The Hand of Merlin News

Patch Notes - Early Access Build 674600

New features:
• Added 3 new enemies: Enchanter and Witch as two new Mystic Bandits, and Basilisk as a new ranged Abomination.
• Added support for Steam's Big Picture mode.
• Added first-pass gamepad support; it's functional, but UX improvements are planned. Also, only the standard Xbox controllers are officially supported.
• Created a new model for Skill Cards, shown when ranking up your party. The new cards are more informative, and now also include effect area in the skill specs.
• Added some new SFX to Heroes.
• Added some new illustrations for encounters.

Quality-of-Life improvements:
• Units with no action points can now be manually selected. This makes it possible to use 0 AP skills after having spent all AP.
• Added a hint on how to recruit a new Hero in case one of them dies in combat - by visiting Heroic nodes, denoted by a helmet icon on the world map.

General fixes:
• Fixed a bug where reaction attacks against large units would sometimes fail.
• Fixed a bug where trying to end a turn while any unit had a free action wouldn't end the turn until the free action was used.
• Fixed a rare bug in Isabel de Orreaga's encounter that could sometimes prevent her from being recruited.
• Warrior's Driven Haste skill and its upgrades now have correct cooldown values, as stated in the ability card.
• Warrior's Command skill (upgrade of Warcry) should now be usable even if there are no allies nearby.
• Mystic's Scavenging Singe (upgrade of Singe) can no longer target a tile if there are no units in that tile, making it consistent with other attack skills.
• Ranger's Volley skill should no longer allow hitting targets behind full cover.
• The relic Snake Skin can no longer poison the bearer if they receive a debuff.
• Fixed a bug where the effect of Stasis spell would decay twice as fast as intended.
• Fixed typos in several encounters and tooltips.

Optimizations:
• Reduced texture sizes for several heroes and enemies, without loss in visual quality.

Gameplay balancing:
• Changed how Wyvern's passive works. Instead of gaining a stacking Evasion buff when attacked, Wyvern now has Opportunist - when an enemy takes damage, the Wyvern will attack a random enemy in melee range.
• Changed how Mandrake's Quicken ability works, now allowing it to gain an extra action point istead of a Speed increase, making it similar to Warrior's Haste.
• Changed how Behemoth's AI works during reaction turns, favoring the use of the Trample skill.
• Behemoth's Heavy Armor passive will no longer affect damage over time effects.
• The Inspired status effect (gained from various abilities and relics) is now capped at 10 stacks maximum.
• Warrior's Coordinated Parry skill (upgrade of Parry) is now usable at 0 AP.
• The relic Strong Drink can no longer miss, and now has 3 charges with effects that stack with itself.
• The relic Alardin's Shield now grants +2 Evasion (up from +1).
• The relic Blood Amulet now grants +2 Power (up from +1).
• The relic Beast Talisman is now Common, and costs 50gp (down from 80gp).

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer.

Hello guys and gals! Today I wanted to share with you a bit about how we go about adding new stuff to the game, particularly content.

The Hand of Merlin is what I like to describe as a “rectangular” game, meaning it is validated not by its systems, but by its content. A roundabout way of saying that the game is fun or not depending on what you face, discover, and do in the game.

That means that we have to take extra care in creating cool encounters, enemies and skills for you to use and recombine, and the processes we use to go about creating said content needs to be constantly revised.

In the context of enemies and skills, its a three-stage process.

1. We identify a fantasy or a niche. This is the verbal stage. It’s usually down to a sentence or two. In the early stages of the game, they were mostly aesthetic, like “Bashing someone with a shield sounds fun” or “I had this image of a big, beetle-like monster”, which would evolve into Bash and Behemoth respectively. Nowadays, so close to full release, we tend to find more mechanical or thematic niches to fill, like “The Warrior could use some self-heals” and “So many enemies punish the melee characters, how about we do the reverse?” turning into Malice and the upcoming Basilisk.
   
   
2. Then, we Systematize - my personal favorite! We have to translate the idea into actual game terms. What does it mean to push someone with a shield? How is it different from a basic attack? Why would you pick it? This stage is still theoretical, but we have to start thinking about how to implement it in-game, often checking with MarkoP to see what’s possible, or making some small tests in-editor. A great example is how Thorntoad’s Bristleback passive went from a desire to “dissuade the player from focusing fire”, into a process: whenever he is hit, he’ll deal melee damage and become more resilient to damage, via the addition of another status effect, Thick Skin.
   As a side note, Relics can often start in this step. Whenever we are doing a new skill or fix, we “discover” a possibility in the design and come up with a relic’s functionality first, before finding a fantasy/historical element to it.
   
