The Hand of Merlin News

Hi peeps! Last week we introduced you to Will, and he’s been hard at work getting to know the engine, and the project. One of his first tasks was to revisit our Spell effects, particularly Merlin’s.

Here are a couple of gifs of his work.

Restoration


Translocation


Thunderbolt


Starfall


What do you think? Let us know on our Discord server, we're always there!

Mat

Hi, everyone! Mat here once again.

One of the areas we want to polish up a bit more is VFX. This includes getting some eye-candy for the cool Guardian Spells, specially for the upcoming ones. To that effect, we are currently onboarding a new member of the Room-C group, straight from Bristol, UK: Will!

I wanted to take the opportunity to follow in MarkoP’s footsteps a bit and give him the round of questions we usually give our newest additions.


Q: Hi, could you introduce yourself?
A: Hello, I’m Will. I am a Real-Time VFX artist hailing from England. I love the natural world and nothing keeps my interest more than watching the forces of nature play out in that landscape. Whether it’s paddling in the powerful surf of the Ocean, catching a sunset looking beautiful or the low glow of a campfire set against a starlit night sky, I am happiest when I find time to spend time in the world. It is also an excellent chance to gather reference for when I try to recreate such effects within the dark sorcery of a game engine's powerful particle editor.

Q: When did you start messing with VFX? What got you into it?
A: I first became interested in VFX when I was in my final year of university. I was initially compelled to try it as I realised there was a high demand for RT-VFX artists in the games industry. I quickly fell in love with the process as making effects requires a lot of creative problem solving and design thinking to best represent important gameplay features to players.

Q: What was your impression of The Hand of Merlin?
A: When I first looked at The Hand of Merlin, I thought it looked like the kind of game I’d normally play. I initially thought it was a unique re-theming of a well trodden genre that I enjoy. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the game had some very interesting differences to contemporaries I’ve played; while still being easy to pick up for a veteran strategy rogue-like player such as myself.

Q: How do you make a specific VFX to fit a specific ability or spell?
A: The most important job of VFX in my opinion is gameplay. So the first thing and last thing is always to make sure that the effect I am working on shows the player a visual embodiment of their inputs. This is achieved by working closely with design and programming to ensure that the effect is aiding player understanding of mechanics they are interacting with.

Q: Can you tell me more of the challenges of being a VFX artist?
One of the biggest challenges I face often when I am creating VFX for any given project is the number of options available. Often a VFX artist has many different ways to tackle the problem at hand. They must then pick the method that will give the best result within the constraints of the project they are working on. The answer to how to solve any given problem again goes back to strong communication about the gameplay purpose of an effect and understanding which workflow is best suited to tackle it.

Q: What things do you do when not making rad visuals? Any hobbies?
A: I like to try and get outside as much as the weather allows. Camping and hiking are things I highly enjoy. With a job like mine, there’s a lot of sitting at a desk. So to stay active I generally try to do some yoga every day and go climbing 1-3 times a week. I would also say that I often get lost in my guitar and music is a fun hobby I’ve been engaged with and I am always learning something new about.


And there you have it! Will is now present in our Discord server under the handle Badfish, so feel free to drop by and ask him any questions!

Mat

Hi all!

Next next patch will bring a tech change that will prevent the remaining cheesing/save scam opportunities that are readily available inside of the game on the world map. I want to take a bit of time to explain how it happened and why we’re only fixing it now.

When we initially added encounters to the game, they were pretty tightly coupled to their presentation within the game. Specifically, the way we presented the encounters (the book) was directly in control of advancing the encounter state forward, and just was the encounter state. We would inspect the encounters for a page, prepare all the UI widgets and show them. Clicking on a button that advances to the next page would look directly into the read-only encounter resource, change the text of the page, change the buttons and that was about it.

Later, when we added randomness to encounters, we had the issue of pages changing something that should be perceived as a “fixed” value, like the amount of gold to grant or the required hero to use an option. This was fixed by finalizing the encounters, which essentially means making a copy of the encounter resource and pre-rolling all random value ranges to fixed values.

After that, we wanted a tool that would make sure the encounters are not busted, like having dead ends, or a page having no clickable options and the like. The encounters are just text files, after all, and it's easy to make mistakes. To make this possible, we had to change how we present the encounters, and it could no longer be tied to the presentation. While the tool is not perfect because the encounters are very complicated, it at least finds most of the issues.

At this point, we pretty much had the capability of driving the encounter state forward without having a UI for it. This was the final piece of the puzzle needed to even be able to make no cheesing possible.

I consider cheesing anything that makes it possible (and easy) to abuse the games’ save system to gain resources infinitely or retry choices. This could be abused by getting resources from an encounter, closing the game or returning to lobby, then continuing the game. The result would be that the previously gained resources were still there and you’d restart from the beginning of the encounter. Not good. This is pretty much the reason why the game was never saved during encounters, and why you could restart them by the quit+continue combo.

