The Hand of Merlin News

Crash fixes:
• Fixed a memory leak that could cause slowdowns or crashes if playing a single session for several hours continuously.
• Fixed a bug where cone attacks that miss the terrain entirely would cause the game to freeze up in an infinite loop.
• Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur with Warrior's Thunderous Lunge (upgrade of Lunge).
• Fixed a rare crash where an encounter could grant a relic while inventory is already full.
• Fixed a rare crash when interacting with the in-game Journal.

General fixes & improvements:
• Fixed an issue preventing a certain unlockable Guardian (other than Merlin) from spawning on Arcane Nodes.
• Fixed an issue preventing the Holy Grail story event in Al-Andalus from happening if inventory was full.
• Fixed an issue where Dimensional Restoration would not trigger Merlin's Prophecy.
• Fixed targeting issues with Dimensional Restoration around abyss tiles, making it consistent with other spells.
• Warrior's Charge (upgrade of Lunge) can no longer let your character run into an object (such as a tree or a stone block) and stay inside it.
• Mystic's Noxious Concoction (upgrade of Concoction) should now deal health damage directly, as stated by its description.
• Mystic's Miasmic Desecration (upgrade of Desecration) can now target an area even without any units currently in it.
• Mystic's Sanguine Elixir (upgrade of Aeolic Elixir): the (+) Green upgrade now correctly offers a higher stack count of Quick (the (+) Red upgrade offers twice the charges, which is unchanged).
• Fixed several skirmish map issues where large (2x2) units could be stuck with no path available.
• Fixed missing battle music in certain conditions on the Herbal Shop skirmish map.
• Fixed a bug which allowed The Archmage achievement to be unlocked by spending mana in an encounter, rather than strictly in a single skirmish.
• Fixed a bug causing Butter Fingers achievement to unintentionally be awarded at a certain story event.
• Fixed a bug which allowed Hero Prowess Unlocks to be obtained in Easy mode, rather than Normal only.
• Removed an unintended accuracy penalty in the Bastard Sword blacksmith upgrade line.
• Fixed the wrong card odds in a few encounters.
• Fixed a few cases where special options in encounters would reference the wrong character.
• Fixed an issue where skill card text could sometimes extend past its borders.
• In the Options menu, Music and Sound volume sliders now move in consistent increments.

Gameplay balancing:
• Reduced the amount of Mana granted when the second Guardian is unlocked.
• Slightly reduced the upper difficulty bound of Al-Andalus regular (non-corrupted) skirmishes: maximum enemy count is now 5 (down from 6).
• Ranger's Heavy Shot (upgrade of Shoot) no longer applies the Weak debuff to the caster, but has a longer cooldown instead.
• Ranger's Parthian Sprint (upgrade of Sprint) no longer scales with caster's Power.
• Thorntoad's Bristleback ability now only grants 3 stacks of Thick Skin (down from 5).
• Increased the base armor for all Pylons to 25 (up from 15).
• Increased the cooldown of Translocation to 3 turns (up from 1).

Crash fixes:
• Fixed a crash in case player got Dazed status effect from an encounter and then fought a Thorntoad.
• Removed the possibility of recruiting the same Hero twice through the same encounter.

General fixes & improvements:
• Fixed some bad spawn positions in Olive Meadow and Corrupted Field Road skirmish maps.
• Fixed an issue where it was possible to stand in the same location as certain cover objects on some maps.
• Holy Desecration skill (and its upgrades) will no longer target abyss tiles.
• Fixed a bug where holding [Space] to fast forward animations in skirmish could persist to the world map even after releasing the button.
• It is no longer possible to undo a Move if a Spell had been used. (The intention of Undo was always to only undo movement with no side-effects.)
• Serpent Skin no longer poisons the user when you apply a self buff.
• Upgrades for the skills Charge+ (Red) and Fencing Lunge+ (Red) now properly function with just 1 Action Point.
• Fixed several typos and added some missing images to various encounters.
• Opened book blur effect now starts fading out as soon as the book starts closing.

