Genre: Role-playing (RPG), Strategy, Turn-based strategy (TBS), Tactical, Adventure, Indie, Card & Board GameThe Hand of Merlin
Dev blog 51 - Back to work work
We’re back from our 2-week winter break. We’re settling back into the workflows, and everyone has their stuff to work on. Programmers are programming, designers are designing and artists are… arting.
So I asked the team what they were doing over the winter break. I'll use the names we have on our Discord. Here are some stories.
Mat, a Brazillian lost in Croatia, was not prepared for the harsh cold weather of Croatia in December (it’s summer in Brazil). So after a few attempts of enduring the near-zero temperatures (celsius), he and the missus gave up and focused on making food and playing DnD.
Sanduk, a cool weirdo, got inspired by the earthquakes that hit Croatia to draw something related. The stronger quake hit when she was returning from a walk with the dog, and she briefly thought she was causing the shaking, but figured what was going on when plaster started falling down off the walls. Other than that, she made some cookies and cakes, and after 2 years of wanting it, she bought the toaster.
Aleluja, the cat wrangler, said her break was boring, but I beg to differ. She cleaned up the chaos in her apartment, finished Red Dead Redemption 2, worked on an EU stop motion project, and spent time learning Swedish! Mycket bra!
AlenHR, the effect wizard, is a big drone aficionado and has spent time working on a prototype drone that mixes two types of drone rotor configurations (push and pull for the front and back rotors). It has some benefits for drone size and flight characteristics, but he’s not sure if the thing will fly at all. He started kitbashing one up, so I guess we’ll see!
MarkoZ, the guy who walks his cat like a dog, learned to make french macarons, and he says he was very successful. Can’t wait for the pandemic to end and we start working in a shared office to try them.
Kaz, the cowboygirl, spent time working on illustrating a school book and an encyclopedia, drawing dinosaurs and fungi, while listening to Arabic language lessons. She also had fun with her pet slugs and pigeons doing unspeakable things. Not with each other, mind you, individually.
Shiv, the bear, is traditionally the one who messes up everything, and he managed to mess up being a blood donor. The needle pierced his vein in a bad way, and now his left arm has a nice rainbow pattern that will last for around 3 months, according to his doctors. He’s still alive but has some trouble sleeping due to the bad arm. We all wish him a speedy recovery. Thankfully it was his left arm, so he can still work (the one thing he did right). <3
Mia, the LARPing dungeon master, spoke of having some gender role reversal in her household, where the gals played Zelda almost every day, while the men were horrified by the fact they’re playing games. Apparently, the men in her house don’t know what fun is.
MarkoP, yours truly, spent time programming (what a shocker) with the focus on learning OpenGL and having it work alongside a D3D11 renderer, playing board games with friends, and waiting for the next Path of Exile expansion. He also got a vegetable chopper for Christmas, which he’s pretty happy about. (weird writing about myself in the third person)
Sorry for not having some interesting game news this week. Returning from a 2-week work break does that. All of us have gone back to doing interesting things, so next week should have some stuff to share.
If you want to inquire more about any of the things you read here, the whole team is on our Discord server, available for questioning. I’m guessing some people might want to ask Kaz some stuff. Sheesh.
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/
Christmas special 01 - Team animals
A very different blog post this time around. The team is currently on a two week collective vacation for Christmas and year number rollover. As such we don't really have a lot of interesting things to show, so i thought i'd show the animals the team owns. I'll use the names people use on our Discord.
Aleluja (artist)
Jakov (our IT admin)
Kaz (artist)
Jonas and Verena (writers)
MarkoP (programmer)
MarkoZ (programmer)
Mat (designer)
Mia (designer)
Sanduk (artist)
Shiv (artist)
Regular (game related) blog posts will continue on January 13th. Come join our Discord server for more animal pics.
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/
Dev blog 50 - Development timeline
When I originally started writing these blog posts, I made an initial plan for about 48 blog posts. At the beginning of the year, we thought we’d release the game in December. We knew what features we wanted. The start of the year was looking good for us. Nobody was expecting the Spanish Inquisition.
Then the fire nation attacked.
From March 17th, due to the Covid-19 induced lockdown, we were all working from home. We thought it might just last a few months. We were -oh- so wrong.