My latest change fixes all of these issues. Any time you do anything that one would expect to have a permanent effect (picking new skills, upgrading them, spending resources, advancing through encounters, etc), we save the game, which now contains your current encounter state. This means if you leave the world map for any reason then continue your game, you will be set to the same page you were on when you closed it.

There are two main reasons I wanted to do this.

The first one is the reroll ability cards button we added to hard mode. Until the patch hits, the button is disabled during active encounters because of the aforementioned tech reasons: you could in theory reroll your ability cards, see ones you don’t like and decide you don’t actually want to spend the essence on it. All you’d have to do was leave the game, then continue and you’d be reset back to the start of the encounter with no changes to your resources or your party in case you leveled them and picked skills. This is obviously bad on many levels.

The second reason was the remaining few cheese/scams that were possible. You could advance through an encounter, reach the random card choice (which was always fully randomized to account for the quit+continue cheese), pick one, and if you didn’t like the outcome, quit+continue and you’d be back at the start of the encounter with another chance to get a better outcome.

The change done here solves both issues and will make all of your choices during the world map fully permanent in your current run.

The other improvement I’m making is one that’s been bugging me for a while, and now I have time to devote to fixing it. I’ll likely write another blog post on the topic once the fix is up, but in case I don’t, here’s the short of it: for some player characters, their movement during fights isn’t undoable (Tariq specifically, if not a few others as well). The issue has the same cause as being unable to undo movement for a Mystic character that has the Hallow aura active.

Thanks for reading, I hope you don’t mind the little glimpse in the technology part of the game. If you wanna ask stuff, or suggest stuff, join us on our Discord server or post here on Steam. Till next time!

MarkoP

The end is near, Wizards & Warriors!

You've asked for it, and with our latest update, we're thrilled to introduce Hard Mode and new metaprogression features.

Hard Mode
One of the most common requests we receive from you all is to make the game harder. Well, we love a challenge, too, and Hard Mode is the result of our efforts! But what exactly does that mean? It means your runs are about to get a serious dose of abomination wrath!

To distinguish Hard Mode from the current player experience, the first step was to add more complex resource management and, of course, make your enemies tougher. Check!

More specifically, you’ll be introduced to Dire Units, which are super-buffed versions of the abominations you already know and love. Meaner and nastier, expect these baddies to radically increase the challenge thanks to higher HP, more armor, less cooldowns, and unique passive abilities, just to name a few upgrades

Curses & Blessings System
Don’t despair just yet, because we’re also adding new metaprogression features, which will help you grow stronger with each run! As you gain more and more Essence, you’ll need a place to spend it, which is where the new Blessings and Curses system will come in.

In Hard Mode, you’ll spend Essence in exchange for temporary benefits to your run. Blessings are positive benefits, such as increasing your maximum mana level or earning larger gold rewards. But there’s a catch… of course there is.

Spending Essence on only Blessings would make Hard Mode too easy, so to balance it out, you’ll also have to select Curses, which produce negative effects on your run, such as more Bandits or less gold.



Each benefit is assigned a Doom Value, and your Blessings and Curses must balance. Hate math? So do we, so allow us to simplify it: If the Blessings you select equal a Doom Value of 3, then you must also select Curses to go with it that equal a Doom Value of at least 3. MUWAH HA HA HA!

It's Spooky Season
We'd be remiss not to acknowledge the fact that this update is releasing during Halloween week! To celebrate, enjoy explosions of pumpkin guts raining down on the battlefield between October 30 - November 1. Trick-or-Treat!

And more! Here's a full rundown of everything included with this update:

Patch Notes - Early Access Build 675833

New features:
• Added a new Hard Mode, which greatly amps the difficulty and is tuned for Heroes with Prowess unlocks.
• Added Dire Bandits and Dire Abominations - bigger, meaner, uglier versions of enemies which have a chance to spawn in Hard Mode runs.
• Upon beating Hard Mode once, players unlock Hard Mode+, which allows adding Curses and Blessings to add extra challenges to a Hard Mode run.
• Added seasonal destruction effects. Covers and units will explode with pumpkin chunks between October 30th and November 1st, and candy canes between December 24th and January 1st.

General fixes:
• Fixed a crash with gamepad after opening and closing the in-game menu while in portrait tooltip.
• Fixed a potential crash when a unit is killed.
• Fixed a crash that could happen when an enemy unit would be reduced to zero Range.
• Fixed a bug where the difficulty settings in session weren't restored properly when reloading the save game.
• Fixed an issue where the option to recruit Rumayla al-Qirqiyya would sometimes erroneously not be generated in her encounter.
• Fixed an issue on some skirmish maps where Heroes could spawn in invalid locations.
• Fixed a geometry error in the Tavern skirmish map, which allowed enemies to enter tables.
• Units that don't end up moving from a knockback or a pull-in effect will no longer trigger reaction attacks.
• Fixed an issue with Warrior's Gritting Slash skill where the Grit effect would sometimes not be applied to the Warrior.
• Fixed an issue with Warrior's Staggering Bash skill (and its upgrades) where it could sometimes fail to impart the Staggered condition to the target if the knockback was interrupted.
• Fixed an issue with Warrior's Judicious Cleave skill (upgrade of Cleave) where it could sometimes fail to disrupt prepared actions.
• Added a missing line in Warrior's Bash skill description about its disruption capabilities.
• Alain's passive no longer triggers Mesmerized when an enemy uses a non-damaging ability against a decoy (such as Redcap's Gaze).
• Ranger's Ensnare skill (and its upgrades) can no longer miss.
• Berserk Status effect and its derivatives, associated with the Warrior's Rage ability line, no longer increase damage done to self.
• Alain no longer poisons himself when under the effect of Expurger (from the Mystic's Expurging Totem).
• Thorntoad's Leap skill now correctly triggers reactions like Archer's Vigil and Stand Ready.
• Fixed various typos in encounters and tooltips.

