Genre: Role-playing (RPG), Strategy, Turn-based strategy (TBS), Tactical, Adventure, Indie, Card & Board GameThe Hand of Merlin
Patch Notes - Early Access Build 674059
• Added destruction effects to Heroes. E.g. when a Hero dies by an explosive, they will now explode into chunky bits.
Quality-of-Life improvements:
• Completed ultra-wide support for all skirmish maps in Albion and Marca Hispanica.
• Removed the timer for shuffling random outcome cards and replaced it with a manual Shuffle button.
• Added artwork to indicate when an encounter option leads to a card draw and random outcome.
• Added a quick-and-dirty display of the currently upgrading skill to below the Hide cards button when upgrading skills.
• Changed how portrait tooltips work - they are now hover persistent, and have their own tooltips for various elements, like attributes and status effects.
• Added gear icons to portrait tooltips, as well as attribute breakdowns (the components adding up to the values, such as gear, effects, etc).
• Added a visualization for locations of manual waypoints.
• Slightly increased font sizes in the Journal and in some tooltips.
General fixes:
• Fixed an incorrect message when the AI passes their turn.
• Fixed a bug with the legend compass not getting deleted correctly, causing a crash if the dangling compass is clicked.
• Fixed an error in Zahra's Resourceful passive that sometimes did not proc her armor healing.
• Fixed an issue where the benefits of Hunter's Spree and Surging Shot (upgrades of Ranger's Shoot skill) could not be correctly applied.
• Fixed an issue preventing Volley from being offered as a skill choice to Rangers on level up.
• Turpin's Cross now requires 1 AP to be used, as all free action relics do. This avoids characters becoming stuck with 0 AP.
• Healing for 0 no longer triggers side-effects by default.
• Fixed a bug where encounter text could sometimes use the wrong name when referring to a Hero.
• Fixed various typos in several tooltips and encounters.
Gameplay balancing:
• Revamped all variants of the Holy Grail relic. Instead of an on-use action, they now all have unique passive effects.
• Roland's Horn now deals Harassed to enemies instead of Rally to allies, serving as a locking mechanic with better scaling.
• Ranger's Defensive Vigil (upgrade of Archer's Vigil) no longer takes AP away from the target, but adds 3 stacks of the Blinded debuff.
• Ranger's Far Shot skill (upgrade of Shoot) now only has 1.5x the default range, down from 2x.
• Ranger's Quickdraw skill line now comes with a 40% accuracy reduction, but scales better with more power.
• Warrior's Slam skill now deals Staggered instead of Dazed for its base version and all upgrades. It also now allows pushing diagonal enemies.
• Heavy Armor effect now also reduces damage to health while there is armor left.
• Higher tier Blacksmith upgrades are now cheaper.
• Supplies now cost the same in all zones.
Dev blog 77 - Grail Redesign
Hey! More design stuff! Today, let’s keep it simple: Grails.
So, if you ever played The Hand of Merlin, one of the first choices you make in a run is to pick a Virtue, granting you the accompanying relic. Bravery, Honor, Piety, and Fortitude.
The Grail-picking process is an interesting thing to design for. In a lot of ways, it is part of your loadout for the run: Core with Spells, Heroes, and Grail, and as such, they have to offer gameplay modifiers, enough to spice up your strategies.
Now that we have learned more about the meta and the “fun” aspects of combat, we found the time to redesign the current four grails.
Bravery was the standard grail, giving you a once-per-fight free action point. Worked wonders as a good opener, and was pretty straightforward. Now, the bearer deals extra damage against enemies with larger pools of health/armor and those with more power. “Bravery” really only shines in the face of adversity! - This Grail now should be a good option for your weaker characters to bump up their damage per turn or to put on your glass cannon.
Honour granted a buff to the bearer whenever they missed an attack, sort of a “pick-me-up” mechanic. That felt a bit underwhelming, so we wanted to take the opportunity to introduce a new sphere of ability design. Now, it restores cooldowns and grants 1 AP if the bearer kills the “last hitter” - the unit that last attacked them. A powerful effect, but might take some setting up to do!
