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Dev blog 69 - Early access week 1

Hi!

Our first week of being live in early access! We’re very happy about the reception, which looks to be pretty positive as well!

We’ve gotten a fair number of suggestions and general feedback on both our Discord and on the steam forums. We’ve also received a fairly low amount of technical issues and crash reports, all of which seem to have been fixed, but if you’re still having crashes on the latest version (build 669421 as of Saturday), please send those reports in because I don’t like seeing crashes at all and these always get the highest priority.

In other news, since we’re getting a bit more time away from doing support for users that can’t start the game or are having general issues running it, we’ve been working on some quicker improvements we could do. We’ve mostly had only these past two days to work on stuff, at least on the programmer side, so we’ve done a couple of requested features, like move confirmation, better level-up notifications, and general fixes to some common and obvious bugs, like some aspects of the damage calculation, some stuff with auras and the like.
My fix on Saturday was a bit of a stopgap to prevent crashes related to auras, but it introduced a problem where separate instances of the same aura would stack together. In the case of beneficial auras, the effects were great, but it means that one end game enemy, if left unchecked, would just wreck your run in a most unfair and unsatisfying way, preventing your units from gaining action points at all. This was properly fixed on Monday and is being deployed in the patch today.
We’ve also been fixing any typos, skill bugs, and balance issues that we know about and have a good idea of what the fix is/should be. We also have a large list of items to check, investigate, fix or improve, and all of them will get their turn in time.

Mat came up with some ideas to make the hero characters more unique and has started iterating on that design. The artists proposed a new bandit support enemy and are in general working on new heroes. We’ve also got alternate maps in the works, and all this is planned for a larger content patch in the near future.

Know that we read all your feedback, and I try to be as present on the forums as I humanly can while also writing code and fixing bugs. Since we aren’t a large team, some things will take a bit of time to add or fix, but we will get to them eventually. Thank you for your understanding and patience.

Come join our Discord server and chat with us and report bugs directly, if that’s your jam.

MarkoP

https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/