The Hand of Merlin News

Hi there!

Continuing on from last weeks’ post, a short summary of the second zone.
The general flow of the game is having the heroes move across several zones (currently 4 in total) to reach the final big bad boss guy. The first zone, Albion, was covered several times already. The second zone is Marca Hispanica, which is a mountainous area with snow because we wanted to have an environment vastly different from Albion. The third and fourth zones are similarly different, but I’ll cover them sometime in the future.



The concept art for the second zone was created some time ago, but the zone itself wasn’t very developed until we changed engines. The only piece of info we had was a sketch of how the zone was split into regions that would control how and when the enemy units would spawn on the map. After we moved into Serious Engine, we had a good idea of what the zone has to look like. After Mateja and Lucija were hired and had gained some experience making levels for Albion, we gave them the task to make some levels for the second zone. They have since done a great job in fleshing out the identity of the levels, and it’s much snowier than the original concept. Ivan did the world map design based on the original region sketch.

During the time we had enemy units that moved around the world map destroying nodes, there was an idea that the other zones could have different gameplay in terms of how urgency was presented. The idea for the second zone was adding an enemy that moved over some invisible nodes from the top of a mountain and to the last node on the map. The last node in all zones was always a city node that was under siege, and your heroes were going there for story reasons. After winning the fight, you would enter the city as an encounter, and be able to trade, purchase relics, heal and so on. This also provided the player with a small respite before venturing on. We also had an idea for doing an underground segment in the zone (visible in the concept image above). There would be a few nodes marked as “underground” which would spawn a few specific encounters and would hide the nodes that were above ground. Needless to say, this didn’t go far from the idea stage :)



The current plan for the gameplay of all zones is to be equivalent. Since the traversal is directed to the last node anyway, you’ll have to choose which rewards to pick up based on your current state. Low on health? Go down the route that leads to a city. Lost a hero? Go north to grab that hero. Want to chase Guardians? You get the idea. The only exception is the last zone, which will feature very few nodes and the boss fight.

Thanks for reading! If you’re interested in talking to us devs, come join the Discord server for the Hand of Merlin, or ask me about stuff on Twitter.

MarkoP

Hi folks!

Moving on to something different for this post, I want to talk about our base design idea for the overworld maps.

From the early days, we knew we wanted to have node traversal akin to FTL. The first issue was that our map is not space-based (and therefore allowed easy random node generation) but rather land-based. This meant generating random node positions could result in them being placed in logically inaccessible areas like seas, mountain peaks and similar. Our first maps were hand made and hand linked to create a general feeling of moving through the world. Encounters were hand placed at first, and later randomly assigned to each node.



For a long time, the movement on the overworld map was undirected, meaning you could go to any node, even if it was already visited. This would mean you’d get no rewards for going there, but based on how the map was linked, you could visit every node on the map before reaching the end. We didn’t really feel this was good because the players felt no sense of urgency, and the choice of taking one path or the other was lost. We needed a way to rush the player to the final node in the zone. The problem was we were directing the player to go towards the danger (as defined by the story), whereas in FTL the player was running away from danger. One of the first methods to solve this was adding a timer during which the player had to reach the end node. This was pretty much a failure because the players didn’t understand the timer at all (it was badly presented), and if it ran out, the game would straight-up end. This was really bad.

After that, we tried adding an enemy unit that moved across the world and destroyed nodes in order to force players to choose which special reward nodes to rush to. These enemy units would randomly spawn across the world every so often and move after every three moves the player made. Instead of the hard “game over” rule when the timer elapsed, we’d have the final enemy unit move to the player and initiate a very tough fight. Most of these attempts weren’t very well explained, and we kept coming up with better solutions to the core problem.



In the end, we decided that we’d just make the links between nodes be one way. This gets rid of the problems presented by the other solutions and solves the initial problem of having a sense of urgency and choice - moving to a location means you wouldn’t be able to reach a lot of the other locations. In some sense, it’s similar to the map traversal in Slay the Spire. The very last thing we added (fairly recently, last month) is random node layout generation. We created a tool that can author various node layout configurations. We then use some graph replacement methods to replace the few nodes we place on the world with a more dense network of nodes. How well this will work still has to be seen, as it’s a fairly new tool in our toolbox.

