Since we’re still in playtesting and bug fixing mode, there aren’t a lot of juicy design topics to ramble about. We’re steadily ironing out the kinks from the game, and every report we’ve received on both Steam or Discord has already been fixed.
The only temporary setback to get those fixes out is a planned power outage that will affect our builder infrastructure. We were planning a patch for today, but due to this we’ve decided to push the patch for next week. We don’t want to risk releasing a patch today without a way to react to any unexpected crashes or critical issues it could have. Note that when I say unexpected, I really mean unexpected - the expected ones would have been fixed before the patch went out!
So in short, expect a patch next week with fixes to everything that has been reported on Steam so far, and likely anything that gets reported from today until then.
As for the title of the blog post… *drum roll*
June 14th!
In less than a month, the game will receive the final Early Access update, Update 8: Endless Mode, and leave Early Access to become the full 1.0 version!
It’s been a long, bumpy and fun ride since we started Early Access. I’m sure we couldn’t have made the game as good as it is now without the support of the people who gave us feedback. Whether that feedback was some tiny annoyance or some larger concern (like character uniqueness), we tried to improve the game with all of those in mind, and even if we didn’t end up resolving every suggestion, I can assure you that each one was at least discussed.
That said, we’re still open to feedback and are ready to improve the game the best we can with our limited capacity all the way until release! Just note that, after all, we are just 3 programmers out of 8 people in total, so there’s a natural limit to what we can pull off. So if you have the game and would like to suggest improvements for before or after 1.0, report bugs or give us some constructive criticism, come talk to us directly on our Discord server, or post here on Steam and I’ll reply as soon as I see the message!
Thanks for the support!
MarkoP
Happy 1st Birthday
Hey, everyone. Robert here. When The Hand of Merlin released into Early Access last year, many of you told us that its level of polish didn’t feel like an Early Access game at all. And what greater compliment can there be? Thank you for that!
Before we put on our party hats and light the candles, let’s kick things off with a fun fact. Did you know that The Hand of Merlin was not always called The Hand of Merlin? In fact, finding the right title took a while!
At first, we went with Guardians of Erda: Merlin’s Tale. Quite a mouthful, huh? It was supposed to convey the message of the journey, of saving the world, of getting back in touch with Merlin’s lost kin, the other Guardians. But it just didn’t roll off the tongue.
The title we landed on, The Hand of Merlin, is also very symbolic. It can be taken to mean that Merlin has a hand in shaping the world and its history. But it also represents the Heroes that help carry out his task: the fellowship itself acting as the hand of Merlin. Plus, it’s way shorter, so that’s good!
Over the past year, we’ve been doing live development in Early Access, while also porting the game to consoles. That includes pushing regular content updates at a steady month-and-a-half interval, with lots of small updates in between, usually weekly or bi-weekly.
Let me tell you – it’s been a brutal experience! 🙂 But also very fun, with lots of things we’ve learned on the way.
Thinking about some of the highs over the last year, we really enjoyed seeing popular content creators livestream or review our game. It felt good to hear folks praising various gameplay aspects, or just plain-old having fun with it!
Another high would be… um… helping folks with technical issues. No, seriously. It may sound weird, but it feels good to have a happy customer praise our technical support, especially since we’re such a small team and all spread so thin. There’s no dedicated community manager or tech support contact: it’s just us, the three programmers on the team, juggling coding new features, bug fixing, tech support, build system management, and everything else in-between.
And of course, you can’t have the highs without the lows. In the early days of EA, seeing those very same content creators across Twitch and YouTube finding a nasty bug was a bit deflating. One time, all the textures went haywire and started blinking with psychedelic textures during a stream. The chat exploded, and the guy was laughing, but we on the dev team just wanted earth to swallow us. 🙂 Fortunately, we were soon able to reproduce and fix the bug, but I promise that we will never forget that scene with flashing neon floors on livestream!
Even with so many people praising your game, it’s still difficult seeing negative reviews pop up. I keep track of all the reviews and posts, and every unfavorable one is a kick in the gut. Still, we sift through them and often there’s something actionable to be found. Something to address, to help make the game even better.
The worst mistake you can make as a dev, I think, is to react emotionally or start arguing. Even if there’s an angry post on the forum, I ask myself: how come that person is so angry? Is there something we can change to address their issue? Oftentimes, the answer is yes, and then the person goes from feeling angry to feeling vindicated. That’s such a great feeling when that happens! So, this actually started as a “low,” but became a “high” by the end! 🙂
And so, here we are: 365 days after The Hand of Merlin’s first day in Early Access. It’s been an amazing year, and we’re very excited to reach the end of our EA voyage and officially release version 1.0 in the near future (you’ll be hearing more about that very soon)!
