My name is Kaz. I’m a 3D and concept artist who was working on the Hand of Merlin from its very beginnings. For today’s blog post I gathered up some very old concept art to take you through our monster design journey.
When the game was still in its diapers, we had no concrete idea what style or atmosphere we wanted our enemies to portray. We had general narrative pointers - but no aesthetics to accompany them. This was an important decision to make early on because enemies are, of course, a very important part of communicating the nature of the danger you’re facing and for complimenting the overall story of the game. We knew we wanted them to feel completely alien to our heroes, but still aesthetically fit together with each other to make it clear that they come from the same place. Very dangerous and strange place. A different universe, even.
We went through dozens of distinct ideas, ranging from the remains of prehistoric animals to creepy half-functioning robots from the future. Even a combination of the two, perhaps animated by some unknown alien force. We gave crystals and elementals a go, carnivorous plants, tar and slime, rock/lava themed goliaths, insects and even some fleshy horrors inspired by the Silent Hill series. At one point we even entertained the thought of animal hybrids, though we decided those looked too familiar and not scary enough, even if explained by external alien corruption.
It’s important to note that the design of the abominations was heavily influenced by the technical and gameplay limits, as well. For example, the fact that the enemies were supposed to fit a square-shaped tile underneath them made any ideas for monsters with elongated bodies unviable. A lot of quick sketches were made, many of which were never even fully coloured, let alone finalised.
Picking a colour theme for our abominations was important as well. We wanted the creatures to sport hues which were as uncommon in nature as possible, to make them more alien. This colour palette would also be the identifying aesthetic of the “corruption” itself - the strange force seeping into our healthy world and gradually killing it. The monsters were to be its deadly harbingers.
After a lot of testing (with fire-orange and neon green being a dominant choice in the beginning), we opted for the dark purple, red and black. We felt that the combination of these colours represented the right amount of darkness and mystery, while looking very unnatural and dangerous when placed on the world and skirmish maps against the rocks and foliage. It really popped out in contrast to the healthy green and made the scenery look infected, sickly. The monsters born from this unnatural darkness would be a combination of aliens and insects, with a dash of something reminding the players of plants and vines. Something, we believed, would be the strangest and scariest from the perspective of the people in the medieval times who had no concept of any monsters beyond their era-appropriate mythology. We also decided to avoid giving them eyes (with the exception of the Redcap, our eyeball-pancake), realising that the monsters looked much more scary and unrelatable if they had no identifiable face.
Most of the early concepts never saw the light of the day, being pushed under the rug with the rest of the discarded ideas. However, some early drawings were a nice base for the evolved purple designs later on. Once we had our general aesthetic flashed out, we could make new designs or modify some of the existing initial ideas to fit the needs of the gameplay mechanics assigned to the particular monster.
Here’s an example.
Our game designer, Mat, needed a monster which could run around freely and attack from a distance. This fit nicely with the existing birdlike (or dinosaur) concept we already had, since it looked quite agile and was designed to shoot quills. However, Mat wanted this monster to have a lot of health at its disposal, while not being particularly well armoured. Hence, its sturdy armour plates were removed or shrunk, while its overall mass was increased by adding tumours and wild flesh. This made the enemy look like it could soak more damage to its HP, while also playing on the morbid/sickly aesthetic. Next, Mat wanted this creature to be able to infect the heroes with a lingering ailment from afar, but also to push away the units in its melee range without causing a lot of damage. This lead to the quills and needles of the original design being dropped, in exchange for something big and blunt. In this case, to stay true to the dinosaur inspiration, a set of heavy protruding tail bones were added. For the lingering negative status effect the poison of choice was… Well, poison. More accurately, venom. A dash of sickly green was added to the swollen tumours to represent the venom sacks; and with that the monster design for the Basilisk enemy was finalised.
Here’s a picture of this enemy as it looks now in the game.
I hope you enjoyed this short overview of our monster creation history. I, myself, find its evolution to be quite interesting. Join us on our Discord server!
Kaz
Dev blog 114 - New Abilities
This post is written by Mia, our gameplay designer.
Hello there!
Two weeks ago we mentioned there will be some new abilities coming to The Hand of Merlin, today we’d like to tell you a little more about them!
