The Hand of Merlin News

Earlier this year, just two weeks before the lockdown, Mateus Farias arrived from Brazil to Croatia. A week later, a not-a-very-nice-magnitude earthquake devastated downtown Zagreb, leaving our game designer without a roof. He found a new place to stay, but that's when the floods came...

The Hand of Merlin is a game about the endless struggles in life. We wrote this sentence down in the game design document, to give some deeper meaning to the game we're working on. Just in case someone asks what's it all about and if the aliens are a metaphor, or, you know, we had to write an artist statement.

Yes, it's about fighting aliens with your Arthurian medieval knights, and yes, Merlin is an alien, and it's all grim (and leftfield) as it sounds. The plot owes everything to our lovely writers' duo, Verena & Jonas Kyratzes, but we wanted the game to really be about doing the right thing, even when it's hard. And about those occasional sparks of magic in our lives that help us push through.

One pandemic, one earthquake, two floods, and one engine switch later, Room-C is doing great with the hardships! We're fairly light on those magic moments so far, but this is all about to change when the game finally gets out there and we can feel that magic already: we were happy to see The Hand of Merlin accepted and recognized by so many shows (we made the PAX Rising selection just recently, and the game was featured on Digital Dragons and TGS). And finally, we're here, at Steam's own Autumn Festival - thanks for checking out The Hand of Merlin and playing the demo!

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The Hand of Merlin is a roguelike turn-based RPG, coming soon from the engineers of The Talos Principle and Serious Sam, and written by Verena & Jonas Kyratzes (Phoenix Point).

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

You know that you can Join us on Discord anytime and we’ll be happy to chat with you! However, we'll be hosting a special live Q&A session on our Discord this Friday, October 9th, so here's a reminder to... well, set a reminder on the right side of this screen! At the same time, we'll be live streaming The Hand of Merlin Demo gameplay here on Steam.

This probably goes without saying, but The Hand of Merlin Demo is now live, with new updates and improvements, and we'll even have a fresh build ready soon, before the festival is over. So give it a go, play the Demo, and join us on Friday to let us know your thoughts and we'll be glad to answer all of your questions and share some of our plans going forward.

Once again, singing, dancing, and eating cheese during this session is not only allowed but is encouraged. To get things going, we might even drop a key or two! :wink, wink, nudge, nudge:

In the meantime, have a great festival, and please remember to wishlist and follow The Hand Of Merlin.

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


Cheers,
Room-C Games

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/

Hey there folks!

A little bird told me you really dig the story encounters in the Hand of Merlin and we're thrilled you like them so much! The driving force and the culprits behind all these stories are Jonas and Verena, husband and wife in literary crime.

Mia, our mighty quest designer, handles the mechanical setup of the encounters that pertain to flow, rewards and balancing, but it's Jonas and Verena who write all the lore and flavor texts.

As a heavily story-oriented game, for this Hand of Merlin blog post, I decided to do a quick interview with Jonas and Verena, so let's hear their side of the story.

Q: Hi Jonas & Verena! Where did you get the inspiration for the story for The Hand of Merlin?
A: The inspiration initially came from trying to find a type of story that would work well in a roguelike, allowing us to have story encounters without getting repetitive. From there we got to parallel universes, and then we hit on the way in which the many contradictory versions of the Arthurian stories complement that idea. We’ve also simply always had an interest in that material.

Q: How do you approach writing the story for individual zones? (i.e. Albion or Marca Hispanica)
A: A number of elements go into each encounter: overall theme, tone, research, etc., but the proportions change. So some are heavily based on some historical or literary detail specific to that region which we want to build upon (e.g. a character from Le Morte D’Arthur or a chanson de geste), while others are more about the atmosphere in general. Albion is a faded kingdom; in the Marca Hispanica we see the effects of constant religious warfare; whereas Al-Andalus is actually more civilized, but at the same time the Cataclysm is much more advanced there.

Q: Do you feel confined in the strict structure of the encounter templates?
A: Not really, since there’s plenty of flexibility, and if something really doesn’t work, we can talk about it and find a solution.

Q: How do you get started on writing individual encounters?
A: It usually starts with a core concept, either a premise (“you meet a robber in the woods”) or something drawn from worldbuilding needs (“the player should meet Sir Brastias”). Then we develop it as we write it, and later return to add more variations and details.



