We're super proud to be a part of Dev.Play 2020 and we've rolled out a fresh The Hand of Merlin demo! It will only be available during the show dates (Nov. 3-4) so grab it today, and join us on Discord to share feedback with us: https://discord.gg/ej8sjxx
Recently we started looking into adding more particles to the game. We knew for a while it’s one of our weak points since nobody on the team was experienced with making them. After a recent game release, we asked Croteam if we could borrow their particle creator, and they agreed, so now we have Alen, a person with experience who’s making a lot of our particles. He’s making them really fast too! We also added support for geometric particles (it’s basically just a model with a specific shader that makes it look cool). Today’s post shows how our particle visuals have improved since you last saw the game during the festivals.
Grail of Piety relic (reset ability cooldown to all allies)
Vial of Pure Water relic (heal health)
Vial of Poison relic (target takes health damage every turn)
Shield Block (take less damage per stack)
Hunter's Mark (target takes more damage from caster)
The design and art members are working together to discuss which things need particles, and how they should look. The current idea for status effects is to make all buffs use one and all debuffs use another effect. We figure this should make it clear what type of effect was granted, and inspection of the unit can help you note what the effect does. On that note, our lead art boi has started working on improving the UI elements, to make them a cohesive whole, which might prompt a change to how we present unit info. Once we have something done, I’ll be showing that off.
We could also use some feedback on something. One discussion point was about making each status effect to have its own unique icon in the particle effect, instead of having all buffs use the same icon and all debuffs use another icon. Do you think it’s better to have all status effects have a unique icon or is having a single icon for buff/debuff types good enough (like the Hunter's Mark and Vial of Poison gifs)? Give us your thoughts in the steam forums, comments, or our Discord server. I attempt to read all of those, but your 100% chance is Discord.
Things are progressing at a steady pace. Some of the things we’re doing include:
Updating animations for human units to look better
Adding particles to all Skills
Adding more props to our galleries for skirmish map beautification
Adding more sounds to units
Improved the camera bounds in maps
Preparing encounter templates for zone 2
Discussing encounter questlines
Adding more relics
Creating the “Ultimate” Skills for enemies
Improving enemy AI
Prototyping the hero unlock system
Fixing issues that prevented us from having transparent objects
Fixing all the bugs!
I think the most interesting bug we fixed is that selling the Grail to the relic vendor did not lose you the game. You can’t lose the Grail from having the bearer die, but we’ve intentionally left in the option to sell the Grail, as a temptation thing. Maybe we make it an achievement? Who knows!
Our idea for the Hero Unlock system is to make a flexible content-driven system that can be configured to track a variety of general game events. Once enough of those events fire, the unlock target is granted. For now, we’re only discussing unlocking heroes and achievements. This means that modders that create their own heroes can also make them unlockable by whatever means they want. Achievements will likely not be unlocked by content-driven data but hardcoded data, just to avoid cheesing through them by making a dead easy requirement that unlocks every achievement we make. That would be a crappy experience and destroy their value. Some example requirements we wrote down are “Deal 15 friendly fire damage with a single ability use”, “Kill 20 bandits and acquire 700 gold before reaching Jerusalem” and “Survive 5 battles in Marca Hispanica without losing a hero”. These are not final, mind you, because we don’t yet have the system done, but I’m working on it! If only I weren’t interrupted by other urgent things every day…
One other thing I want to talk about in this post and maybe poll for general feedback is one of unit visibility in maps. As mentioned above in the list, we fixed issues with transparency and now we have the ability to make objects that occlude the battlefield transparent so you can see what’s behind them.
We also added unit outlines and fill when behind occluding objects. Check out Morgan Tud below:
Which one do you prefer the most? Which one should we make the default? Give us some feedback in the comments or on our Discord server, where we’re always active. Especially me, I can be found there almost 66% of the day. The other 33% of the day I’m sleeping.
This week I want to give a short report about what we’re doing with the game. When we were preparing a build for the festival, we knew there would be some things that just wouldn’t be ready in time for the festival start. We decided to push those things into a patch on Friday, and we delivered that patch in the late afternoon for us. The patch notes were never shown, but a TL;DR would be something like:
Added some new content
Fixed some bugs
Changed some balance values
I guess every patch for every game can be summarized with this, eh?
Before and during the festival our playtesting spawned some discussions on the design choices we made for that build. We had a long discussion on Friday about it, and then some more on Monday 2 days ago, and I’d like to give a short summary of what’s going on.
We’re changing enemy Skill loadouts. This means that every enemy should be very distinct in terms of his behavior and Skills used. The biggest offenders are the bandits - they look similar, and outside of their name it’s hard to notice which one is which. Most bandits will now have unique abilities that force different approaches to “solve” the combat against them. We’re also adding so-called “ultimate” Skills to enemies. These will be very dangerous and telegraphed abilities that are meant to throw a wrench into your plans and unit positions. They should be easy to avoid but require a change in plans in order to do so. We also talked about enemies having some innate Evasion value. The Evasion attribute is used against Accuracy in order to determine if a hit occurs. Some enemies had this value set to 1, which means that you had 90% chance to hit them out in the open (outside of cover). We determined this felt crappy, and have removed this from enemies. From now on, Evasion is gained only through active actions: moving behind cover or using Skills that grant it.
We’re changing the Redcap abomination to be less annoying. It’ll have different Skills that force repositioning, such as leaving ground effects when moving around and generating ground effects through an active Skill. We’re also making reactions and telegraphed Skills cancellable. Some player Skills will have the keyword like “Disrupts” which means it can be used to stop an enemy from using his reaction or telegraphed Skill. Both of these will now be tied to a status effect to make it visible when a unit is using them. The plan is to make any Skill that does Knockback or Stun also disrupt. We’ve also discussed removing full misses from the game and replacing them with a minimum damage amount. For now, we’re keeping full misses due to removing the innate Evasion from enemies to see how it works out. We’re finalizing some straggler encounters in Albion, and then moving on to writing encounters for Marca Hispanica. We’re also introducing new encounter types, the Quest encounter. These will be acquirable in Albion and Marca Hispanica and be completable in Marca Hispanica and Al-Andalus respectively. There will also be three-step encounters that start in Albion and span through all 3 zones. The last zone is the boss fight zone and will just be wrapping up the story and journey, so no quests there.
There’s a bunch of stuff going on, and I don’t want to make these blog posts be walls of text, so I’ll spread out what we’re working on from now on out. Come discuss the game with us on our Discord server!