There are at least a dozen new abilities (not counting the upgraded versions) coming to the game, warriors gaining the most since they needed a few more abilities in their pool to match the Rangers and Mystics. These warrior abilities which were missing will be readily available in the ability pool right away, the other abilities however will need to be unlocked!
By saving worlds (winning) you’ll begin to unlock new relics and new abilities. This will allow further exploration of combinations and synergies, different builds and strategies. For every hero that survives the final battle, you’ll have a 66% chance of unlocking a new skill for their role, the other 33% is getting a new relic unlock. Should you for example already have all the mystic skills unlocked, instead you’ll have a guaranteed relic unlock (unless you’ve already unlocked everything, that is). You can unlock abilities on any difficulty, so if you'll be in a hurry Easy Mode is an option as well.
All of this is susceptible to change if we see that it’s not as rewarding as we thought it would be.
Some of these unlockable abilities are: Warrior - Hook Disrupt and pull your enemies to your warrior. Set up combos with your rangers or drag them through fire. There’s numerous ways to use it, offensively and defensively.
Ranger - Partner Up The new abilities of the rangers play around teamwork, and Partner Up is a great example of this. Designate another hero as your rangers Partner, whenever your Partner is attacked the Ranger will shoot at the attacker in revenge.
Mystic - Incense Most of the new mystic abilities are heavy on support duty. Incense is an aura which applies a debuff to all enemies in its radius, lowering their accuracy and evasion. This’ll help your rangers nail those Quick Draw shots and your warriors to evade attacks.
Each upgrade of these abilities adds another function to it, giving you more ways to strategize.
We’re still ironing out some of the new abilities, as well as having our VFX artist hard at work trying to make them all look good as well. It’s a work in progress, but we’re quite happy with how these new abilities act and interact with each other and the old abilities.
If you’re curious and want to know more before the update itself is out, feel free to poke up on our Discord server where we might share more.
Mia
Dev blog 113 - Steam Deck
Hi all,
Robert here, this time to talk about - Steam Deck!
Yup, that's right: we got the opportunity to test our game on Valve's fancy new piece of hardware, and I have to say: it's a pretty powerful device, and with all the optimizations we'd already done for the other consoles, The Hand of Merlin already runs on Steam Deck at a smooth 60 FPS.
Some of you - the lucky ones - may already have a Deck in their hands, and if you do, you'll notice that Valve assigned us a yellow "Playable" tag. But over the last few days, we've been working on getting the few reported (minor) kinks out, so that we can have that nice green "Verified" tag.
So let's unpack the journey of porting to Steam Deck, as short and pleasant as it was.
First things first, we've already been working on supporting Linux natively. Although we haven't ticked the box to make this official on the store page yet, the native Linux (and macOS) executables have been available for some time now, and a few of our dedicated fans have been helping out with compatibility testing. This means we do not require Proton (a Windows emulation layer) to run our game on SteamOS / Steam Deck. In other words, there's no risk of an emulation layer introducing bugs or instabilities, plus there's zero overhead, which improves both performance and battery life.
Secondly, the biggest gruntwork was updating our Steam API support from a fairly old version (that came by default in Serious Engine 4) to the newest one required by Steam Deck. This allowed us to correctly identify the input controls: both the touchscreen and the gamepad, and I have to say - planning ahead really helped us out here. With Steam Big Picture mode already supported via our dynamic UI scaling system, font legibility was no issue at all. Having already done full gamepad support, once we updated the Steam API, the controls also Just Worked(TM).
Fortunately, Serious Engine also already has built-in support for touch input, and it helps that our UI does not require more than a single mouse button for most operations. There was just one small but important tweak we had to do: if using the touchscreen, you now always get a small confirm / cancel button before executing a move or attack action. This really helps prevent mistaken actions.
On top of this, our engine works just fine with multiple input sources, so switching between the touch and gamepad controls on the Steam Deck felt really smooth and seamless, so much so that I found myself using the right analogue stick for quick and precise camera panning, and the touchscreen for most UI interactions.