From our perspective, as a small team of 9 people (give or take a few over the course of the year), working from home is a huge impairment to communication and decision making. We were used to working from a single room in the office. When we needed to discuss something, we could do it by just turning in our chairs. Ideas were free-flowing since everyone could hear everything in the room. Showing somebody something on the screen was much easier in person. Working from home added a large aspect of friction to that. While we can still communicate via voice chat and screen share, the fact is that the friction is still there in the form of the time delay from when you want to start the communication to the point when the communication actually starts. Not to mention it’s much more useful to see the person talking because body language and body cues are important when humans communicate.
All this to say: we were slowed down. We were also preparing builds for festivals on multiple occasions. While this was very beneficial to us (by getting useful feedback from the general public), it also meant we were working on a demo version of the game instead of the full version (from a code perspective). Some things had to be disabled, other things had to be excluded from the game, and we were making a tradeoff: invest time making sure the demo is properly limited instead of working on the shipping version. Not that it’s a huge time tradeoff, as some aspects of the demo are just part of the shipping version, but the time investment is real. It accumulates with the time wasted initiating communication between us.
We discussed the planned December release. We could release the game if we rushed the rest of the content for the game. It would not be polished, it would be buggy, but we could do it.
We decided against it.
We’re pushing back the release to Q2 2021, most likely spring. We have a project chart timeline which puts us at around that time. This includes all the polish and initial balance and testing and stuffs. Since we got a smidgeon better at the whole work-from-home situation, we feel this is a pretty good estimate. Everyone who played the demo can probably attest that the game is almost there, but we still need a bit more time to add the sparkles, the glitter, the shine. We’re updating the store page as well to show the approximate release date.
For a final thought, it’s Wednesday, my dudes.
Thanks for reading. Come voice your sadness and anger about the pushed release on our Discord server. I provide free virtual hugs.
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/
Dev blog 49 - UI revamp
Today I’m happy to present pieces of our new UI we’ve been working on for a while.
A month or two ago we scheduled some time to make a newer cleaner interface art that is connected in style, theme, visuals, etc.
Our lead artist, codename Shiv, took the task with a passion. He’s never done a proper full UI before. We have 4 different scenes, each with several elements that need to look like they belong to an overall theme.
The main menu will get new textures for buttons, some new label backgrounds, and in general making things more clear.
The world map has also received a facelift. Shiv wanted to have everything consistent and connected, and so we’re using the same icons for every piece of UI that has the same semantics. The legend should also help with understanding these things at first, and later when it becomes second nature will just always be closed.
The fights will also receive a facelift, with a newer unit header that collapses when the unit is not “in focus”, a new action bar, and all portraits shown for all enemies. We’re also changing the portraits for Merlins’ party to be in the same style as the enemies, as it’s easier to make them that way.
I'd also love to show you the updated book, but it's not yet ready. We expect to start implementing the new UI this week, and will probably finish it early next year. While most of the changes come down to changing some content files, some of these things will need a little touch up on the code side, so MarkoZ and MarkoP (that's us programmers) will split the task somehow. Honestly, I'm very excited to see this new UI in game and start recording new gifs with it.
This will be a big change to our UI, and as such I’m very interested in hearing your thoughts and feedback. Does everything seem reasonable? Does anything still look confusing? Do you feel some aspect needs another improvement? Leave your comments all over the internet, but tell me where I can find them. Plz, I don’t have time to look all over the internet. You can find me on our Discord server.
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/
Dev blog 48 - AI AI AI AI AI
The past two weeks I spent working on the AI with Mat. We weren’t very happy with how the AI made decisions for tactical movement. They didn’t look very smart by moving 1 tile over, or not attacking a unit they could clearly hit or moving away from units just to move back toward them.
Our game uses a utility AI approach. Every unit scores each tile they can possibly use their abilities on, and the best tile wins. Each tile is scored based on the configuration done for that specific ability.
Since most of our attack abilities were fine for the most part, we focused on remaking some of the movement considerations for it. We added a couple of new ones, offense and defense rating, which we calculate as “how many units can I hit, and in what way (full hit, hit behind cover, can't hit)”, and “how many units can hit me, and in what way”. Coupled with a small fix for AI where we allow it to consider the tile he’s standing on, and a lot of work done by Mat and me for a few whole days in screen share and talking and thinking about it, we now have AI that moves a bit smarter. We made sure they can think when far away from enemies in order to approach them, and close to enemies to flank them.
As I mentioned in blog post 26, our AI is data-driven. This means that once we made one consideration that we felt works well, we could save it to disk and reuse it in another place. We made 3 different tiers of resource files: brains, decision-makers, and considerations. A brain has a list of ability configurations - instructions for the unit with this brain about how to use a specific ability. Every ability config has a decision-maker, which is a list of considerations. Currently, we have 41 decision-makers using 59 considerations, and all of these would be available for modding once we release the editor post-launch. A single consideration can be reused in different behaviors, and different behaviors can be applied to different abilities. Creating these is also fairly straightforward.
