Fan Academy

Fan Academy is a fan-made revival of the game Hero Academy, a turn-based tactics game developed by Robot Entertainment. This project aims to bring back the joy of the original game, offering a way for fans to rediscover it.

This is not a reverse engineering of the game. The game logic has been written from scratch based on the original gameplay while using the original assets to try to preserve the game's aesthetic as much as possible.

What is Hero Academy?

Hero Academy is a player-versus-player turn-based tactics game where players choose a team of heroes and use their units and items to defeat the opponent. Unfortunately, the game is currently dead, delisted from all stores and its online servers shut down. It is no longer possible for people who purchased the game to play it.

Learn more about the original game here on its Wikipedia page.

How was Fan Academy made?

Fan Academy is written in Typescript, using the game engine Phaser for the client and Node, Express, MongoDB and Colyseus for the back-end.

The server code is hosted on a separate repository.

Who is behind the project?

Hi, I'm Daniel, a.k.a. dadazbk, a full-stack developer based in Belgium. You can learn more about me on my GitHub profile.

Licensing and disclaimer

The code in this repository is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

This means:

• You are free to:

  • Share: Copy and redistribute the code in any medium or format.
  • Adapt: Remix, transform, and build upon the code.

• Under the following terms:

  • Attribution: You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
  • NonCommercial: You may not use the material for commercial purposes.

Disclaimer for Third-Party Assets

This project includes proprietary assets from Hero Academy, which are the property of Robot Entertainment. These assets are used for educational and non-commercial purposes under the assumption of fair use for a fan project. This license applies only to the code in this repository and not to the assets. All rights to the proprietary assets remain with their respective owners.

Local Setup & Running Locally

To run Fan Academy locally, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/Dan-DH/fan-academy.git
cd fan-academy

2. Install dependencies

yarn install

Or, if you use npm:

npm install

3. Configure environment variables

Create a .env file in the project root. Example:

VITE_BE_URL=https://fan-academy-be.onrender.com
VITE_SOCKET=wss://fan-academy-be.onrender.com

You can copy and rename .env.example as .env:

cp .env.example .env

• VITE_BE_URL: The backend API URL (in example: production backend)
• VITE_SOCKET: The Colyseus socket server URL (in example: production backend)

For local development, you may point these to your own backend/server if needed.

4. Run the development server

yarn dev

Or:

npm run dev

The app will be available at http://localhost:5173 by default.

5. Build for production

yarn build

Or:

npm run build

6. Preview the production build

yarn preview

Or:

npm run preview

---

See .env.example for a template of required environment variables.