Thanks for reading! Come back next week for the start of the zone 2 showcase. Spoiler alert: its got snow! If you want to chat with us, come join the Discord server for the Hand of Merlin, or follow me on Twitter.

MarkoP

Hi everyone!

What do you get when you cross a Guardian and an ability? A Spell! That is exactly the topic I want to talk about in this post.

While not every detail about the Spells is finalized, I can at least talk about their idea and role in the game. We had the concept of Spells from as early as I can remember being on the project before we even had Guardians. The idea is that the Guardians have their own set of abilities only they can use. Each guardian grants their powers to Merlin after encountering them in the world enough times. This is represented by unlocking that Guardians “Core”, which, in sci-fi parlance, would be a power core that fuels a ship’s systems. In terms of lowly earthlings from the middle ages, these are powerful spells that just happen. Lowly earthlings have no knowledge about no “Cores”.



The role of Spells is to provide additional power in the fight against the enemy invasion. When you don’t think you can handle the enemy, just use a Spell and smack that thing back into oblivion! Or just, like, deal some damage or whatever. Spells are meant to be much, much more powerful than anything seen or known by the lower planes. These things pack a punch or do some other unique effects that no ordinary man can pull off, like teleportation, restoring unit health in an instant or similar. Yes, we’re taking the approach that restoring health is a slow process, seeing what time period we’re in. Thus, having an instant health restore is something divine, that only a godlike being can do.

Gameplay-wise, every guardian has their own set of Spells and passive ability. The passive ability is active from the start of the fight and triggers every time its conditions are met. Internally, these are implemented via status effects that are granted to all units by default. The Spells have to be selected from the Guardian Core, up to three at a time. Only the selected spells are available in combat and their use is limited by the amount of mana you have. Each Core has its own mana pool that differs in size, and Spells have some mana cost. They don’t cost action points though, and you can use them with any unit. The Spells use the Guardian attributes, which are derived from the Core itself - the higher the level of the core, the more power Spells have! This might change as we iterate over the Spell system as a whole. The game is still in progress, after all!



Since Spells are plain old abilities, creating them is as easy as normal abilities and then setting their mana cost instead of action point cost. The biggest difference is purely in the design and effects they have - we just give Spells the more powerful ones. It’s an interesting balance, trying to define abilities that would logically fit units in medieval times, and abilities that look like Spells, but are actually sci-fi weapons. Our ability system is flexible enough that creating them is just a matter of giving an answer to “what do I want this thing to do”.

The person who will be answering most of these will be our designer Mat! He just came from Brazil to Croatia, just in time for the pandemic to go in full swing and just before an earthquake hit Zagreb. I hope he doesn’t feel like he made a bad life choice :|
He’ll be giving meaning to most of the systems we’ve made so far, from abilities, enemy units, meta-progression, spells, relics, overworld progression, encounters… the whole nine yards. For instance, Mat just started prototyping Spell interaction on the world map. For this reason, the Spells themselves are not very precisely defined and we don’t yet have any cool Spell effects to show. When this changes in the future, I’ll showcase them around the web, either via a blog post, the Discord server for the Hand of Merlin or through Twitter, so don’t miss out! Thanks for reading!

MarkoP

Hi folks!
In some of the previous posts, I mentioned Spells. Before diving into what Spells are and what their role is, I wanted to first introduce the concept of the Guardians. The name is WIP and I’ll be using it for now, but we’ll probably be changing it to something else, like Watchers, Wizards, The Guys Up Above or something.

The following is a part of the world-building document our writers made that I modified for the post:
Guardians are immortal and transdimensional beings, creatures like Merlin and Morgana. There are probably only a few hundred of them scattered across the cosmos, and many may be lost or asleep, having put themselves into a state of suspended animation. Some may conceal their identities and become the source of legends about gods and wizards, having settled down in individual worlds, and no longer participate in the affairs of the cosmos.