And finally, as I talked about in a previous blog post, we had done some significant optimizations in a push to bring the game to consoles. To properly support Steam Deck's hardware, all we had to do was correctly identify its GPU and set up appropriate default graphics settings. And voila - smooth, stable 60 FPS! Well, unless of course you limit the FPS from the Deck's Quick Access menu in order to preserve battery. But even if you do - the visuals won't change. The game will look just as good, but the battery will last longer.
So, there you have it. Full support for Steam Deck incoming. :) For any questions or comments, find us on Steam Discussions or our Discord server.
Robert
Dev blog 112 - Classy
This post is written by Mia, our gameplay designer.
Hello there!
A good number of feedback we’ve received has mentioned a problem regarding classes. Specifically, that they aren’t different enough or lack some class-specific mechanic. We wanted to tackle this problem, but doing so without fully reiterating every ability, since we are approaching full release and running out of time.
So just as every hero has their own unique passive, now so will each class have a passive related to it.
Warriors For warriors, the loudest complaint we’ve heard is the lack of a zone of control - or rather, attacks of opportunity! And guess what folks, warriors are getting exactly that! The first enemy (per round) that tries to move next to a warrior will get whacked. Of course, we already had an ability that did exactly that. “Stand Ready” is being removed and replaced with a new ability - “Provoke”, which is also a very requested feature, a taunt!
Rangers Rangers, primary damage dealers, are getting a strategic teamplay element to them - flanking. For each ally an enemy unit is adjacent to, the rangers gain bonus damage and accuracy against that enemy.
Mystics For mystics we had several options, but settled for a passive which plays into positioning and teamplay. Morgan Tud will share his (old) passive with the other mystics now. On attacking an enemy with “Singe”, nearby allies are granted “Mending” which restores armor gradually. As for Morgan, he’ll be getting a new unique passive of his own, “Thornwarden” which plays into his abilities.
Along with these changes, we’ve also got some new unlockable abilities for each class you can look forward to!
We love hearing feedback and thoughts from you all, so drop by our Discord server and let us know what you think!
Mia
Dev blog 111 - Final Boss Redux
Hi all,
It's Robert again - but now, I've put on my "game designer" hat and tackled the Final Boss! (To help out our other game designer who is, of course, knee-deep in the mucky innards of Endless Mode.)
In any case, we had heard feedback that the battle of Jerusalem felt a little lackluster. We had also heard from some players that they didn't feel much of a pull to do another run after having beaten the game once or twice. So, we sought to change that.
We set out to accomplish these two things:
1) Make the final battle feel more epic, and more engaging. To achieve this, the mechanics of the final battle are now quite different. Of course, all the recognizable elements are still there: there are still Pylons, and you still have to use the Holy Grail to strip the Pylons of their immortality, and you still feed the Grail mana by killing Abominations that keep pouring in. But this is where the similarities end!
Before, each Pylon was relatively easy to kill, and while they came in ten different flavors, their differences did not really require you to change up your approach. Other than that, the boss itself was just a background entity which did not participate in battle directly. But the new, redux'd battle will have you face off against the eldritch monstrosity head on! The fight itself has 3 main phases.
The first phase is a single Mega-Pylon: a massive, living structure, with a lot of Health/Armor and tons of damage potential. There are two variants, and both have unique reaction abilities that you cannot ignore. One will prepare a ray attack against the attacker each time it's hit, meaning you have to be careful with your action points or you'll get stuck in the blast zone and ripped apart. The other will spawn a temporary cover underneath the attacker, knocking them back, and then prepare a nova-style blast, damaging anyone not in cover. Again, care must be taken! But - both of these powerful attacks will also damage other Abominations, meaning you can make these Mega-Pylons work for you through careful positioning. And you will need to do this, as the wave spawning is relentless. But remember, every kill gets you a point of mana, which lets you power up the Grail and wreak holy havoc with it. :)
The second phase is another of these Mega-Pylons (the variant you didn't see in Phase 1). These first two phases are really there to teach you the mechanics and not overwhelm you, while also giving you a chance to deal some damage and/or break immortality on the Pylons, before finally, the Boss itself emerges... And then you face off against all three at the same time! Without going into too much detail about what exactly the Boss does, let's just say it should make the battlefield feel dynamic with ever-shifting covers, while also drawing power from any Pylons left alive. Make sure to read those tooltips! ;)
2) Make winning a run feel more rewarding. As for this point: well, if the final battle itself feels more engaging, that's certainly rewarding in and of itself. But, we wanted to do even better! So, we're adding special rewards that you can gain by defeating the final boss: new skills and relics that you can unlock and add to the random pool!