   
3. Then, we Implement. For most skills and enemies, we could give the artists and programmers a heads-up in advance, so by the time the design team reaches this stage, we have the assets ready to slot in and see them in-engine. We can find out some impossibilities in current technologies, or discover some inconsistencies with our plans: that’s normal, we just go back a step and try again. After a bit, we have something testable. For the Basilisk, we actually were lucky enough to be able to use some pieces of other enemies, like Mandrake’s movement AI and some lessons we learned from Wilfred’s Nonchalant passive, and the implementation was quite quick.
   
   
4. Then, Internal playtest! Up until this point, the skill or enemy was built in a vacuum, with theories and desires alone. We thought it would be a neat idea if, say, Redcap’s Ooze, that ground effect he leaves, actually could heal other abominations. But once you actually see it happening in live play, with 2 Redcaps and a Mandrake, you notice that it doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s not properly explained, the player’s can’t do a lot about it, and Ooze is already a hassle on its own… Often, the ideas are scrapped or retooled.
   
   In this stage, it’s very important to bring other members of the development team into the loop, since the people that developed the idea from concept to implementation can become numb to its issues, or only see the results from a specific angle. I often gloss over poor descriptions or AI mistakes in the content I implement myself, and have to be reminded by my fellow devs, simply because I’ve been seeing the thing for so many hours that the small details don’t strike me as odd anymore. This is a great piece of advice to any designer: Designing something in a vacuum is dangerous! Get someone else to see and approve your deliverables.
   
   
5. Then we can move on to Iterating. Very rarely do we actually see a piece of content go from concept to seeing live play without at least one touch-up. As an example, an early implementation of Redcap had passive Evasion, meaning that no matter what you did, there was always a 10% chance that you’d miss it. When I designed it, it made perfect sense: The players have it, and it’s good that you build redundancy in your plans, to account for the randomness factor. But other devs played it and found it frustrating! So we iterated: maybe the Gaze ability could introduce the same randomness and require the same redundancy, but in a more straightforward way, that the players can play for. Maybe we can make another enemy gain evasion only if you attack them, like Wyvern turned out to be. We re-systematize, re-implement, retest… until we find it acceptable.
   
   
6. Then you come in. Live feedback is the greatest (and most overwhelming) thing to happen to our game dev process! We show our content piece to you, the players, and see what you think. Sometimes you think that “The boss fight is a bit meh”, or that “A specific map in Zone 2 is the worst”, or, in a brighter light, that “cooldown reduction makes you feel powerful” and “dealing direct health damage is cool”. We take that into consideration, try to account for it, and fix whatever bugs and errors you (or our extended QA team) find out. This step can happen over and over and is still ongoing for many aspects of the game, but it's one of the most important ones too, as it makes the game a better product for you!
   

So there you have it! The process of how we add content. Now that you know how important your voice is in our development process, be sure to show up on our Discord server to share your feedback with how the game is turning out, so we can keep improving it!

Mat

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer.

Hello there! Mat is back to talk design.

If you guys ever read our soft roadmap, you’ll remember that another major content patch that we want to do is the addition of a few new enemies - a chunky new abomination, and some support bandits.

It's great to be able to design a whole new enemy set after seeing the game live for a few months. We learned a lot about how players engage with the game, their favorite strategies and skills, etc. We can now create a creature specifically tailored to challenge the meta!

So, let me introduce you to the Basilisk, our new abomination!



It serves as a chunky sniper-type. Very high range, likes to take cover, and has some damage-over-time properties, choosing to lay down some poison-type abilities while growing its own power with the Toxin Buildup passive, which increases his damage every turn. It’ll be featured on Marca Hispanica onwards, taking the same “slot” as Thorntoad. (if you didn’t like the chunky guy, then rejoice!)

However, he is not without limitations. His Toxin Buildup passive can be reduced by melee attacks, giving your Warriors another way to deal with the threat.

To accompany that new addition, we are also introducing two Mystic Bandits, the Enchanter and Witch for Albion and Marca Hispanica respectively.



While not particularly resilient, they can heal, empower and even give more AP to the other bandits, requiring your attention at all stages of a match, and offering a bit of a different strategy for your human enemies.