Before we wrap things up here, I’ll leave you with one more fun fact about The Hand of Merlin: An artistic influence on the game was Excalibur, a 1981 film. The entire movie is a visual trip, and really hits the nail on the head with that weird, off-kilter medieval feel with dark mystical undertones.
The movie also features some very shiny armor, which due to the physics of optical lenses used in cameras, produced strong fringes of light extending from the borders of those bright suits of armor. This in turn caused the film to have an almost dream-like, otherworldly feel to it. We actually replicated this artifact – this feeling – with a strong bloom effect in-game.
Thank you so much for your continued support and feedback. You’ve all definitely made this first birthday all the more sweet!
Patch Notes - Early Access Build 678732
New features: • Added a few new sound effects for Abominations that were missing them on special attacks. • Created a proper portrait for the final boss.
macOS fixes: • Fixed an issue where mouse clicks would sometimes not work correctly. • Fixed window not being interactable after switching from fullscreen to windowed mode until the window is moved or resized.
General fixes: • Fixed a crash that could happen if playing through multiple runs in one sitting. • Fixed a bug with the final boss fight where it could get hard locked if a pylon died at the start of the enemy turn by a damage-over-time effect. • It is now possible to view the unlocked rewards at the end of a run when using a gamepad. • Fixed a bug with the Atlantes core achievement having wrong unlock requirements. The achievement should be now be granted for new sessions, both for the case of having already unlocked the core, and for unlocking the core for the first time. • Fixed a bug where sunken areas in certain maps prevented some abilities from being able to effect units on the other side, most notably at Roncevaux Pass - the final map of Marca Hispanica. • Fixed a bug where action points could sometimes be shown as negative on the unit header in combat (this was purely a visual bug). • Warrior's Disrupting Taunt skill and its upgrades now properly disrupt reactions as well. • Fixed Warrior's Sword Sworn skill to only trigger via direct damage, excluding reactions or damage-over-time effects (as was intended). • Light Boots relic can no longer miss when used. • Straw Doll relic and its status effect Paragon should now correctly trigger its decay rule only when Heroes take damage - Decoys should be excluded. • Warrior's Bash Down skill now correctly applies Guard Down. • Bandits' use of Martyr skill now properly triggers on player's turn instead of during enemy turn. • Fixed an issue where some skills could only be used at 2 AP even though their cost is 1 AP. • Fixed a bug where choice cards in an encounter could become broken if mashing buttons too quickly while they appear. • Fixed an issue with "Florismart's Glade" encounter where it would not be possible to recruit Alain the White. • Fixed an issue with "Merlin's Cave" encounter which caused it to give too much Essence. • Fixed typos in various tooltips and encounters.
Modding: • The testing roster can now define the starting relics, both for being equipped on heroes and stashed.
Optimizations: • Fixed several memory leaks, where used memory would grow slightly with each level (around 1 MB). • Fixed an issue where terrain material arrays could get reallocated when loading certain levels, causing a slightly longer load time.
Quality of life changes: • Added a new hint to indicate how to gain Essence - primarily by visiting Arcane Nodes on the World Map. • Added a menu option for controlling the size of the displayed tile grid in combat. • In combat, hit chances are now shown only for units that will have effects applied to them, to avoid confusion. • Changed the default value for unit outlines in combat to always - this should help with unit visibility.
Gameplay balancing: • Mystic's Thundering Brimstone skill now applies Dazed to large enemies as well. • The effect from Mystic's Blighted skill no longer decays, meaning affected enemy can heal attackers until it dies. • Furtive status effect will no longer be lost via spells, reactions or damage-over-time effects.
Dev blog 118 - Playtesting phase
Hey folks!
Starting last week, we've entered full playtest mode! Yes, that means the game is being prepared for full release! Hype! While we're playtesting, we've got a content freeze. No brand new assets are being made, and all artists are promoted to the role of playtester. Programmers are partially promoted to the role, because, you know, somebody has to fix the reported issues as well. We’re also keeping track of any bug reports on the Steam forums and our Discord server and fixing them asap, so if you're playing the game, let us know of any issue!