Piety was the strongest, by far! On use, it would reset cooldowns to the entire party, once per fight. A great “Win now” button, and a tad too powerful when compared to the others. Instead, we wanted to offer some incentives to accompany the new healing abilities and passives. The Bearer of Piety will have extra effects when healed (armor OR health, so ready up your combos!). We were interested in also reducing debuff stacks, but we want to see how powerful this current model is.
Last but not least, Fortitude is for your beefy characters. While before it would grant you a 2 point damage reduction IF the bearer was debuffed, we took a page out of what we learned from abilities to change its behavior. Now it is a dynamic damage reduction: Each time you take damage, it increases its effect by 1 but is reduced by 2 each turn. Wonderful if you are taking multiple attacks per turn, but a straight upgrade nevertheless!
If you were paying attention, you’ll note that all Grails are now passives, and that’s by design. Not only do we want the first relic a new player sees to be something that reflects the “loadout” purpose, but we are preparing to tie in the Grails with meta progression (making grails stronger over multiple runs) and with the events of the end of the game - no spoilers, but we got some feedback about the role of the grail that we want to address in the near future.
Be sure to play with these updated relics and offer us any feedback you have on them, as well as the other balancing changes in the following patch.
Thank you!
Join our Discord server!
Mat
Patch Notes - Early Access Build 673810
• Many house-keeping / internal changes to prepare for the next major patch.
Quality-of-Life improvements:
• Improved the appearance of several skirmish maps on ultra-wide / triple-monitor setups.
General fixes:
• Fixed a crash that could randomly occur during combat.
• Fixed various typos in several tooltips and encounters.
Dev blog 76 - Mat's Design Talk
Hello again! Glad to be able to sneak you all another peek of our design tables. Today, I want to talk a bit about how the Skill Overhaul went, and a bit more about what we found out, and how we are planning to move forward.
In The Hand of Merlin, the primary operand you have in tactical play is your character’s abilities. They define what actions you possess, and drive your strategy. Especially since we wanted to make the game straightforward, without many auxiliary mechanics (such as Zone of Control, Facing…), getting abilities right is paramount to our success. I’ll talk more about that decision, but first, let me remind you what the Skill Overhaul was.
When we developed the player abilities, we approached it with three design pillars in mind: Niche Protection, Thematic Flavour, and Problem Solving. That is to say, an ability had to (a) feel like their class, (b) evoke a specific fantasy associated with our cultural touchstones of that class, and (c) serve a specific need in the map. For instance, consider Hunter’s Mark - your ranger is a trained hunter, able to focus on specific enemies to give extra damage. It ticked all the boxes, surely: It’s a damage buff that only works for the main damage-dealer, it feels very flavourful, and it could help out by bringing down bigger enemies, like Behemoths of Lindworms.
Then, we doubled down on themes for the upgrades - “Hunter’s can boast about their kills!” turned into Hunter’s Prize, for instance. And, you know, it all made sense and made the abilities work.
If this was closer to a traditional C/JRPG (Baldur’s Gate, Final Fantasy) this could’ve been enough, but there was a key aspect that slipped a bit: The Cost of a Slot.
In those games, you can amass great quantities of skills to use. Even if you don’t use them a lot, there might eventually be some specific conditions where the ability would come into place, but in The Hand of Merlin, picking something like Staggering Blow meant that ¼ of all of your main actions are dedicated to the problems that Staggering Blow can solve. In those cases, why would you pick something conditional over a direct, reliable damage increase?
The data was clear - Quick Draw, Cleave, Concoction, all damage-dealing abilities were far more reliable and attractive. So, we had to make some adjustments.