Configuring a new AI unit can be done within a matter of minutes if you know what you need and all of the pieces are already available. For example, once Mat and I made the Ruffian bandit, we could create another melee bandit pretty much for free: just browse the existing presets to him, change the ability being used and we're done. Once we finished the bandits, I left Mat to his own devices and he created the AI for the rest of the abomination units, with the occasional bug fix on my end.
It's a bit hard recording and making GIFs for the AI behavior because I'd have to record an entire gameplay session to showcase how they move now. It's not easy just showing a single instance of "see, he moved to a really good position" because I have no idea when he'd do so in order to line up a screen good capture. Suffice it to say that in our internal playtests the AI did move better with less weird movements. I might coerce somebody on the team to record a play session in a few maps to showcase it, then upload it to Youtube or something, but seeing we're hella busy these days, I can't make a hard promise.
Thanks for watching! Join our Discord server so we can chat about the game, life, universe, and everything!
P.S. The title is a pun for "AI pain".
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/
Dev blog 47 - Spelling fights
Christmas break is looming ahead. We’re busy adding all the things to the game. Encounters for Marca Hispanica (zone 2) are being added at a break-neck speed, enemy AI is being worked on to make them move around in a smarter looking fashion, we’re getting new music and sfx, most enemies have their skills made and ready for use, levels are being produced like maaaad, and the topic of today: moar spells.
We’ve expanded the set of spells to tier 2, meaning there should now be 6 spells available in any future build of the game. Some spells were reshuffled in tiers, and 3 more spells are added. Mat is taking his sweet time with adding spells because they have to fulfill a specific role in the game, making some of the harder fights possible instead of easier.
I’m not sure if everyone who played the game found how to unlock spells, so here’s the rundown. Every time you reach a node, we pick a random encounter from a pool for that specific node. Arcane nodes, and by extension, arcane encounters, have a chance to feature another guardian character, the same race as Merlin. Each time you meet one, he provides one core essence, which is a currency item used to unlock spells in the guardian core you currently have active. Once you unlock at least one tier 1 spell, tier 2 spells become available. We have plans for the third tier as well, but those will come at a later point.
One of the spells Mat made is Warp. It applies a ground-based aura that affects all units, but in different ways. It applies Positive Warp to all allies and Negative Warp to all enemies. The effects of both buffs are similar but opposite: allies get +4 movement and enemies -4 movement. For some of the slower units, this effectively means they cannot move at all if they got caught in the area. Any enemy units that end their movement in the area will become afflicted as well. (note that everything is subject to balance changes)
It also looks pretty nice, so here’s a visual of it.
One of the spells we’ve had for a while now is Thunderbolt. It deals a lot of damage to one unit, and I’ve somehow managed to talk people into making it look like a laser. In one of our Steam discussion threads, I said I would try sneaking one in the game, so here it is.
Thanks for reading! If you want sneak peeks into the development process, join our Discord server and ask questions, we’ll be happy to answer each and every one of them.
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/
Dev blog 46 - Waves of enemies
Some time ago, our designer boi Mat asked me if we can do something different for a couple of skirmish maps regarding how the fights progress. He wanted to have enemies spawn during fights and have it controlled externally through some sort of wave spawning system. While we can spawn new units during fights through abilities, I didn’t want to hack this functionality using invisible units that use hidden abilities to spawn new units.
We’re making the game in Serious Engine which has support for spawners, but a lot of our code is not really compatible with that method. We have custom needs for spawning units anyway, so we had to approach it differently. Luckily, the scripting side of the engine is flexible enough and made this possible with relative ease. A bit of tech background:
When any skirmish fight starts, there is a single script in that world that spawns the starting enemies. The script takes into account any decisions made during the encounter that lead to the fight in order to spawn units and players at different locations and configurations. Until now, this script was only ever executed once.
To make the spawn system, we needed to make this script wait for specific events from our game code in order to do more things. Currently, we have a “round started” event that gets picked up by the script, and spawns new units based on any internal decision making, like whether the enemy warband has less than 2 units, and whether all reinforcement units have already spawned. For now, this is the only event we need.
The biggest difference between the wave spawning and initial unit spawning is in tile occupancy and spawning animation.
