Dev blog 40 - Post-festival changes
Hello!
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:
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!
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/
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!
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/