But that's not all. As we introduced some power creep when redesigning skills and passives, we gave the players a lot of new toys to play with, but the enemies didn’t keep up. Yeah, we made them a bit stronger, but we could do better. I’m not going to spoil everything, but we changed how some of the enemy passives work a bit, from the dreaded Wyvern’s Elusive, to Behemoth’s Bloodlust, making them more in line with the current direction of the game, and addressing some of the more common feedback we received.

Expect the major patch soon, and please let us know what you think in our Discord server.

We're excited to give you some new challenges to face!

Mat

Hi folks!

This week we won’t be pushing a patch out because we don’t have any notable changes done. Mat is on vacation so there are no balance changes, and I’m still busy with gamepad support, tho I’m getting into the finishing stages of the core functionality so hopefully soon I’ll go back to some gameplay stuffs.

Since there’s no other topic we could talk about, I’ll continue talking about gamepads from last week.

The current state of the support is fairly complete. All the main screens are fully usable with the gamepad in a way that, at least to me as a non-console user, feels relatively normal. There are a few places that are janky and weird, most notably selection of spells in the core, node selection in the overworld map and the tile picking in fights. Basically, anything that has to do with 3D elements, which is probably not surprising since 2D UI interaction with gamepads is much more intuitive (and simple!) than anything to do with 3D that requires picking.

When I envisioned spell selection in the core, I thought that it would make sense to use the up/down stick or d-pad movement to move between spell tiers, and left/right would move between the individual spells in that tier. After implementing it, I’ll say that my vision was entirely wrong, and it feels very unintuitive and crap. So I’ll be changing that so it works more like a directional thing where UP selects the first spell that’s above the currently selected one, and so on.

The world map node selection is a bit better, but still weird. It works by requiring you to push the stick in the direction of the node you want to select relative to the current node, but this has 2 issues. The first is that when two nodes are in a relatively similar direction, it’s hard to precisely pick which one you want to really go to because the margin for difference is very small. The second is a bit of unintuitiveness stemming from the first issue: you can’t push UP to select the top node, but have to push in the, for example, right-and-up-a-bit to select it. This is another thing that will be tweaked once I get some feedback and ideas for a fix.

Lastly, the combat tile picking is the weirdest one. I’ve tried 3 solutions so far, and neither felt good :( The main problem I’ve identified is that our game doesn’t use a pure isometric projection (which would keep the vertical lines parallel to the screen), but a very narrow perspective projection. The camera is very far away from the map and is using a small FoV for a sort of telescopic lens effect. The other part is that the camera is looking down at an angle. So the issues I saw were:

• When the hit tile (or the screen point that defines which tile is hit) happens to be on the edge of the screen, pushing the stick UP actually moved the hit world point towards the up-and-left/right (depending on which side of the screen you’re on), which is caused by the perspective projection having a vanishing point, towards which all points will move to when going away from the camera.
  
• The speed of moving the hit world point up or down is not the same as moving it left/right, which is caused by the camera angle: moving 1 meter away from the camera will move a shorter vertical screen distance than moving 1 meter left/right and keeping the same distance from the camera.
  

Both issues are a natural byproduct of our setup, but they do have a solution which will just take a bit more thought put into it, or a moment of epiphany to hit me like a truck and make me feel stupid for not thinking of it sooner.

If you have some ideas for how any of these might work from a user perspective, I welcome the feedback. I don’t own any consoles and only play games with my gamepad when it feels it would fit (like platformers), so having good feeling gamepad controls is a bit outside of my experience range. I can also answer any inquiries regarding how any other part of the game works with the controller, in case you wanted to know.

Join our Discord server if you want a more direct approach to leaving feedback!

MarkoP

New features:
• Added new sound effects for several abilities and enemies.

General fixes:
• Charm Stones relic no longer triggers Safir's Paladin passive.
• Warrior's Interdict skill (upgrade of Stunning Blow) no longer removes Ethereal status effect from Pylons.
• Summoned units (such as Decoys) will no longer be tracked in end-of-run report as casualties.
• Fixed an issue preventing Blight and Decoy skills from being drawn at rank up.
• Summoned units will now immediately gain the effects of auras within range, rather than having to move out and back in.
• Fixed typos in several tooltips.

Optimizations:
• Greatly optimized the terrain system, reducing the game's total memory footprint by about 40% in skirmish scenarios. This change also reduces VRAM and disk space requirements.
• Optimized texture sizes of certain monsters.

Gameplay balancing:
• Alain The White's Fey passive will now also trigger off Decoys.