We’ve also got reports coming in from the QA team testing the game. They’re testing the game on Linux and macOS as well, and the reports for those should help with most of the obvious issues on those platforms. One of the issues that should now be fixed is the clicking issue reported on macOS, where sometimes the mouse either did a double click on every single click, or required a double click to register as a single click. One of our programmers valiantly dug deep into the macOS handling code to fix that one, which was both hard to reproduce and hard to even debug to figure out what was actually going on, so the fact he got a fix for it is great! If you previously had this bug, try the game and let us know if it’s fixed for you so we know if the fix is working the way we expect it to.
So as you can see, by entering this mode we’re basically gearing up for our 1.0 launch in the near future. Our days are spent tracking down and fixing bugs, and our designer is busy with putting the guides for modding on Steam and handling balance changes as they’re reported.
We’ve also gotten some good general game feedback on our Discord server and Steam that we’ve been discussing internally. We’re actively looking to iron out the kinks in the game, and improve the situation for new players. Although we’re close to release, it doesn’t mean the patches stop until then, they will happen probably every week up to and a short while after the full release. We've actually got a patch coming today as well! So the more people let us know their pain points with the game, the better we can make it for its 1.0 sticker :)
If you have suggestions, please drop them in the forums or on our Discord server. We love to see them and discuss them!
MarkoP
Patch Notes - Early Access Build 678618
General fixes: • Fixed a crash when opening the in-game Options menu on macOS. • Fixed an issue in the final boss fight which would cause the script to break (and the boss would never spawn) if player killed a Pylon in a certain way. • Added a check to the lobby that automatically unlocks any heroes that are not unlocked in the profile, but should because they don't have any unlock requirements. This is notable for mods adding new Heroes. • Added a fixup for Atlantes' core achievement for players who unlocked the core before the achievement was added. • Fixed a rare occurrence which could block progress in Roncevaux Pass, making it impossible to progress into Al-Andalus. • Fixed a bug where locked relics (rewarded for completing the game) could appear in encounters/relic shops before being unlocked. • Fixed Canoel random encounter with the Thief: they should now properly steal a static amount of gold every time, and return it if caught. • Fixed Keen status effect (granted by Breunor's passive) to properly expire at turn end. • Fixed a bug where the self-buff part of Warrior's Taunt skill (Blocking) could sometimes miss. • Fixed a bug with Grail of Piety relic where its extra healing effect would also erroneously reduce CDs by 1. • Fixed an issue preventing Thorns status effect from reflecting any damage. • Fixed an issue preventing different variations of Roland's Horn relic from spawning. • Fixed an issue where Cockatrice's abilities were not affected by cover. • Fixed a bug where status effects (and their visuals) could in rare occasions be applied to units that just died. • Fixed multiple skills which you could not use at 0 AP despite them costing 0 AP. • Added green and red diamond markers to tier 3 skill upgrades where they were missing. • Updated Cockatrice's Wingslam VFX to better fit the ability's logical hitbox. • Added several sound effects which were missing on certain enemies. • Updated various hint images to display the latest UI. • Updated descriptions of various relics and skills to clarify them. • Fixed a rare bug where the grid outline in combat was sometimes flashing or was not rendered properly. • Fixed missing footstep sounds on a certain skirmish map. • Various minor visual fixes across several levels.
Quality of life changes: • Improved the automatic camera tracking logic. The camera movements should feel smoother and far less janky now. • The rankup notification can now be shown even while the Journal is open (i.e. the player is in an encounter), which should help players not miss their rankup opportunities.
Gameplay balancing: • Attribute rewards at rankup have been adjusted. The choice is now between +2 Health or +1 Armor, but every four levels there will be a third choice for a random attribute.
Dev blog 117 - Status effects
This post was written by Will, our VFX artist.
Hi everyone.
In The Hand of Merlin there are a great number of status effects, (over 200 in fact) which grant the player various different boons and banes that players will have to manage to effectively beat the evil monstrosities they are presented with. The task of visually representing these needed to be broken down so that players could quickly and effectively see what type of status currently affects the units on the skirmish map.
The gameplay implications needed to be represented were decided as follows;
Status effect VFX categories
Buffs:
Increased damage dealt
Reduced damage taken
Increased speed, evasion, accuracy or AP gain
Healing over time
Debuffs:
Reduced damage dealt
Increased damage taken
Decreased speed, evasion, accuracy or AP gain
Damage over time (burning / poisoned / bleeding)
Immobilized (unable to move)
Incapacitated (unable to take any action, stunned)
So I designed some quick concept sketches which the team helped me to refine. Then it was time to test and check them in the engine.
This is how they all look overlapping and while there's a lot going on it's much more readable than it was.
We here at Room-C hope this will make the game easier to play and make it more obvious that a status effect is affecting a unit and indicate its type. You can share your opinions with us on our Discord server!