So completing a run successfully means you have new toys to play with in the following runs. Yes, this means we'll also be adding new abilities to complement and augment the skills you can already learn through ranking up. These won't just be variations of the same abilities; we've coded in some new mechanics, too. And the design principle between these additions has been one particular pillar of design: teamwork. Or in other words: more synergies between classes! But more on that topic in a later blog post.
So there you have it. Pretty big changes are coming up! Let us know what you think about these on our Discord server or here on Steam.
Robert
Dev blog 110 - Endless Mode
*This post is written by Mia, our gameplay designer.*
Hello there!
In ‘Dev Blog 104 - Release when?’ you may have noticed that we mentioned a new game mode is in the works. The work-in-progress name for it is ‘Endless Mode’, and as the name suggests, it is a mode in which you can fight the abominations, in theory, forever.
In Endless Mode Merlin sends his puppets into the Void itself, sealing their fate. It’s a one-way ticket and a noble sacrifice in an attempt to curb the Corruption at its source. There is no happy ending for the heroes here, the only goal is to cull as many abominations as you can till you ultimately fall. This sacrifice comes in hopes that it may save a world one day. For while there are infinite worlds, there is only one Void.
The story here takes a back seat though, as the focus and point of this mode is to just test out different builds and enjoy the combat strategy. It’s meant for all the players who aren’t that interested in the journey and stories experienced on the path from Albion to Jerusalem. In Endless Mode, the pages between fights are short and more focused on the mechanical needs. After each fight there’s a random gear upgrade available, and after every other fight, there’s a relic available. Survive long enough and you could have your whole warband “pimped out”.
Difficulty wise, it is not going to be easy. While it may start off as such, the difficulty ramps up steadily and continuously (up to a point). The main issue you’ll face will be managing your health, as it is the Void there is no friendly face around that could assist in healing your wounds. Good use of spells here will be important, to mitigate that, each fight rewards 1-3 mana.
It’s a work in progress, but the base has been set up and we’re now entering the testing phase and modifying accordingly. What we do have is some pretty new maps we’d like to show off!
If you have any good ideas on how we should actually name this mode, feel free to drop in to our Discord server and let us know!
Dev blog 109 - UI improvements
Hey folks!
A little while ago, we were working on improving the skill upgrade process. The idea was to show the base skill on the screen during the upgrade. Even though this information was already there (through a tooltip on an icon between the cards), it wasn’t very intuitive or obvious.
When I was working on adding the middle card (which you can see in the game today), I was hanging out with a friend on discord and chatting about our work. She’s a UX designer, so she started giving me ideas for improving my situation. When I passed the ideas along to the team, after a bit of back and forth, we decided to hire her for freelance work to go over the UI/UX in the game.
Now, a month later, we have a bunch of suggestions to improve the games’ UI. A lot of these are changes to font usage, text sizes and small layout tweaks, but there are a few that are a bit larger. Here’s a list of items I consider notable changes:
Difficulty selection screen will have all difficulties on the same screen instead of in sub-screens
Hard mode + modifier selection screen gets a new layout
Core selection screen gets a new layout
Hero selection screen gets a new layout
Codex hints will be rewritten to a different format
Victory screen after combat gets new information
Cards will be changed to a better information layout
Warband book page tweaked layout
Blacksmith tweaked layout
Unit portrait tooltip tweaked layout
Most of these will be part of the next content update slated this month, with some bits maybe spilling into a few smaller patches afterwards, depending on how much time i get to focus on this. A lot of the main menu is already done and just needs to be finalized.
Finally, here’s a preview of some of the suggestions.
Before -> After
Before -> After
Let us know what you think about these on our Discord server or here on Steam!
MarkoP
Patch Notes - Early Access Build 677512
New features: • Created new VFX for Cockatrice's Wail and Thorntoad's Blast (prepared ultimates).
General fixes: • Fixed a bug with the in-game menu's "Save and Exit" functionality, which incorrectly saved the game progress without any checks, which could lead to various issues in some cases. • Fixed a bug where dead units would still be detected as turn injectors, preventing the turn from ever ending.