Since we use the concept of multiple dimensions, there are many worlds Merlin can affect. These worlds are being destroyed by the Cataclysm, a transdimensional event that is tearing apart the borders between the worlds and the Void between them, letting in the horrifying world-devouring monstrosities that dwell in the darkness. Merlin believes in protecting as many worlds he can, no matter how impossible it seems. His plan to stop the Cataclysm from destroying this cluster of worlds we see in the game was to shepherd history into creating Arthur, an inspiring leader who would build an empire based on virtue and equality. Merlin couldn't predict where exactly in the world the first break, the source of the infection, would appear, and he needed a powerful force capable of dealing with any scenario. In Arthur's Camelot, he sought to create just that, and he gave each Arthur (across dimensions) a Grail, an artifact of immense power capable of healing that world.

Without going further into the story aspect, stuff happens, Merlin wakes up weakened and finds the Cataclysm had already begun to affect these worlds. He scrambles to find a group of heroes to help him prevent disaster and destruction, and this is where our game starts.

From a gameplay point of view, the player acts as Merlin, trying to save as many worlds as possible. At his disposal is his fort, “Avalon”, which is something like a ship capable of travel across worlds, and possibly much more. The ship has systems that can affect the lower planes, manifesting as Spells for the humans. The ship is powered by Cores. Each Core is associated with a Guardian and provides you with a set of active Spells and one passive Spell. Each Guardian has their own set of Spells unique to them, making each run feel different, as each run must be started and finished with the same Core.



You can acquire the Cores of other Guardians via specific encounters on the world map that have a more global story arc, spanning several runs through the game. For instance, on your second run, you get to a node where you meet Morgana. After some talking, she tells you to meet her in another dimension. On your next run, you can meet her again, and so on until you finish the quest. Once the quest is finished, Morgana grants you access to her Core which can be used on any of the future runs.

Next week I’ll get into Spells themselves. Thanks for reading, and come share your opinions on what you’ve seen so far on the Discord server for the Hand of Merlin, and yell at me on Twitter if you want to know something I haven’t already mentioned!

MarkoP

Hello again!
In the previous post, I talked about our abilities, and in this one, I wanted to expand on the topic a bit. Specifically, I wanted to touch on status effects, because they’re the other part of what makes our abilities cool.



Any ability can grant a status effect to all targets in the area of effect. The area of effect is either a radius around the target tile or the entire map. The status effects have the expected functionality you’ve seen in other games - increasing stats, applying debuffs, damage over time, etc. Their functionality is split into 2 main parts - a passive and active component.
The passive component can be any flags that are boolean in nature - you either have them or you don’t, like Phasing, Immune to damage, React to attacks, and similar. They can also be numerical modifiers to any unit attribute - +10 to max health, -50% accuracy and so on.

The active component is a list of actions triggered by an event. Most of these events happen during the processing of any other ability, like dealing damage, killing a unit or spending all action points. The events can be filtered, so a status effect can only trigger its actions if, say, a friendly unit spends all action points or an enemy unit takes damage. The actions that trigger currently only apply to the unit affected by the status effect that triggers the actions. I have plans to change this so the unit that applied the effect can also be the target of the actions. The list of actions includes the classic ones - damage, healing, restoring action points or resetting ability cooldowns. Status effects can also grant other status effects through these actions, to make an infinite chain! (god, I hope not)



My favorite is the “use ability” action.
Yes, status effects can use other abilities, that could inflict other status effects, that could use their own abilities, etc. It’s kind of insane.
At some point in the dev process, we were tinkering with an enemy that, when killed, would spawn a smaller version of himself. The small one would run away from your units and regrow back into the full-sized unit. It’s a slightly annoying enemy, but hey, we were adding general functionality. It definitely didn’t help both of them had a ton of health…
Anyway, I implemented him by giving him an innate status effect that grants him an out of turn action when hit and also detects when he’s killed. When that happens, the status effect uses the Spawn Mini-Me ability on his own position, after which he promptly dies. The little guy, newly spawned, then runs away, uses a Grow ability and waits for a few turns. If you don’t kill him, he regrows back into the full unit by casting an ability on himself that changes his base unit class. The whole process was especially pleasing to me because it allowed me to delete a bunch of code that handled the specific “when a unit dies, use this ability” logic, and move it fully into the content.

There are going to a bunch more ability effects and status effect actions and modifiers. I’ll probably showcase them as we make more cool ones. Thanks for reading, come join the Discord server, or follow me on Twitter.

MarkoP