Will
Patch Notes - Early Access Build 678544
New features: • Updated the VFX for most status effects, which should be now be more intuitive and readable even with multiple effects stacked.
General fixes: • Fixed an issue on certain Mac and Linux machines causing a "GPU not recognized" error message at game start. • Fixed an issue where Hero Prowess unlocks did not work when defeating the final boss. • Fixed an issue in the final boss fight where Mana would not be restored via the Holy Grail if killing a unit on the same turn it was spawned on. • Fixed an issue where Dire Toad's Bristleback ability could trigger repeatedly off of reflected damage (such as Thorns). • Fixed an issue where the choice cards for Ranger's Explosive Arrow skill upgrades showed the same text. • Fixed a bug in the encounter "A Day for Jousting", where points were awarded incorrectly in the case of one broken lance.
Quality of life changes: • The "essence available" notification on the world map now pops up and animates only if you had no essence before gaining one. If you start the map state with one or more, it is still present, just not animated across the screen.
Optimizations: • Reduced clutter on several maps, which does not affect visuals but improves performance and reduces memory usage.
Gameplay balancing: • Replaced Ranger's Specialty Arrow skill upgrade which was overlapping with the new Exploding Arrow skill with a new upgrade - Stunned Arrow, which applies a stun to the target. • The status effect Timed Bomb applied via Ranger's Explosive Arrow skill can now be detonated prematurely by killing the affected target. • Mystic's Noxious Fumes skill is buffed: increased max charges from 2 to 3, and it no longer affects allies. • Tendril Whip relic now has a 60-degree cone area of effect instead of a line.
Dev blog 116 - Modding
Hey folks!
On Monday we released our long awaited Content Update 7!
Along with a bunch of fixes, changes and improvements, it also marks the release of our Editor to the general public. That’s right, you can now play the game in a modded environment and create your own mods or install mods others make!
We have prepared several modding guides to help anyone wanting to try making their own. These span making new abilities, relics, encounters, maps, units, etc.
If you’re seeing this sentence here, it means the guides are not up as of writing this blog post. We expect to post them today (Wednesday), so when they’re up, there will be links here instead, so if you're interested in them, check back here later!
Due to how the game is set up, some things are simpler to mod than others. Relics, skills and (by extension) status effects are for the most part a “drop in and it works” resource. They automatically integrate with their respective systems. Encounters, zones and skirmish maps are, to some degree, mutually dependent on each other. Zones require some number of encounters to work, and encounters that have a fight need to specify the skirmish map where the fight is, and each fight needs input from the encounter (if set up for it) on where to spawn enemies.
The guides will go into more detail on each aspect of modding if you’re interested.
Other than this, we have a patch for later today that will fix some issues found at the last minute before the update went live and a few extra ones reported after, plus some additional VFX.
This is about the time we like to either mention or write a whole blog post about the “what next?” question, the roadmap, the future, 1.0 release and adjacent topics. Good news! There’s one more feature we’ve got in the oven, the dreaded Endless Mode (name pending?). We have it playable internally, but we still need to playtest it and tweak it and see what the difficulty progression needs to be and all that stuff. Once we’re happy with that, we’ll slap the big ol’ 1.0 sticker on the game and release it out of Early Access! It’s really not that far off. After that, we plan on supporting the game with any updates the game can benefit from. We’ll be listening to every piece of feedback we receive and see which ones we can do to further improve the game! Just like, keep in mind we’re a small team and don’t have the manpower to turn the ship (or the camera) in a whole different direction. Thanks!
If you have any questions about either modding, our release date, or just want to yell at us for making a (great) game, join our Discord server and let’s engage in some constructive discussions! Steam forums are fine too!
MarkoP
Major Update 7 - Modding!
Major Update 7 - Modding!
Patch Notes - Early Access Build 678477
New features:
Revamped the final boss fight with new mechanics. It should now be more engaging, but also more rewarding: every victory will unlock new skills and relics that can be found in the following runs.
Warrior: Automatically attacks enemies moving into or out of melee range to apply Bleeding.
Ranger: Gets a stacking bonus to power and accuracy against a target flanked by the Ranger's allies.
Mystic: Applies a stacking healing-over-time effect to allies standing next to the target of the Mystic's primary attack.
At rank-up, instead of getting an automatic Health increase, Heroes will now be able to choose to improve either Health, Armor or a combination of both (presented via choice cards).
Added official support for macOS (10.13 High Sierra or newer) and Linux (SteamOS 3.0 or Ubuntu 18.04 LTS).