We added the No Roadblock Design and the Slot Worth pillar. I talked a bit more about the first aspect in previous posts, but the second one is quite simple: at the end of the day, abilities are compared in regards to their capacity to provide the opportunity to deal/negate damage, which is the actual end objective and what makes you choose one over the other for your few slots. Debuffs became more violent or simply easier to use, and we discovered some success in adding action points or cooldown reduction to emphasize that even further.
With the changes made, we went on to play with it! We do a lot of internal playtesting, having a few very competent players in our dev team. They play a few runs, try to break things, and relate their feelings about specific abilities/strategies over to us in Design. It seems like the game was more varied, had less obvious winning strategies, and felt more fun overall. Some of our community feedback seemed to agree, and we were having a much better time.
But we are not done! While pursuing the need to have a small set of 4 abilities to be very versatile and powerful and keeping our current systems, we had to employ a “combo-building” approach, common to some deckbuilding games. It seems that the game switched a bit more towards trying to create powerful game-breaking builds (10 AP actions! Instant CD reduction! Kill Behemoths by bypassing armor!), as we oriented design towards multiplicative effects, power-scaling, and similar drives. It’s fun, engaging, and far better than to be bothered by upgrades you didn’t want, but there’s still something to solve: Cheese.
We call Cheese strategies that are made available by combining separate mechanics in ways that we did not predict, creating an effect so powerful that the enemies cannot keep up with, effectively solving the game. The old version still had these (Kaz, one of our artists, could win the 3rd boss fight in a single turn), but the current model still has quite a few. A marked power creep and the capacity to bypass several systematic difficulties like cooldowns made the game a bit easier and a bit…, well, out of control. Hallow + Warcry on Salim with Quick-shot and Take Aim/Far Shot comes to mind.
Still, we consider it to be a fun take on the genre, and it fulfills our vision for a tactics game that is status effect and ability-driven, with many ways to create complex builds and strategies, so I don’t expect a lot of systematic changes apart from those we introduce with meta progression.
What do we want to do now? First, we will normalize the peaks and valleys, such as making cooldown matter a bit more or making the Grail relics a bit more engaging. Then, we will make sure that the enemies gain some cool toys to play with too: More complex abilities and combo potential, but also the new enemies we have planned.
In the end, we’re excited to see how the game is changing and improving based on your feedback, but we are not done yet! We want to make sure our players have decent challenges to face and can have as many meaningful choices as possible. With some effort and more feedback from you, we’ll get there soon!
Thanks for reading and playing!
Join our Discord server!
Mat
Patch Notes - Early Access Build 673671
• Improved ambush scenarios by adding an element of danger while the party is not yet revealed to enemies. Instead of standing still, the enemies will now wander about, possibly revealing the party. In addition, there is an auto-reveal timer: the enemies will grow increasingly wary as turns progress.
• Added several new encounter illustrations.
• Added sounds to all skills in the Mystic's Elixir line.
Quality-of-Life improvements:
• Added aura information to small unit tooltip.
• Units spawned in waves will now focus the camera on their position upon spawning. This should help players notice new enemy arrivals.
• Improved the appearance of several skirmish maps on ultra-wide / triple-monitor setups.
• Improved the tooltips for Morgana's spells that reference the Hexed status effect, to make it clear what the effect does.
General fixes:
• Morgana's Spire (Tier 3 spell) can no longer be cast underneath units making them unable to move.
• Warrior's Judicious Cleave skill (upgrade of Cleave) no longer targets allies, as intended and described.
• Warrior's Stand Fast skill and its upgrades will no longer stack with itself.
• Ranger's Trail Blaze skill (upgrade of Sprint) is now blocked by low obstructions, like the other Sprint upgrade lines. This avoids units being locked into place.
• Mystic's Flash Hallow skill (upgrade of Hallow) should now be usable even if there are no immediate targets in the aura's range.
• Mystic's Thunder Brimstone and Brimstone Shards skills (upgrades from Explosive Brimstone) can now be used even if there are no units in the target area.
• Quarry status effect no longer describes that it has a decay rule, since it does not.
