The Hand of Merlin News

Hi all!

Some members of the team have taken their vacation time this week, some took last week off, and some are taking next week off, so this period might be a bit slower in terms of interesting design blog posts and patches. We do have a patch coming today with some smaller/easier fixes and a memory optimization, but next week will probably go without one.

Since my time has mostly been spent on working on gamepad support, I can at least talk about how that’s going.

A lot of our UI code was written with a mouse and keyboard in mind. We’re fairly tooltip heavy and that’s presenting an interesting challenge. My mindset for implementing gamepads was always to do it so it feels natural to control the game with it. Obviously this is a bit tricky if most of the code was done with a mouse in mind instead of a gamepad. In particular, we wanted the game to be fully controllable with only the mouse and not require the keyboard, so UX wise, everything is done to respond to a single button press at a specific point on the screen.

When talking about being able to control the game with just the mouse, you’re expecting only one, maybe two, buttons to exist. UI interactions are usually intuitive for people in this day and age, so relying on just the left mouse button coupled with its point on the screen is enough to drive the entire game.

For gamepads, this obviously doesn’t work the same. If you’re using a gamepad, you can likely expect the player to be able to use all of it’s buttons. Gamepads also don’t really have a screen point they are directly interacting with like the mouse has, and even if they do, moving that point is much harder/different/annoying. Our first temporary implementation (which is currently available if you want to play with it) does exactly that: it moves the virtual mouse position with the left stick, and uses the A(xbox) or X(ps) button to emulate the left mouse button click. This is fine for now, but that’s not how a gamepad user expects to control the game.

So I went through every screen in the game and looked at it with my gamepad in hand and thought about how I’d control that screen with a gamepad. Jumping between UI options, jumping across Spells, toggling between UI mode and book/node/core/fight modes. With that plan in mind, I started looking at the code to see how to split the control into “this is when you’re using a gamepad” and “this is when you’ve got a mouse”. The whole process requires a fair bit of refactoring, but is on a good trajectory to be done for the next major patch.

Thanks for reading! Join our Discord server!

MarkoP

Patch Notes - Early Access Build 674263

New features:
• Added 3 new Heroes: Tariq al-Ash'ab (Warrior), Alain the White (Ranger), Isabel de Orreaga (Mystic).
Each has a unique new passive ability, too! You can recruit these new Heroes on your travels (by visiting Heroic nodes with a non-full party), and you can also unlock them permanently by performing various feats of strength.

• Added 3 new Skills available at rank-up: Rage (Warrior), Decoy (Ranger) and Blight (Mystic).

General fixes:
• Fixed a very rare issue that could cause wrong font rendering in Book UI, or even a crash.
• Fixed a bug where mana granted by certain relics would sometimes not be applied.

Optimizations:
• Reduced the memory usage of various particle effects, without any noticeable loss in quality.

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer.

Hey! It’s time for a new major patch, and with it, some new toys for you to play with!

When we were planning on what to do during Early Access, we knew that we had to focus a lot on replayability. New alternate maps, new enemies, new skills… and new heroes! With the addition of passives, picking the correct hero for your playstyle is an important part of The Hand of Merlin experience. For that reason, we’re proud to present our newest addition to the hero roster:



Our new warrior is Tariq al-Ash'ab, a berber mercenary. Tariq embodies fancy footwork, and with his Bladedancer passive, he becomes stronger for each nearby enemy. He carries the Cleave ability for a similar purpose, and even sports decent speed and evasion. With some healing support or access to good armor, he can be one of the heaviest hitters in your warband!



For the new ranger, we bring you Alain the White, a mysterious prince. A decent speed and even some evasion, Alain attempts to be a more utility-oriented ranger, with his Fey passive punishing enemies that miss, and the new Decoy skill, that summons an inanimate target to draw enemy fire.



Finally, Isabel de Orreaga is our new mystic. This tough hermit carries heavier defensive attributes than most of her class, and sports the Campaign Surgeon passive, which makes every healing also come with a few stacks of the Keen status effect, increasing the damage of the next attack. To capitalize on that, she has the new Blight ability, an alternative way of healing. When targeting a foe with this ability, all your allies that damage the target are healed for a bit of armor.


Each new hero is an attempt to expand what it means to increase each class’s design space and with it, offer new ways to approach character building. Utility rangers, tanky mystics and warriors that don’t need to circle the battlefield too much, all with new abilities and passives to play with.

