Yes, we’re going into early access! :O This blog post explains why and what to expect. When? May. I don't have more info than that. When I do, I'll let you know.
We’ve been asked a few times whether we would do early access, and my answer every time was “dunno”. If it was ever to be on the table, it would be for a relatively short time, and its primary purpose would be balancing, QoL features, accessibility aspects, crash fixes, and similar. This hasn’t changed, and the primary purpose for our early access is exactly that.
Since our publishing deal with Versus Evil was signed, some other options opened up, like porting to other operating systems and localization. As of this moment, we have the game running on Linux, macOS, and Windows. I know some people are already happy with just this :)
Since there’s a ton of text in the game (and this is not an understatement, we have over 800 pages of text!), localization is going to take a while. We want the full release to be fully localized (don't have a complete list of languages yet, when I know, you'll know), so early access will likely last for as long as localization needs, which I’ve been told will be a minimum of 3 months.
While waiting for localization to complete, we want to polish the game up as much as we can. Mat’s been playtesting the game, but he can only get the game balanced up to a point. We plan to have at least two difficulties by EA release and add a harder one during. Feedback on how hard or easy they are would be much appreciated, and if you’re an expert player, which aspects should be tweaked for the hardest difficulty.
In general, we’re at a point where we just need some feedback. We want a large number of people to play the game, and tell us what they think. Tell us what’s confusing, what’s not explained, which abilities suck, which spells are just so OP you never want to go into battle without them, which encounters have typos, which encounter choices feel bad, etc. So if you’re interested in the game, and want to help us make it the best version it can be, we encourage you to join our Discord for a direct communication channel, or post on the Steam forums for a bit delayed communication channel. I do read all of these, it just takes me a bit to see steam posts.
For some other news, here’s a screenshot of some achievements in the game. The icon is brought to you by the magnificence of my doppelganger programmer MarkoZ. Don’t worry, they’ll be replaced with proper ones.
We've also updated some art on the store page. Mad props to my main boi Shiv. So yeah. Big news. Give us your thoughts! We’re all on our Discord server and happy to talk. I also monitor the Steam forums, but not as quickly as the Discord.
A fresh gameplay trailer should premiere on Sunday, around 10:30 AM PST, offering a glimpse of the new zone and some brand new content we haven't shown before.
Want more than a glimpse? Mat, our game designer, has you covered! Not to keep you waiting, he'll be playing through the latest build here on Steam.
When's the game coming out? Join our Discord server, ask, and watch us smile awkwardly while beating around the bush!
Remember to follow us here on Steam and wishlist the game.
Lately, we’ve been discussing difficulty modes and how they affect the game. We decided a while back to add a lower difficulty mode to allow a wider group of people to experience the game. Hand of Merlin effectively has two different games in it. One is the tactical layer where you fight against enemies in a turn-based fashion on a grid, and where the chances are high that you’d lose Heroes. The other is the strategic layer where you move between a network of nodes and carve your path from start to end of the area, picking which locations and reward types you’d like to go for. There’s also a lot of reading here since all encounters are small short stories influenced by your choices. You can also lose Heroes on this layer, but it’s much more difficult to do so because that requires you to travel without supplies while your Heroes are low on health. Each jump to a new location without supplies does 1 point of health damage to all Heroes, and health does not regenerate without explicit healing actions.
So our primary method of game difficulty stems from the combat itself. We want the game to be a bit on the harder side, because we want the loop of dying and trying again, having learned something new about the enemies and their skills. That said, some people might find the default difficulty too hard, and would otherwise put the game down. To that end, we talked about adding a Story mode of sorts, where the difficulty of combat is reduced to some degree. We’re calling it Story mode because its purpose is to allow people to focus more on the story of the game rather than the combat aspect (some people just want to read what Jonas&Verena wrote). In this mode, more resources would be granted, your Heroes would have more life and enemies would have less life.