• Bad Omen and Expurger status effects should no longer trigger from Damage Over Time effects such as Poisoned.
• Fixed a bug where Pylon of Rendering would start with no stacks of Ethereal. Now it should start with 5, as usual.
• Fixed a bug preventing existing profiles from being able to get the Al-Andalus Tourist achievement.
• Fixed a bug that prevented the blacksmith from generating the shop state in Camelot if the player abandoned the run on that node.
• Fixed a bug where guardian encounters could not be continued if the player closed the game during the guardian encounter.
• Fixed a bug where if multiple notifications were created in the map state, they would overlap in the center of the screen while one is animating.
• Fixed a bug where the card hover tooltip wasn't correctly removed in some cases.
• Fixed an issue where aura radius got truncated when showed as part of status effect description in ability tooltips.
• Fixed a bug where moving a unit while undo is happening would spend the AP and not undo the action.
• Fixed a bug where the action bar indicated the wrong hotkey ([10] instead of [0]) for the Dimensional Restoration spell.
• Fixed a bug where geometric particles could be targeted by decals (auras could get ground effects stuck to them).
• Fixed an end of run report bug where abandoning the run before choosing the grail showed an incomplete "You chose the .' sentence.
• Fixed a bug where the world map could be scrolled while menus are open.
• Fixed a bug in the lobby when changing the active Core but canceling the run before starting it would cause inconsistent Core model to be shown.
• Fixed various typos in several tooltips and encounters.
Gameplay balancing:
• Salim's Measuring passive status effect is now capped at 6.
• Zahra's passive no longer deals its extra damage to allies in the case of friendly fire.
• Cockatrice's Wail aura now applies Rejuvenation instead of Mending, allowing it to heal Health as well as Armor.
• Roland's Horn relic no longer has a warm-up period.
• Francisca relic's damage now scales with attacker's Power (instead of dealing a static 4 damage).
Dev blog 75 - Reveal timers
For a while now, I’ve been aware that our ambush scenarios have a problem.
As a reminder, an ambush scenario is one where either the enemy starts unrevealed and you can sneak up on them or one where the enemies ambush you (based on encounter choices) and start first. Today, I’m talking about the former case.
A Warband that has no revealed units essentially has every unit skip trying to think about what to do. In other words, we skip the AI calculation for unrevealed units. Until fairly recently (maybe two patches ago), this was happening instantly and was hard for anyone to discern what was going on other than “I can press the End Turn button constantly and nothing happens”.
The first part of the solution was to make the AI units telegraph what was happening. They were skipping their turn because they weren’t revealed, so I made them raise a combat message (the scrolling text) saying “Unrevealed”. I still knew there was a bigger issue at hand and last week I’ve decided enough is enough, when our designer Mia posted a message in our internal bug tracking channel.
I’m happy to report that this is a thing now. In every ambush scenario, you will have 3 turns before the enemies are automatically revealed and start attacking you after your 4th turn.
We then also had another idea - have the unrevealed enemies randomly move around, increasing the danger of accidentally revealed them if you’re not careful. This is how it looks like in the current version and is going live in the patch today.
The movements are fully random so you won’t be able to memorize the patterns in order to prepare a flawless ambush by abusing restarting the fight.
Thanks for reading, and if you wanna ask questions or pitch suggestions, join our Discord server or post in the Steam forums.
MarkoP
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Patch Notes - Early Access Build 670034
• Added new VFX for all aura abilities.
Quality-of-Life improvements:
• Units now show their passive status effects on the map state portraits (as opposed to just during skirmish).
• Mystic's Explosive Brimstone skill and all its upgrades now explicitly show their effect area in the description.
General fixes:
• "Heal Half Armor" effect, associated with Rana and Zahra's passives, should no longer miss.
• Warrior's Bash skill now allows you to push away Mandrakes before they trigger their Xenopollen ability, even if the movement was blocked. Meaning, it is now always safe to Bash a Mandrake to avoid its on-death effect.