When we spawn units for the start of the fight, we don’t have to check for multiple units occupying the same tile. This is very obvious to the designer when making the initial spawn setup, and is very easy to test if it all works. We also don’t have to play special animations on those units, because we’re assuming they were already there when the player characters arrive there. So they all just appear in their Idle animation.
When spawning units for the wave system, this happens in the middle of a fight. Units have likely already moved around and might be occupying tiles where we wanted to spawn wave units. Thus, we have to find an unoccupied spawn point within a named group to use for the new unit position, and we have to play an animation on that unit unless we want it to look pretty horrible.
The plan is to use this system primarily for boss fight maps (especially the final boss of the game), but it’s not a stretch it will be used in regular fights as well. This mostly means we’ll have to add a new animation to some, if not all, abomination units so we can use them for this system. Human enemies will likely not be dynamically spawned, because we can’t make them unburrow like the Mandrake above (tho that would be funny as hell), but we might find a way to let them walk in from off-screen or something. This does have some unrelated issues, but if we manage to sort them out, we might use it.
Personally, I can't wait to see how the rest of the abominations look like when they spawn through this.
Thanks for reading about some of the stuff we’re working on. If you’d like to say hi to us, ask questions, or tell us how much our game sucks, come join our Discord server, all the devs are there and are very friendly and receptive to all feedback.
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/
Dev blog 45 - A note on music
In the last few weeks, we started looking into getting some music specifically made for the game. Robert did some research and found a music genre called Dungeon Synth. In particular, he found a musician/band called Old Sorcery. At some point, we contacted them and asked if they’d like to compose music for the game, and they agreed! So now we’re getting some cool music right from the source. For this post, I decided to ask him a few questions.
Q: Hi, could you introduce yourself?
A: I am a musician from Lahti, Finland. I dabble in various genres.
Q: When did you start composing dungeon synth, and what got you into it?
A: Hmm, it was in 2015-2016 when I thought that I can do this kind of stuff by myself. I have always listened to Mortiis and Burzum and the pioneers of electronic music like Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Goblin. I thought that the world lacked a symbiosis of medieval soundscapes and analog synthesizers.
Q: What was your impression of The Hand of Merlin?
A: I am a lifelong fan of isometric RPGs. Baldur’s Gate I and II still are easily the best games in the whole universe. I was positively surprised by all the aspects of The Hand of Merlin; the amount of reading one has to do, the difficulty of the battles, the general lore of the game. Not only that it mixes the Arthurian times with this alien stuff, it had this Lovecraftian element to it, which really got me interested.
Q: How do you make music that fits a particular theme or scene?
A: I don’t really know how to answer this. I spend hours of thinking of what I shall do next, and my whole life is centered around music. After a few days of pondering this story, this Realm, I really got into the proper mindset and started dabbling with some actual musical themes.
Q: Do you find any challenges composing music for a game?
A: I have done this earlier, but all of those former games have been amateurish shit, which never got published. With this project, EVERYTHING is a challenge for me. Honestly, I have never done anything this satisfactory. And I do love every minute of it. I feel like I have found my true calling. Not only that I was chosen to do this game, I was chosen to do a RPG involving magic and medieval battles. What could be more exciting? Old Sorcery is based on this kind of world.
Q: What things do you do when not composing music?
A: Watch movies, play video games, read books. Not much else, really.
Thanks for reading! If you've got any questions for our composer, join our Discord server and ask!
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/
Dev blog 44 - Gear upgrades redesign
Last week the team got into a discussion about the ways character progression works. There are 4 main ways characters become more powerful:
- Acquire new Skills
- Equip relics
- Buy gear upgrades
- Acquire new Spells
It was determined that the gear upgrades in the blacksmith shop weren't interesting enough and didn't present any choices. If you were presented a gear upgrade in encounters as a reward, it was a no brainer to take it, and the blacksmith came down to just choosing which class of units should be upgraded.
So Mat was tasked with creating a new proposal for how they might work. He came up with the idea of branching gear trees. After a few days of discussions and deliberations, we chose an approach, and set out to make it. Today i'd like to present how the system works, and show a screen of it.
We have defined that all upgrades will be separated into Styles. Each style would define the upgrades for every class (Fighter, Ranger and Mystic) and type (Weapon and Armor). Each one of these has a number of tiers defined that each provide the benefits of the upgrade.
We have also extended the capabilities the upgrades may provide, so now they are capable of giving direct damage modifiers, like you would see on some abilities (for instance, extra damage to unarmored, or less damage taken from large units). Mat has a large table of possible values, ranging from +1 to +9 Power for Rangers, and up to +30 Armor for Fighters.