This introduces a slight issue for us: unlocking Heroes, new Guardian cores, achievements, etc. Without a Story mode, we’d just have everything unlock normally as you play the game, and you’d go through the loop of dying and restarting with new knowledge. If Story mode would make the combat aspect much easier, then a lot of the balancing for the intended experience goes out the window. Additionally, if you could unlock everything in the game by playing the lower difficulty, then there’s no real incentive to play the harder mode at all.
(descriptions are temporary and made by me, so don't worry :P)
We still haven't made a decision about this. We've been fighting about it for a couple of days now. If you have a suggestion about this, do tell us! A short summary of our unlock mechanisms: Unlocking a Hero means you’re able to start with that Hero from the beginning of the game, having him in your default roster. Unlocking a Hero’s Prowess gives you another version of that hero with an alternate model texture and some bonuses to health and armor, and can only be unlocked by having the Hero survive from start to end. Achievements should be self-explanatory. Guardian cores are an alternate set of Spells you can play with. Each core has a selection of 9 Spells (with a default passive one), from which you can pick 3 to use in combat. These are unlocked by encountering other Guardians during your encounters and talking them into giving you their support.
Thanks for reading. If you've got ideas, do share! Let us know what you think about the whole concept on our Discord server. We’re very open to feedback and scrutiny.
Hey folks! It’s been a while since we’ve shown how the world progresses as you go through the game. Once you finish the snowy mountainous zone of Marca Hispanica, you’ll land (not literally because you weren’t flying) in the sandy region of Al-Andalus. Unlike some other zones, Al-Andalus doesn’t have an overarching story outside of just getting to the end. This is explained upon entering the zone, as Al-Andalus is almost overrun with the Corruption. (The map visuals aren't final yet, we're still working on making it prettier!)
The atmosphere in Al-Andalus is bleak, filled with encounters that convey struggle against the forces of Corruption and attempts to survive the onslaught. Most of the nodes in the zone will be corrupted, and the rare uncorrupted node will be a welcome respite with no inherent danger. The progression from Albion to Al-Andalus should be clear: Albion has the occasional corrupted node which almost guarantees a fight against the abominations, while Al-Andalus has the occasional uncorrupted node, guaranteeing no fights. That doesn’t mean all corrupted nodes have fights, it’s just that the roles and their implications on having to fight are reversed. Al-Andalus doesn't feature human enemies, as all humans are focused on fighting the Corruption.
We also played a bit with some encounter constructs in this zone. There’s one short stretch of the journey where you can go to an island city. It’s a set of several handmade encounters that only appear there, with two of them being over water. These will have custom encounters with internal variations so every visit feels different across sessions.
The way Mat has setup the combat progression is also interesting. Each zone adds a new mechanic (so to speak). At the end of zone 1, you fight the first large unit. During zone 2, you see large units during standard combat encounters, and at the end, you’re introduced to waves of units that appear during combat. During zone 3, wave spawning is used in most combat encounters, and at the end of the zone, we introduce a mechanic you’ll need to defeat the boss in the last zone.
I’m not going to talk about this mechanic, as I want to keep at least some unknowns for all the people who read these blog posts. If you’ve been reading them all so far, you’d have seen a lot of things the game has to offer, along with their evolution during the last year of development. I’d like to keep at least some things untold via blog posts, doesn’t make sense to spoil it all, eh? :)
Thanks for reading! If you’ve got any questions or want to comment on anything really, join our Discord server and ask/suggest/complain/praise/hang out. The whole team is there.
With our change to the UI, we took the opportunity to also consolidate some information into one screen. Last week we talked about achievements, and in blog post 43 we talked about unlocking heroes. We mentioned that we’ll need a way to show the progress for unlocks, and the Codex is our solution to this.
When we initially created the hint popup dialog, we knew we wanted a way to also see all previous hints. Our first idea was to put this information into the book as an extra chapter on the right side. As time went on, our understanding of what we want with it changed, and so now we’ve put all meta information into the Codex, while all in-world information is viewed through the book. The book shows the information about your warband and has controls for ranking them up, as well as the interaction with encounters.
The codex has 4 tabs. The first one shows hints for the overworld map or the fights, depending on whether you’re on the map or in a fight. We intend to update this so all hints always show up there regardless of your current “location”.