Optimizations:
• Reduced the polygon count of most meshes in the game, greatly improving framerates on low-end PCs, and without noticeable loss in visual quality.

Quality-of-Life improvements:
• Removed the gamepad controls legend from the game. Instead, individual UI elements have contextual control labels, which takes up less space and should be more intuitive.
• Action bar number hotkeys are now only visible when using mouse and keyboard.
• When using a gamepad, there is now a hover indicator to connect the disabled encounter option with the tooltip explaining why the option is not available.
• All heroes that have their Prowess unlocked will now by default be set to the first unlocked Prowess in the list in the Lobby.
• Tooltips for relics viewed in the Journal will now show formulas, since exact numbers can be inaccurate and uninformative outside of combat.

Gameplay balancing:
• Status effects that reduce damage (Heavy Armor, Resistance, Expurger, Shielded, etc) no longer reduce damage done from Spells. Spells, however, still benefit from damage-increasing effects, such as Vulnerable.
• Increased max stacks of Bleeding effect to 10 (up from 5).
• The Well Rested status effect now stacks.
• The Paladin status effect (Safir's passive) now deals 1*Power damage when using non-offensive abilities, up from 0.5*Power.
• Morgan Tudd's passive (Druid Physician) now also works on himself, rather than strictly other allies.
• Wilfred's passive (Nonchalant) increased to +3 damage (up from +2).
• Warrior's Coordinated Parry skill (upgrade of Parry) no longer costs AP to use, like the base version.
• Ranger's Specialty Arrow skill (and its upgrades) have been buffed. Increased CDs (2->3 in most cases), but increased base damage (0.5x -> 1x), as to not make it so reliable on its conditional effect. Exploding Arrow (one of the upgrades) no longer needs to target unarmored targets to deal its explosive effect.
• Ranger's Archer's Vigil skill (and its upgrades) now deal slightly more damage. Also changed Defensive Vigil upgrade into Sharp Vigil, which grants Guard Down as a debuff.
• Slightly increased AoE of all skills in the Ranger's Volley line (1.5->2, Wide 2.5->3).
• Reduced Ranger's Quick Draw skill line's accuracy penalty to 30% (down from 40%), making the ability more reliable.
• Slightly increased base Health and Armor in most rangers, bringing their average defenses (Health + Armor) to 30, up from 26.
• Recurve Bow blacksmith upgrade line (Balanced Ranger Weapon) now also grants +1 Evasion.
• Roland's Horn relic now has a simpler and stronger design - it debuffs all enemies on the map, reducing their Power.
• Medicinal Bandages relic no longer costs AP to use.
• Added a starting cooldown on Wyvern's Jump skill. This should make getting ambushed less punishing.

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer.

Hey! Mat here, once again. Hardmode is just around the corner, so I hope you are as excited as we are!

I wanted to take a moment to explore one of the latest features we are introducing to Hardmode: rerolling ability cards.

It's simple. Whenever your warband gains a rank, you are able to pick a new ability or upgrade an existing skill. If you are in Hardmode, you can now spend Essences to get another roll, with the first card being guaranteed to be a new one when upgrading.

This will allow you to spend the Essence you earned in Hardmode in order to have more control over your build, making the run a bit more likely to succeed. This will come in handy when you engage with Curses and Blessings, as those runs can be quite challenging, even if they give you a lot of Essence.

It’s another reason to bank some Essences before attempting a harder run, for sure. In fact, this whole idea was brought up by MarkoP when considering other uses for Essences, and also a way to address how random the game can be for high-level play. We sat on the idea for a bit, but once the changes to the Essence economy happened in Hardmode, we just felt like it was time to try it out!

Now, we’re looking at the first few days after we launch the End Times update to see how we can improve the experience, but we already have a few plans. MarkoP is working on removing a tech limitation to allow you to reroll ability cards when you are inside an encounter (currently it can only be done when not in an active encounter), and we are investigating ways of improving the UI as well.

The more important part though, is to hear from you guys what you think is the effect of this change! Did it kill the vibe of the game? Did it feel more strategic, or more grindy?
As you play our new update, be sure to let us know on our Discord server!

Best of luck out there!

Mat