Dev blog 39 - Last public demo
Hey there folks!
The last opportunity for playing a public build of The Hand of Merlin has arrived! Today is the start of the Steam Games Festival: Autumn Edition, and we’re participating! If you haven’t tried it yet, there’s no time to lose! It only lasts until the 13th of October, after which we close shop until release!
The demo for this festival will be mostly similar to previous versions - the entire first zone of Albion is playable from start to end, culminating with a fight against a Behemoth. A large moth.
There are a lot of changes and improvements in this build, most notably around 25 new relics for you to either buy or find during your travels, and Mat has listened to your feedback and done some work on making the game easier by changing the stats on all enemies. Another thing we’ve introduced is gaining some attribute stats as your units rank up, which currently means that your units will gain small health bonuses per rank. The same feature technically allows for enemies to gain bonus stats based on their spawned rank, which allows us to bump their power slightly for later zones as your units get more powerful.
Additionally, we have changed how some of the gameplay mechanics work. At the start of the game, you are given the Grail from whoever rules Albion. The Grail is a relic that can be equipped on units, however, if that unit dies, the game is immediately over because relics are destroyed along with their heroes. The big change here is that the Grail has received its own stash slot, which means it cannot be lost due to combat, and if the unit carrying it dies, it automatically goes into that stash slot, preventing immediate loss. The old mechanic seemed interesting on paper, but after more playtesting, it was just too annoying and felt bad.
We still have some work planned to be done for the festival demo by the end of this week, so there will be a mid-festival update with an additional landmark encounter for the Stonehenge with an accompanying combat map, more particles for abilities, improvements to visuals, tweaks to AI and probably more stuff that are too detailed to list here. I’ll have to improve my “what’s changed” game once we start pushing out patch notes :-P
We will also have a live stream on Friday and maybe Monday, exact time should be available on the festival event schedule if you want to look it up front, and we’ll most likely post an event post an hour prior, so if you want to tune in, follow the Hand of Merlin page so you can get notified of this!
Tanks fur reeding. Join our Discord server to chat with us and axe questions about the game, we’re really a fun crowd! For instance, I love puns.
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/
The last opportunity for playing a public build of The Hand of Merlin has arrived! Today is the start of the Steam Games Festival: Autumn Edition, and we’re participating! If you haven’t tried it yet, there’s no time to lose! It only lasts until the 13th of October, after which we close shop until release!
The demo for this festival will be mostly similar to previous versions - the entire first zone of Albion is playable from start to end, culminating with a fight against a Behemoth. A large moth.
There are a lot of changes and improvements in this build, most notably around 25 new relics for you to either buy or find during your travels, and Mat has listened to your feedback and done some work on making the game easier by changing the stats on all enemies. Another thing we’ve introduced is gaining some attribute stats as your units rank up, which currently means that your units will gain small health bonuses per rank. The same feature technically allows for enemies to gain bonus stats based on their spawned rank, which allows us to bump their power slightly for later zones as your units get more powerful.
Additionally, we have changed how some of the gameplay mechanics work. At the start of the game, you are given the Grail from whoever rules Albion. The Grail is a relic that can be equipped on units, however, if that unit dies, the game is immediately over because relics are destroyed along with their heroes. The big change here is that the Grail has received its own stash slot, which means it cannot be lost due to combat, and if the unit carrying it dies, it automatically goes into that stash slot, preventing immediate loss. The old mechanic seemed interesting on paper, but after more playtesting, it was just too annoying and felt bad.
We still have some work planned to be done for the festival demo by the end of this week, so there will be a mid-festival update with an additional landmark encounter for the Stonehenge with an accompanying combat map, more particles for abilities, improvements to visuals, tweaks to AI and probably more stuff that are too detailed to list here. I’ll have to improve my “what’s changed” game once we start pushing out patch notes :-P
We will also have a live stream on Friday and maybe Monday, exact time should be available on the festival event schedule if you want to look it up front, and we’ll most likely post an event post an hour prior, so if you want to tune in, follow the Hand of Merlin page so you can get notified of this!
Tanks fur reeding. Join our Discord server to chat with us and axe questions about the game, we’re really a fun crowd! For instance, I love puns.
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/