• Fixed an issue where Warrior's Bash skill would sometimes not deal full damage to the blocking unit.
• Fixed an issue that would sometimes prevent Mystic's Caustic Coating skill (and its upgrades) from applying its effect.
• Fixed an issue where Mystic's Raise Tall Totem skill (upgrade of Raise Totem) would raise a low cover instead of a high cover.
• Fixed Bayard's Bits relic to not destroy all cover when moving.
• Redcap's AI should no longer gaze at a target gazed by another Redcap, which was never intended. As a benefit, this also helps avoid confusion.
• Dire Toad is now immune to knockback, as it is a large unit.
• The action bar now has space for up to 16 AP; which is the soft cap of attainable AP per turn.
• Fixed a bug where auras that did not affect any unit did not show their unit tooltip description.
• Fixed an issue with the epilogue saying Roland always survived, regardless of actual events.
• Fixed several typos in ability and effect descriptions.
Gameplay balancing:
• Mystic's Delphic Elixir+ skill (upgrade of Aeolic Elixir) no longer targets the caster, just their allies.
• The aura granted by Mystic's Holy Totem skill (upgrade of Raise Totem) now scales with Aura power properly, making Holy Totem significantly stronger.
• Restoration spell's strength has been reduced from 8 to 5.
• Translocation spell cooldown reduced from 3 to 1.
• Stasis spell now affects all enemies in the map, rather than just a single target. Additionally, the Stasis effect now works similarly to the Stunned effect, where 1 stack equals 1 turn stalled.
• Thunderbolt spell no longer deals damage. Instead, it now has one of two effects: a) for armored foes, it removes all armor, b) for unarmored foes, it kills them instantly.
• Warp spell no longer affects speed. Instead, it now changes AP draw per turn: -1 to enemies, +1 to allies.
• Halo spell is now renamed into Starfall. It deals more damage (20, up from 15), and no longer has a minimum effect range.
• Black hole damage is increased to 15 (up from 8), and the duration of its Maim effect is increased to 3 turns (up from 2).
• Hexed, the status effect associated with Morgana, now has healing properties, granting innate healing opportunities to the second core.
• Wither no longer requires the target to be unarmored to be killed.
• Wraith now deals 15 Health damage, up from 10.
• Covenant has a different mechanic. Now, it increases the stacks of Hexed of all enemies with at least 1, by 2.
• Pylons now always have 25 Health (up from 1), and have their stacks of Ethereal reduced from 8 to 5. Ethereal now makes pylons immortal, and restore +1 to both armor and health per stack. The intent of this change is twofold: a) to make bleed builds effective, b) to reduce downtime between being able to eliminate Pylons.
Dev blog 74 - Aura improvements
Today I’ll be talking about auras.
When we first introduced auras, they had a very simple visual representation that simply highlighted all tiles under its influence with a transparent tile overlay. When I received requests for making the auras have nicer visuals, I added two separate controllers: one for the center tile and another for each affected tile.
At that time, all we could do for auras was plonk a particle emitter to these two controllers, which is what you will have seen when using Hallow or seeing Thorntoad's Miasma. During development after that, we added some extra capabilities for general visuals which include something we call geometric particles. This is a fancy name for saying "a static model with a shader on it that animates over time", but it's shorter and more to the point.
One of the issues we saw reported during early access so far was that tiles were too hard to see when there were multiple auras in play. Examples are Hallow and Miasma and maybe Rolands Horn auras at the same time in the same area.
image by brubie from our Discord
It is impossible to see anything under those tiles because the auras are using per tile particle emitters which are drowning the tiles in too many particles. It was also impossible to see the edges of cast or effect areas when using Abilities in the tiles covered by auras.
One of my ideas (that I never really had time to implement) was to add a hotkey that either hides the particles while pressed or makes the waypoint lines and area outlines visible through the particles.
