Dev Blog 1 - The Hand of Merlin Status Update
Hello everyone!
It's been quite a while since we created the steam page for The Hand of Merlin, in which time we have, unfortunately, never posted anything. Well, this is something we're aiming to fix, all the way until the release of the game. Our plans include a regular blog post, with a mix of design, art and tech topics that should cover most of what the game offers. In this first post, we wanted to share what has been happening with the project behind the scenes.
In its first iterations, the game was supposed to be a 2D isometric game, visually similar to Banner Saga. We wrote our in-house engine as a tool to create that vision of the game. Over time, the number of cool ideas, and the scope of the game grew, and we decided to transition the game to 3D, in order to solve some asset issues (for example, 2D animations vs 3D animations, since we had only one animator). The engine itself wasn't made for 3D, but it wasn't impossible to extend it, and a couple of weeks later, we had our first 3D model running around the game world.
After working on the rest of the 3D tech for a while, we were offered the option to port the game to an already established 3D engine, which was in parts similar to our in-house engine. For a bit of backstory, the founders of Room-C Games, Robert and Karlo, have been working at Croteam full-time for almost a decade now as programmers on the Serious Engine, which was in part an inspiration for the core tech of our engine. The offer was to move The Hand of Merlin to Serious Engine, which had a lot of tech already written, meaning we would be able to focus more on the game itself instead of writing the core technology required for a standard 3D game nowadays.
The work to move the game from the old engine to Serious Engine started back in mid 2018, and the base of the game was ported after 6 months. The switch also meant we couldn't use any of the old assets, which was at the same time good and bad: the old assets were all pure 2D, and would look out of place in the new engine. Around the same time as the tech port, we started making all new assets, this time as full 3D models. So we got to work, and recreated almost everything we had in the old version of the game (some differences are expected as the design of the game evolved as well).
So here we are, The Hand of Merlin is running on Serious Engine, and are charging full speed ahead with the rest of the content, to bring the game to release at the end of 2020. Late last year, we updated the store page with how the game looks in the new engine (and we still made more improvements after that), so check those out and share them along with any of your turn-based-loving friends.
As for our update schedule, as already mentioned, the plan is doing regular blog posts right here on Steam, targeting Wednesday, and various other content on other platforms as we move forward, so stay tuned for that. In the next post we plan on spilling some details about the game itself, and start introducing our small team, so see you next week!
Room-C Games
It's been quite a while since we created the steam page for The Hand of Merlin, in which time we have, unfortunately, never posted anything. Well, this is something we're aiming to fix, all the way until the release of the game. Our plans include a regular blog post, with a mix of design, art and tech topics that should cover most of what the game offers. In this first post, we wanted to share what has been happening with the project behind the scenes.
In its first iterations, the game was supposed to be a 2D isometric game, visually similar to Banner Saga. We wrote our in-house engine as a tool to create that vision of the game. Over time, the number of cool ideas, and the scope of the game grew, and we decided to transition the game to 3D, in order to solve some asset issues (for example, 2D animations vs 3D animations, since we had only one animator). The engine itself wasn't made for 3D, but it wasn't impossible to extend it, and a couple of weeks later, we had our first 3D model running around the game world.
After working on the rest of the 3D tech for a while, we were offered the option to port the game to an already established 3D engine, which was in parts similar to our in-house engine. For a bit of backstory, the founders of Room-C Games, Robert and Karlo, have been working at Croteam full-time for almost a decade now as programmers on the Serious Engine, which was in part an inspiration for the core tech of our engine. The offer was to move The Hand of Merlin to Serious Engine, which had a lot of tech already written, meaning we would be able to focus more on the game itself instead of writing the core technology required for a standard 3D game nowadays.
The work to move the game from the old engine to Serious Engine started back in mid 2018, and the base of the game was ported after 6 months. The switch also meant we couldn't use any of the old assets, which was at the same time good and bad: the old assets were all pure 2D, and would look out of place in the new engine. Around the same time as the tech port, we started making all new assets, this time as full 3D models. So we got to work, and recreated almost everything we had in the old version of the game (some differences are expected as the design of the game evolved as well).
So here we are, The Hand of Merlin is running on Serious Engine, and are charging full speed ahead with the rest of the content, to bring the game to release at the end of 2020. Late last year, we updated the store page with how the game looks in the new engine (and we still made more improvements after that), so check those out and share them along with any of your turn-based-loving friends.
As for our update schedule, as already mentioned, the plan is doing regular blog posts right here on Steam, targeting Wednesday, and various other content on other platforms as we move forward, so stay tuned for that. In the next post we plan on spilling some details about the game itself, and start introducing our small team, so see you next week!
Room-C Games