics, this is less of an issue, but there are still a lot of games out there with basic graphics and huge numbers of players.

Also, I am a huge fan of miniatures and miniature painting, particularly of Warhammer, but also other games. I was thinking that it would be really cool to have a service that would allow me to take my painted mini and create an epic image of the character with their gear, different poses, and all of that.

Recently, AI image generation has become very popular. Some services have sprung up with the ability to take photos (of you) and generate lots of different images of you in different scenarios (for example, PhotoAI). I was thinking, why not use this technology to generate images of video game characters?

Will you share your progress?

I will! I want to make regular progress updates on the project, so please follow along!

Currently, you can sign up for the email list on the Hero Generator website. I set it up quickly just to allow me to get started.

I will send emails with the latest news on the project, and you will also be the first to be able to try it once it is in a good enough state for a public beta release.

So please, don’t hesitate to sign up!

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As part of the progress updates, I also want to share the technical details of the project, how I solved certain challenges, why I did certain architecture decisions, and so on.

I think this will be fun to follow for anybody who wants to get inspired for their own projects, and wants to learn how to build something like this.

I will share not only the technical details but also details about releasing it, getting users, promoting it, and making money from it. Disclaimer: I’ve never really made a successful project before, so actually achieving this and going through all the trials and tribulations of making a project successful will be part of the learning process.

Is it going to be free?

There will be a trial version, but no, it will not be free. First, AI image generation is not cheap. Second, I want to be able to continue working on it and maintain it. Third, I do want to make money as well :).

This is obviously work in progress, but currently I am leaning towards a subscription model, something like $5/month. This will give you enough generations so that you realistically never run out, but still allow me to not lose money on the project.

The free tier will be just to try it out, so probably a few image generations per month or something. We’ll see.

What are my goals with this project?

• Provide a good, fun tool that is easy to use, fast, and provides a high-quality output for any character that you would reasonably want to render.
• Be able to create efficient processes for myself to be able to create this project on my own, in a reasonable amount of time.
• It shouldn’t have any major bugs on release, and I want it to be fully tested.
• Get at least 1000 paying users in the first year.
• Learn a lot from it and gain experience on making a project successful.

So, what’s next?

I will start working on it! The first progress update will be about the tech stack chosen, the setup of the project, technical decisions made on the start and reasoning behind them. The hard part about this is going to be to get the image generation to work, and I want to share a lot of the details about getting that to function.

If you read this far, thank you! I hope you find this project interesting and will follow along on the journey! Please let me know what you think in the comments below! Do you think this is a viable idea?

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