One idea floating in his mind (and spreadsheets) is to name one of the Styles "Heavy". A Heavy Fighter armor would also inflict a penalty to Movement (to match the fantasy of wearing heavy armor). Currently he's done so for both Heavy Armor and Heavy Weapon for the Fighter, which can mean the Fighter that decides to grab both upgrades would have very low Movement.
Each time you get to a blacksmith shop, that blacksmith will only carry 2 possible Styles, per upgrade type. He might have Heavy and Light Weapons, but Balanced and Light Armor. It then becomes a choice for you which one you'd like to grab for your units.
Another big change is that all gear upgrades are now per character. Previously they were global per class, and you could buy upgrades for a class you didn't have. This is no longer the case. Each character now has their own upgrade values. The blacksmith will always offer you upgrades only for the characters you have in your party. You can then choose which character to upgrade, and whether you want to upgrade him with the same Style, or swap to a different Style.
Finally, we have discussed what happens if one of your heroes that you've upgraded dies. On the surface, it would seem that all the gold you've spent on his upgrades is now lost. We balance this by making new heroes you find automatically boosted to the same power level as your lost heroes. This guarantees that your power level doesn't end up in a negative feedback loop (new heroes having no upgrades, making them weaker by default, and meaning all your spent gold is truly lost). It also guarantees no positive feedback loops of exploits (as far as i an see): your new heroes aren't any stronger than your deceased heroes.
Since there is a UI redesign coming up, i haven't bothered to make the blacksmith screen look any prettier than it was before, but it does showcase the new layout and framing for that screen. All names are also probably going to be changed: treat this blog post as a preview of the system instead of the final product.
Thanks for reading! If you have any concerns or positive/negative feedback about this change, we'd be happy to hear it. Leave your comments on the Steam forums, under this blog post or join our Discord server to talk to us directly. We're there all the time during work hours, and i'm there always. Unless sleeping.
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/
Dev blog 43 - Unlocking heroes
This week I wanted to show a system I’ve been working on for a while.
At the start of the game, you will only have access to 3 heroes: Breunor, Merewen, and Morgan Tud. To get the other heroes, you’ll have to unlock them through lootboxes gameplay. The requirements for unlocking specific heroes can be varied, as per some of our discussions. This prompted the need for data-driven configurations on how to unlock specific heroes.
Since one of the goals for the game is to be modder friendly, this system couldn’t be hardcoded to look for specific things just for our heroes. Anybody with enough time and effort could add new heroes to the game, and they might wish to set up a way to unlock them. The same system is also meant to be used for unlocking achievements, but those will actually be hardcoded, so no cheesing it. :) The UI is also made to accommodate for more heroes than what we're shipping.
The list of wanted things for the system (as Mat wrote them) were things like:
- Deal at least 20 damage during a single round
- While in Marca Hispanica, survive 5 fights without losing a hero
- During a single run, deal 100 damage with a Mystic, spend 4 mana, and don’t lose any Mystics
- Before reaching Jerusalem, Acquire 700 gold and kill 20 bandits
- Deal at least 15 points of friendly fire damage in a single ability.
- Kill 10 Abominations in the Battle of Roncevaux Pass and have a mystic survive.
Reading this list, you can glean a possible list of things that the game needs to track or notify as happening. Things like “spend currency”, “kill unit”, “visit location” etc, along with the required context for the event. The “spend currency” needs what currency is being spent and the amount, the “kill unit” needs information about the attacker and the killed unit, while the “visit location” needs the location info.
A big part of the system is also having nested requirements. The event for “win fight” doesn’t know whether you’ve lost any units, it just knows the fight was won. To solve this, we allow unlock configurations to have additional requirements.
Every requirement is tracked individually and propagates its own satisfaction state to its “parent” unlock requirement. Once all unlock requirements are satisfied, they grant their unlock reward, which currently is just the hero in question. There’s room for adding additional reward types, like alternate hero configurations (imagine a Better Breunor who starts with +3 health by default).
Note that all of these images are just me testing the system, not what's going into the final game. That part is gonna be on Mat to decide. We also need to add a way to check your current progress towards unlocking heroes during a run, we’re still discussing how to do that properly.
Thanks for reading! If you have cool ideas for unlock requirements for heroes and would like to influence development a bit, join our Discord server and share!
MarkoP
P.S. There will be no lootboxes in the game. They are shit and have no place in any game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/