Quality of life changes: • Hero tooltips now show a better and clearer attribute breakdown.
Dev blog 108 - Improving the Ultimates
This post was written by Will, our VFX artist.
Hi, Will here! Today I'm talking about some of the exciting work I have been tasked with.
When I joined there was a very large backlog of effects the team wanted to have created or tweaked and it has been my great honor to go through and rework and reinvigorate the games already existing effects.
My most recent task however has been to come up with a new way to represent a very dangerous interaction for players; the prepared ultimate abilities of our Abominations. This is a place where the team feels the peril of the abilities were not being shown clearly enough to our players. I was as such given the freedom and time to really explore some options and come out with an effect that fulfills 3 key criteria.
1) Players know at a glance that the enemy is building up to a powerful attack. 2) Players should feel like they must deal with the impending threat in some way (either by focusing down the enemy or running away from its impending attack) 3) After the ability fires players should recognize how that attack was much more powerful than a regular attack.
To that objective here are a couple of gifs to show off the difference between the old and new Wail ability.
Before:
After:
We're making sure that all enemies that do a similar dangerous ability get a proper visual indicating so. This is all still work in progress, but at least it's a glimpse of what we're working on. As always, be sure to let us know what you think, either on Steam or our Discord server!
Will
Patch Notes - Early Access Build 677457
New features: • Added notifications for Feats of Strength, unique accomplishments deemed too difficult to be classified as Achievements. These are hidden at first, but will appear in the Codex under a new tab when unlocked. • Added and/or improved several visual effects on Heroes and enemies.
General fixes: • Fixed the Warband achievement from being unlocked after only 9 prowess unlocks to being unlocked after 12. • Fixed a bug that caused Morgana or Atlantes to be unable to spawn once you started/progressed/finished the other one. • Fixed a rare occurrence where it was possible for status effects to recursively trigger each other to infinity, causing a crash. • Fixed a rare bug where triggering multiple effects that grant an out of turn action and action points would fail to resolve all of them and only leave the effects of one of them. • Fixed an issue with Warrior's Coordinated Parry skill where it would fail to grant the nearest ally 1AP when attacked. • Keen status effect will now correctly expire after a single attack (e.g.: Warrior's Cleave will deal extra damage to all targets, but Ranger's Double Shot only to the first target as it is 2 attacks). • Warrior's Vengeful Parry skill upgrade is now different from its base version: can be used every round. • Warrior's Sharp Vigil skill will now grant appropriate debuff to enemies on hit. • Warrior's Fencing Lunge skill can no longer miss with the Evading buff. • AP gain from Positive Warp spell can no longer miss. • Piece of Avalon relic now grants appropriate status effects. • Heroes will no longer get unusable rank up points if they have nothing to spend them on. • Fixed wrong node labels in Jerusalem world map, which would say "City of Outpost" instead of just "Outpost". • Fixed an issue where the camera could behave strangely in the final fight in Jerusalem if you started combat with a status effect. • Fixed a bug in the Lobby where the hero selection X for removing a hero from warband didn't do anything. • Fixed a bug where: if you were using a gamepad in a skirmish, had a Hero near the Hero portrait bar or enemy near the enemy portrait bar, hovered over that unit in the world and pressed Y (show unit tooltip), the tooltip would stay on screen when you released Y. • Fixed an issue where the gamepad control hint for End Turn would be partly cut off from the screen. • Fixed an issue where some tooltips could flicker on mouse press. • Fixed various typos in encounters and tooltips.
Quality of life changes: • All cutscenes now support a "hold to skip" feature (with a non-intrusive info message) instead of immediately being stopped on a keypress. • Removed icons from confirmation dialog buttons. Instead, the buttons are hover sensitive now. • Added mouse wheel scrolling to the core selection and hero selection columns.
Gameplay balancing: • Lindworm's Gob now only applies 1 stack of Rooted to target (down from 2). • Thorntoad's Leap (including its Dire version) is now classified as an offensive skill, meaning its use can be prevented with a skill like Warrior's Slam. • Grace status effect now has a stack cap of 1. • Miserable status effect no longer reduces AP.