Q: How much do you collaborate with the designers?
A: We usually have weekly meetings to keep up to date, because there is some overlap between our jobs and both sides need to know what the other is doing.

Q: What is the biggest challenge you face when writing encounters?
A: Creating interesting choices for the player without being too random or punishing them too much. We have to keep players paying attention over multiple runs, but what happens must never feel arbitrary.

Q: Do you ever request a specific template for an encounter?
A: We need templates for classes of encounters so that we know we are serving the needs of the gameplay. If we have a specific idea for an encounter, that usually means we already know how to structure it. Then what we need to request is input on rewards/costs for the player, to keep the game balanced.

Q: What else do you write for The Hand of Merlin?
A: Pretty much everything, except blog posts. While there are some placeholder elements in the game currently, so the designers can do their thing, in the final product every item and spell and message should be part of a cohesive whole.

Q: What was the most fun/interesting thing to write?
A: The most fun to write is probably everything to do with the metagame progression and the deeper mysteries of Merlin’s universe because it’s like peeking behind the curtain and seeing where the legends come from.

Q: Do you ever get writer’s block when writing for the game? If yes, how do you get over it?
A: No. Getting stuck doesn’t have to do with writer’s block, but with unresolved narrative design issues. If you’re getting stuck, something is usually wrong and the only way out is to figure out what it is and fix it (or circumvent it).

Q: Would you like some ice cream?
A: Yes, we would like some ice cream.

Thanks for reading, and a big thank you to our writers for taking the time to answer these burning questions! If there’s anything you want to know that hasn’t been answered, come join our Discord server and ask! We’re all a friendly bunch!

MarkoP

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

Hey folks!

The Cataclysm monsters that are invading the world Merlin is trying to save are weird creatures that came from the minds of our creative art team. Says a lot about their weird heads, eh?

So far, we’ve shown 4 monsters through either the blog posts or the demo itself. The first demo we put out was structured for a 5 world location journey across two paths, with a total of 3 fights against a combination of Mandrake, Behemoth, and Wyvern enemies. This was during the Steam Summer Games Festival.
After that, we decided to apply/be on more events during the year, like the PAX event that just finished or Gamescom a few weeks ago. Our current event participation means that the current demo will be available all the way until September 27th (27.09.2020), when it’ll take a break from being ravaged by all you players, and then return strong for the Steam Autumn Games Festival on October 7th (07.10.2020) for some 6 days. The later demo should receive some fixes as we make them, but no new content is planned (not planned doesn’t mean there won’t be any added if we decide it’s worth it).

The monsters you’ve seen in the current demo won’t change, and we will likely keep the same structure for them for the full game as well. Mandrake, Wyvern, and Redcap are monsters you’ll be seeing during your Albion travels, with a Behemoth at the end. In Marca Hispanica we’ll be introducing the Thorntoad, with a Cockatrice at the end. In Al-Andalus, the sandy zone, we add the Lindworm to round up the monster roster (heh it rhymes). The final battle in Jerusalem will remain a secret.



Here’s a short development story: In our old engine, we had a worm enemy as well, given life by yours truly, and i made sure to make it as annoying as possible. It had an attack that ignored all obstacles, essentially lobbed a projectile at you from behind cover at a large range. So naturally, the AI moved that enemy to a position that was fully shielded from ALL of your units and attacked you from there. It also didn’t help it had unlimited movement range, to facilitate the fantasy of it burrowing into the ground and emerging just about anywhere. This meant you had to spend at least 1 action point to get to a position from which you can attack it, and spend the other action point to deal damage.
And the best part?
Every time you hit it, it split into two, each copy having half health of the original, then both copies moved into a new position.
The team hated it (and me through proxy), but I found it hilarious!
Hopefully, the new Lindworm won’t be as annoying, eh? :)



As a final note, some abilities and relics will have effects that apply only to these monsters. For instance, there is a relic that reduces damage against humans and increases damage against aliens. Mat wanted a different name instead of “aliens”, so the writers have come up with the term “abominations”, which we’ll use in all ability tooltips that affect them specifically.
What are your thoughts on this name? Give us your opinion on our Discord server, or in the comments!

MarkoP

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