The other tabs track information about unlockables. The first and most obvious ones are the achievements. We don’t yet have them in the game, but it’s on our plate for next month. We just need to make a set of icons for them and link them all up with a set of hardcoded requirements. Excuse the temporary text here :)
The heroes tab lists the unlocking progress of all your heroes. Our first implementation of this was a dead button that just showed a tooltip with all this information in it, which was… not particularly good :D Knowing we’d have to add an achievement tab anyway, and they both use the same underlying system for unlocking rewards, it was a simple thing to just use the same layout for the heroes. Note here that while Morgan is unlocked (by default), his Prowess is still locked. It has a temporary description here, but the idea is you have to start and finish the game with a hero in order to unlock his Prowess.
Finally, a tab that we never even talked about having, but once I had the idea, everyone was on board with it. The relic tab tracks all relics you’ve found on your journey and owned at least briefly. Here you can see the characteristics of all relics, which might help you find interesting combinations of relics on specific character builds, and maybe something to chase for the collectors out there.
Do let us know what you think about the whole concept on our Discord server. We’re very open to feedback and scrutiny.
Hey folks! Today’s post was written by Mat again, as we recently started looking into adding achievements. We needed a preliminary design for these, and since Mat has done some of it, we pressured him into writing a bit about it. Just note that the achievement icons and requirements below are all WIP and mockups, nothing surrounding them is final yet. ---
Achievements have become expected in most modern games and platforms, as a way to celebrate a victory or to let your player know that they did something noteworthy or rare. To some players, it’s a neat surprise. To others, it’s sort of an objective to pursue in itself! Each game has its own design philosophy though. Here’s a bit on ours:
We believe that achievements work best as little breadcrumbs that you offer the players to let them know what sort of level of play can be expected if they want to become true masters of the game. Sometimes this is letting them know that a battle can be won without losing health, or that you can reach a certain level… Or hey, sometimes is just playing the game a lot, and in different ways!
In that space, we created 5 different categories for Achievements.
1) Tactical Skills These represent complex combos or actions that take some effort to pull, but if you can do them consistently, you will have an easier time in the Tactical layer. We also add particularly impressive feats, here, like surviving a tough battle without losing a hero. Here’s an example:
A player that wins that achievement learned something neat: some of the abominations can be weaponized against their allies, and knowing how to do it consistently will help you out!
2) Strategy Challenge With these, we want to celebrate unusual luck or resource management during your travels. These achievements will direct you to some expectations, but also let you know that you are having a noteworthy run.
Getting the fairies to cooperate is rough, but will pay off!
3) Grind Sometimes, you’ve played the game so much and did things for so long, that we want to give you a bit of a thank you, it’s all - we hope you had fun!
4) Progress Roguelikes can be a bit daunting, but part of the game is inching your way into a new zone or finishing an unlock. These achievements celebrate that!
5) Oddities Finally, there are some events or actions that are just plain… unusual? Rare, hard to do, or just dumb! But hey, at least you got an achievement out of it.
But yeah! We have around 50 entries for launch being prepared, with their technology being implemented as we speak. Got any ideas? Any suggestions? Let us know!
--- Working on achievements must mean we’re closing in on release, right? :) Thanks for reading! Join our Discord server if you wanna make any suggestions. We’re all there and happy to chat.
One of the things we wanted to add to the game for a long time were quest-like encounters that span multiple zones. Lately, we finally implemented all the pieces to make this work, and we have a couple of questlines added to the game.
The main reason we wanted these in the game is to create an opportunity cost to get some cool things. Some of the questlines will be fairly basic, like getting a bunch of supplies and taking them to a castle in the next zone. Some will potentially span three zones, and grant you a really cool relic. We want to reward players that pursue longer questlines with something important, like relics that cannot be obtained in any other way. We also want the longer questlines to actually be rewarding, because of the way they’re positioned in the world.
(note that we added the current party portraits to the world map!)