Thankfully, Robert proposed a much nicer solution.
We're removing particle emitters from all auras and replacing them with geometric particles. This should neatly solve the visibility issues, which makes auras that much less of a pain to look at. It also makes it clear where the auras are originating from.
[I]new Hallow
Abominations will have their own separate aura visuals, and there are separate visuals for buffs (like the gif) and debuffs for human auras.
Mechanically, auras are in a bit of a weird spot. The way they work is by calculating the tiles they affect, then find all units inside those tiles, then filter out units that they cannot affect. The remaining units get a status effect that is controlled by that aura.
One issue we had at launch was that the status effect creation didn't properly account for existing status effects which weren't aura controlled. This could result in the aura "creating" a status effect that was actually merged with an existing status effect on that unit which wasn't aura controlled (due to i.e. content reuse). This didn't update the state of that status effect to being aura controlled, which caused the effect to potentially decay and expire, leaving the aura with an invalid status effect reference.
This issue was found soon after release and fixed the following week.
The other issue (which makes me say they're in a weird spot) was created only recently when we made auras have power that can scale the stack count of applied status effects. When a unit uses a skill that creates an aura that the unit already has, the second aura gets merged into the first one (otherwise, you'd have two auras of the same type). This means it's possible for the second aura invocation to increase/decrease its power, depending on how the unit attributes affect the power of the aura.
Unfortunately, we don't update the status effects applied by the existing aura. If a unit leaves the aura influence and comes back, it would get a new status effect that is updated for the new aura power. I plan to change this in the future so that auras don't actually create unique status effects on each unit in the area, but rather link the unit to being affected by the aura directly. The aura would be a single source of information about what it is doing. This also prevents any possible cases of an accidental merging of status effects from different auras or merging status effect with mismatched "aura controlled" state.
This will essentially remove the snapshotting aspect of auras (use this information as you will until I fix it) and prevent issues like the first one ever happening.
The visual updates to auras will go out in the patch today. The mechanical fixes will be done as soon as I get to it.
Thanks for reading, and join our Discord server if you wanna chat with us.
MarkoP
Content Update #1
• Overhauled Hero Skill trees: new skills are added for each class, most old ones made stronger.
• Added unique passive effects for each Hero. These provide more strategic depth even for level 1 Heroes, and also make individual Heroes more unique.
• Added alternative skirmish map versions for all regular combat encounters in Albion.
Crash fixes:
• Fixed a possible crash with voiceover textboxes when clicking on them furiously.
Quality-of-Life improvements:
• Difficulty selection screen now has a Back button.
• Added a notification when an Essence is gained.
• Redcap's Gaze ability now makes the camera follow a trail towards the target, to make it easier to notice which unit is Gazed.
• The action bar sidebars now save their opened/closed state.
• Slightly decreased font sizes for ability and effect tooltips to accommodate for cases of many stacked effects.
General fixes:
• Fixed some compatibility issues when using Windows Mouse Keys to emulate the mouse via keyboard.
• Fixed a bug where destructible cover could be destroyed around the caster by abilities that destroyed cover in general.
• Non-default Move abilities such as Sprint and Translocation will now also preview hit chances from the destination tile.
• Fixed a bug where the portrait hover texture was visible when undoing movement.
• Fixed several minor glitches on various UI element textures.
• Added some new VFX for the Core View and Hero Roster in Lobby.
• Fixed an issue where some sounds would sometimes not be played when switching levels.
• Fixed a bug where you could press backspace to prematurely end the AI turn.
• Optimized some FPS drops on a cliff skirmish map in Albion.
Gameplay balancing:
• Abominations now have stronger stats in later zones to account for increased player power via Hero passives.
• Status effects of the same type granted through encounters now stack.
• Vulnerable debuff from Cockatrice's Bad Omen will no longer stack.
• Aura-granted effects (such as from re-casting Mystic's Hallow before it expires) will no longer stack, but instead refresh their duration.