Added official support for Steam Deck.
Added modding tools and integrated support for Steam Workshop.
To install mods, subscribe to them here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/600610/workshop/
Then run the game from Steam and select "moddable" from the popup menu. You can view and manage mods from the Options / Steam Workshop menu.
To create mods, install and run The Hand of Merlin - Editor. We'll be adding modding guides soon - stay tuned!
General fixes:
Fixed an issue where closing the game in specific circumstances could cause the save data to get corrupted - this should no longer be possible.
Fixed a crash in the relic shop when dragging a relic into a slot where there is no hero.
Fixed a bug where the reroll button for skill cards was not usable with a gamepad.
Fixed a rare bug where Tariq's Bladedancer passive would not work correctly in certain cases.
Fixed a rare crash if holding down [Esc] while the game is transitioning between states.
Fixed a bug where unit attributes weren't updated when a status effect that affects that unit had its stack count changed.
Fixed an issue where toggling "show extended tooltips" (formulas) didn't trigger an update for status effect tooltips, for cases where they had a value derived from a formula.
Fixed an issue where destroyed cover objects could sometimes still show up as whole and translucent when hovered-over by mouse.
Fixed a rare bug where encounter cards could get overlapped if clicking on them extremely fast.
Fixed the tooltip for Pheasant Feather relic, which did not list the actual effect applied.
Irish Gorget relic can no longer miss with its heal effect.
Fixed an issue causing the Skein of Thread relic to be unequippable.
"The House of Peace" encounter now correctly grants Supplies when picking pomegranates.
Quality of life changes:
Fresh profiles will now start with 0 Essence, instead of 1. To offset this, winning the game now grants 1 essence every time as a minimum. This is a QoL feature because it eliminates the Core/Spell selection step of the loadout process for the very first run of a new player.
Improved the Lobby UI (roster and loadout selection) - it should be both more informative and more intuitive now.
Added "camera speed" option for the Lobby transitions.
Removed the list of previous end-of-run reports from the Lobby, as this screen was very seldomly used.
Improved the skill cards layout for better readability.
Added stats tracking to Victory/Defeat screens: enemies defeated, turns taken, etc.
Ability tooltips will now indicate the shape and size of an ability's area of effect in the tooltip header.
Added an attribute breakdown to unit tooltips, for added clarity of various effects' interactions.
All tooltips will now show formulas in parenthesis only if the formula is non-trivial (i.e. involves at least one multiplication).
Added subtle box backgrounds for the various combat UI elements to make them easier to read in both light and dark environments.
Improved the visuals of the in-game UI scrollbars.
Improved the visuals of the in-game Bestiary's navigation labels.
Changed the icons and names of the map nodes in the final zone (Jerusalem) to be more clear about what they reward.
Renamed Mystic's Desecration skill into Raze, as this is more appropriate to the lore.
Gameplay balancing:
Morgan Tud's Druid Physician passive is replaced with Thornwarden: it applies Thorns to adjacent allies after using Singe, granting them damage reflection.
Zahra's starting skill (Stand Ready) is removed and replaced with Second Wind: it clears debuffs and restores armor to caster.
Soft-disables will no longer be able to reduce attributes to zero, meaning they cannot turn into hard-disables. For example, Slow can no longer reduce Speed to zero, which would make it the same as Root.
Mending now stacks with itself, but has a cap of 5 stacks.
Bleeding now stacks with itself, but has a cap of 5 stacks.
Ranger's Blinding Smoke skill (and its upgrades) have been buffed to apply stronger debuffs (now scaling with Power).
Wilfred no longer starts with the Sprint skill, but instead with Shiv.
Wilfred's passive (Non-chalant) has been buffed to deal more damage to Targeted enemies (now scaling with Power).
Rumayla's passive (Piercer of the Veil) has been buffed - it now reduces targeted enemy's Power by -25% (instead of a flat -2).
The extra damage granted through Breunor's passive (Keen) no longer applies to just one hit, but instead lasts for the whole turn.
Zahra's starting Armor is now 25 (up from 15), and her starting Power is now 5 (up from 4).
Zahra's passive (Resourceful) has been buffed - it now restores armor points equal to 50% of maximum Armor (instead of 1*Power).
Ranger's Surging Shot skill (upgrade of Shoot) has been buffed. Grants Surge on damage dealt instead of health damage dealt.
Abominations will no longer apply Poison or Bleeding - these effects are now reserved for players. Instead, monsters will apply Corruption, which has tighter rules on stacking and maximum damage per turn.
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