Our world generation is fairly simple and straightforward. There are several manually created layouts of the node network you see on the map. We opted out of generating these positions because of landscape restrictions like preventing nodes from spawning on mountains or on the sea. It is also relatively difficult to generate connections between nodes that create interesting choices. Doing them manually is also not too much work, and gives us nice control over how the nodes are positioned and connected.
First, we pick a random layout out of several we have per zone, then we do a content generation pass over all nodes. Nodes are grouped into lanes, and each lane has its own set of controls for allowing nodes to become special, how many of them may do so, how far apart they must be, etc. The questlines are part of that pass as well, which means if you manage to start a quest (which is random right now), you will have a guaranteed node in a future zone be a quest continuation node. It will likely be positioned in such a way that you’ll have to choose what you want to pursue in that zone. You might want to ignore the questline because you want to hunt for an Arcane node or a City node, it’s your choice. For example, you might want to not finish the questline that grants you 15 supplies to take to a zone 2 location. Maybe you're greedy and want to keep all those supplies! It's one thing less you have to worry about, but you lose any reward you might get by completing the quest. It's all about tradeoffs!
(screenshot is with Alt pressed down which shows info for all nodes, not just hovered ones)
If you enter a zone that has a quest encounter spawned, there will be a special indicator on that node telling you about it. You might want to scour and look over the map before you decide which way through the zone you want to go down. Sometimes they might be a ways off. :)
Thanks for reading! If you want to ask us stuff or suggest stuff, you can do so on our Discord server, we’re all there!
Today’s blog post was fully written by Mat, our system designer, which let me spent just that bit more time programming the game, so thanks Mat! All text below is from his perspective. ---
Have you ever felt that weird sensation when playing an MMO or a long-term RPG where you feel like the battles are too similar and you are just going through the same rotations, doing the same things?
Well, when you have to play every map multiple times in order to test new abilities, new AI, or just get a better bead on balancing, you’ll feel the extreme version of that.
And that’s a bad thing for a roguelike, man!
Our original intention when designing maps and skirmishes was to create interesting scenarios around cover placement, types and quantities of enemies, and waves. Then, we let players loose to play around with their load-outs and approach the battle anyway they see fit. That worked out pretty well, and the curated nature of some of our maps, like Ruined Basilica or Hilltop leads to some interesting combat scenarios. They just, you know, can get old quick.
So here’s how I’m trying to fix that feeling.
I divided all enemies into “Categories”, representing sort of their “Power Level”, or the way I like to describe it, “Level of Disruption”, referring to how likely the unit is to require specific maneuvers to play around, or how much it disrupts a plan. People interested in game design might associate this with Birkhead’s Enemy Types, but it’s a common approach in the design of enemies.
Then, for each map, Mia and the writers come up with the “Skirmish Conditions”, or how an encounter itself changes the combat. A choice might lead to better cover, or you might get ambushed. I script these conditions, place spawn points and all that, and then define how many of each enemy category to put in and at which positions. This is where most of the balancing lies.
The final step then is to allow some of these enemies to be randomly picked inside their categories! What that means is that instead of two Mandrakes and a Thorntoad (2x Minor Abominations + 1 Medium Abomination), you might get a Wyvern, a Redcap, and a Cockatrice, which, by virtue of their skillsets, changes your expectations for that fight and forces you to reconfigure your plan instead of learning the map by memorization.
A lot of exceptions, of course. Some encounters mention enemies by name, and some maps work better with a specific enemy roster. That’ll all be respected, but this low-amplitude randomness will definitely make the game a bit more resilient to that awful feeling of “getting old”.
And that’s a good thing for a roguelike, man!
--- Very interesting, Mat! If you want to ask him questions about any of this stuff, you can join our Discord server, where you’ll find all of us happily working on the game. Thanks for reading!
If you’ve played the demo on one of the several opportunities last year, you might have noticed that when you start the game it immediately loads up to the main menu. This means that you’d start the game without much context into what was going on, and what your main goal is.
We intended to solve this issue with the intro cutscene, a small image stream with voiceover narration to explain who you are, what’s happening, and why you’re doing what you’re doing. We didn’t have the time to make the cutscene for any of the demos before, although we did get close to having it around November. Ultimately, it was pushed back when we decided there weren’t going to be any demos, so we focused on the more immediate features. Shiv has done his side of most of those things, so he went back to making the cinematic.