And don’t worry: even though Tariq is using an old one, we added the Berserker’s Rage ability to the Warrior’s Pool. A single-target version of Warcry that grows as you deal damage, it will do wonders to validate AoE-oriented builds with Cleave, Charge, and Slam.

Let us know what you think of the new heroes, and which powerful builds you can come up with in our Discord server!

Mat

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer.

Hello again! I got some more insights about how we go about balancing the game, if you are into that.

Balancing a strategy game is a herculean task, and we from the design department have had a lot of luck, being able to leverage our own dev team as playtesters, but also a lot of feedback from the community. Seeing the numbers go from flowcharts and datasheets into “feelings'' is a great joy to a game developer! Here’s how the process has been happening in the past few weeks.

Our goals haven’t changed. When we make changes, we are pursuing the highest number of significant choices possible. You know that moment when you look at two skills or two options and can’t decide which one to pick? If that paralysis is not due to a lack of information, it means that those two options are balanced. If one option is picked much more often, then it means they're not balanced. There’s a lot of interfering variables, but that’s the gist of it.

To give you some examples, let me talk about some of the data sets we use for balancing.

When we consider abilities, we look at which ones are being picked the most. In particular, I like looking at the ability roster of a party that has defeated the final fight. I call that data set “which abilities are the most commonly effective”. If an ability is too far from its other versions, it nudges me to the idea that they are not equally attractive, so I try to nerf one a bit, or buff the other versions. As an example, Driven Haste, the version that cleared non-offensive cooldowns, was under-picked. So we made it also clear debuffs, to see what effect it has on the picking rates.

Characters are similar. Apart from the obvious fact that most runs involve Breunor, Merewen and Morgan, we keep an eye to see if a specific character is rarely picked. If you take the raw data and then consider how hard each character is to unlock, you can raise some flags - it seems that Safir is considered underpowered, so we changed his passive for this week’s patch, for instance.

Resources are a bit more straightforward. Last year, when we were showcasing our initial demos, we started to make assumptions about how many level-ups a run should take, how much gold you’d get, and how much should be spent on gear to get to the average gear level we wanted. Huge spreadsheet, lots of theoretical plans. Then, we started implementing it and querying. Sometimes we got it right (people spent around 66% of their gold in gear, from our expected 70%), and sometimes we didn’t, like players being able to get to rank 11 in a single run. Some adjustments are still incoming, but we can’t be married to the original plans: if it’s fun, it's working!

Relics are a smoother experience. Because of their random nature, they don’t need to be very tightly balanced, and it’s always fun to see how broken a build can get when you get the right relics. They are usually the result of design experiments, like Mia’s Yonder Charm coming from our attempts to make a “stance” ability that eventually failed. We usually touch up on their designs and values occasionally, after being constantly under/overwhelmed when encountering them in a match. That’s as fuzzy as it gets!

This is really not a science, and there’s a lot of playing, feeling, and making adjustments. As our official release approaches and our recent successes, we are looking forward to seeing the results of our changes, and how fun the game ends up being.

Join our Discord server!

Mat

Quality-of-Life improvements:
• Slightly increased the size of map node tooltips on the World Map, making them easier to read.
• Added new scrolling combat text messages for various events and reactions.

General fixes:
• Fixed the damage calculation for Ranger's Preemptive Vigil (upgrade of Archer's Vigil) to be the same as all other skills of the same line.
• Fixed an issue that made some upgrades of Ranger's Point Blank skill not have their on-hit and on-kill effects apply correctly.
• Fixed various typos in several tooltips.

Gameplay balancing:
• Safir's passive (Paladin) has a new mechanic. Now, Safir deals (0.5*Power + 1) damage to a random adjacent enemy whenever he uses a defensive or utility skill.
• Rana's and Zahra's passives now scale with Power, instead of giving a flat 50% armor restore.
• Reduced the base Speed of all Warrior Heroes by 1.
• Increased Rumayla's base Power to 6 (up from 5).
• Warrior's Driven Haste (upgrade of Haste) now also cleanses all debuffs.
• Warrior's Shield Block skill line is no longer limited by charges, and all versions that apply Resistance have their stack size increased by 1.
• Warrior's Overpowering Slash (upgrade of Slash) now deals Guard Down instead of Vulnerable, meaning the extra damage taken debuff is for one turn only.
• Warrior's Parry skill line no longer costs AP to be used.
• Mystic's Hallow skill and its Dense and Major Upgrades have their duration increased by 1.
• Resistance status effect now has 6 stacks max (up from 5).
• Harassed status effect no longer roots, just reduces speed.
• Quarry status effect is now capped at +1 AP given, no matter the source.