Our writers have written the text that would be narrated over the cinematic, and Shiv has already drawn most of the images we are putting into it, so the only thing that remains is to make the actual cinematic. The Serious Engine has capabilities to make cinematics, so we’re leveraging those to have everything be in-engine, and also because the engine doesn’t handle video playback with consistent framerates.
The intro cinematic will play the first time you start the game and would be viewable through the options menu or something, we’re not yet 100% sure on that because we were missing the actual cinematic in order to implement playing it back on demand. One possibility we might consider is also just playing it every time you start the game and having it be skippable after the first time it’s played. I’m not sure what the best way is, so if you have any opinions on that, tell us!
The general context the cinematic sets up is that there are many worlds (dimensions) that are all threatened by the all-consuming Cataclysm. Merlin has hope it can be stopped tho, and to that end, in each of those dimensions, he has created Arthur and the Grail, which would have the ability to heal the wounds in reality. However, Morgana lost faith in him and trapped him for many years. After a long while, he awoke weakened and saw that Arthur had failed and was replaced with lesser men. Being so weak, he cannot exert much control over the mortal realm except some dream-state suggestions to the heroes, telling them to get the Grail, go to Jerusalem and save the world.
This is the gist of it, the full text is somewhat longer and has more flavor to it, and you’ll be able to hear it during the cinematic when you start the game. Because we didn’t have the cinematic in the previous demos, we tried to replicate the context in the very first encounter you see in Albion when you reach Camelot. We don’t yet know if we’ll cut that encounter down a bit for the full game since it won’t be absolutely necessary to explain everything over again every time you start a new game, but no plans for that yet.
Thanks for reading! You can find us on our Discord server if you wanna chat with us!
Here are some updates on what we’re doing and where we are.
The programmers are implementing the new UI concepts Shiv made before the break. We’re mostly focusing on doing the code implementation and exposing all the knobs to the editor so an artist can come in and play with them and make the UI just right.
Shiv is finishing up with the book UI concept so we programmers have everything we need to do the implementation. Once that’s done, he’ll be doing the opening cinematic and making sure the in-game UI looks like all the concepts he made.
Aleluja and sanduk were working on maps, and while sanduk is still working on them, Aleluja started working on improving some older models and making better animations for the last abomination unit for zone 3.
Kaz was churning out icons for ability upgrades, blacksmith upgrades and is working on adding new relic icons along with new ground materials.
Mat was working on a prototype of the final final boss fight, which he’s completed, and we’re soon having a meeting to talk about how the boss fight will look like (models, aesthetics, mood, etc). He’s also made some new relics.
Mia is working on making template encounters for zone 3 so the writers can make them story rich.
AlenHR is a beast, making destructions for most of our obstacles so they can be split apart by explosive abilities. He’s also done a neat new feature you can see below.
Our internal target for the end of January is to have all encounters for zone 1 and 2 complete, have the templates for zone 3 and 4 done, finish the in-game UI rework, finish the intro cutscene (it’s partially done, just not finalized), add questline encounters (that span multiple zones), add 15 more relics, finish all Merlin Spells, do half of the zone 3 skirmish fights, have a prototype of the final final boss and start working on localization support (not the actual localization, just make sure the system works). The good news is that we’re on schedule with all of this, more than half of the tasks are already done. There are always bits and pieces that just happen out of nowhere that take a bit of time, but they aren’t too time-consuming. An example of this is the little feature AlenHR proposed to me yesterday, which we got working in about half an hour of testing.
As units get damaged, they become more visually bloody. This example is only a blood cover over the unit, but we also have an armor coating applied which might be used for some units as well.
In general, we’re happy with our progress, and we’re currently on schedule with our timetables. This should put us to be released sometime during Spring, so with that in mind, we’re likely not to put out any more demos until release. Thanks for reading! If you want to chat with the devs, we’re all on our Discord server.