Gameplay balancing:
• Added a blacksmith to the starting node of Al-Andalus map.
• Shield Slam skill (and its upgrades) no longer demands a melee target to work.
• Volley and Reckless Slash skills (and their upgrades) now only reduce accuracy by 20% (down from 30%). Adjusted descriptions to remove ambiguity.
• Small adjustments to cover positions, removing some diagonal cover placements in Castle Hall and Valley of No Return skirmish maps.

Visuals:
• Visual polish of the Corrupted Stonehenge skirmish map.

Hi!

Yesterday we released the game in the late afternoon our time.
On behalf of the whole team, I’d like to thank everyone for their interest in the game and their kind words. I also appreciate any criticism of the game, because that’s the only way we can improve it.

The reception so far seems positive, and we’re keeping an eye out for any issues players have with either the technical side of the game or gameplay issues, and are focused to resolve them as quickly as we humanly can.

Please note that our team is not large. We are 9 people doing their all, wearing many hats, and are happy to listen to players to make this game the best it can be. If you’re experiencing any startup issues, or crashes, or graphical problems, we encourage you to tell us about them and we’ll try to help you resolve them.

We already have one patch planned for today, to fix two crashes and some set of smaller issues we found that we can fix quickly during the day today. General feedback on the forums is very appreciated and useful, and we’ve got a list of about 30 items to get fixed and/or improved in future patches.

On the topic of patches, our aim is to put out at least 1 patch a week. We’re still discussing whether they would go out on Fridays or Wednesdays, the former being the end of the week, and the latter being our usual blog post day which also gives us the opportunity to address any issues that may arise after the patches go live. These patches would contain bug fixes, QoL improvements, balance changes, and additional content we make during early access. There’s a patch coming out today for sure either way.

Join our Discord server for some direct communication and just hanging out.

Thank you.

MarkoP

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

The Versus Evil Publisher Sale is now live on Steam! Get up to 90% off!



Check out our most recent additions which include Almighty: Kill Your Gods, a co-op looter shooter, Hitchhiker, a narrative-driven experience, and First Class Trouble, a wacky social deduction game!

But that's not all! We're excited to also be launching not one, but two new games just in time for the sale!

The Hand of Merlin is a turn-based rogue-lite RPG in which Arthurian legend meets with sci-fi horror. Recruit mortal heroes to explore lands rife with otherworldly evil, make narrative bending choices in unique interactive encounters, and search for the lost fragments of your soul across the multiverse!

Sockventure is a story about a kid whose favorite sock gets eaten by a cursed washing machine. The kid needs immediate help, and calls a superhero to the rescue. Then, the adventure begins. Make your way through 200+ intense levels of hardcore platforming to find the missing sock inside the washing machine!

Our catalog has never been more diverse, so we hope there's something for everyone here to enjoy!

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

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1206600/Almighty_Kill_Your_Gods/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/953880/First_Class_Trouble/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1222340/Sockventure/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/888530/Yaga/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/904400/Cardpocalypse/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1003120/Hitchhiker__A_Mystery_Game/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1278190/Jumpala/

Hi folks!

Some people have noticed that our updated store page now has a release date!
It’s May 11th!

Last week we had a news site announce our release date. I wanted to make a proper blog post announcement the next day, but some important programming stuff came up, and it slipped my mind. Indie teams and wearing lots of hats does that, unfortunately, so sometimes my “lead programmer” role comes ahead of my “community person” role. So, I decided to dedicate an entire blog post to talk about our early access release.



The game will release to early access next week, May 11th, 6 days from the time of this blog post.
Our efforts in the days before it goes live are mostly on ironing out the UX stuff we know about and fixing any obvious issues. Funny thing about obvious: when the QA team affiliated with Versus Evil started going over the game, they found a bunch of obvious issues that we just didn’t see. :)
We’re making sure that all unlocks work. We’re adding missing illustrations to the encounters. We’re playtesting the whole game from start to end to see if there are any wild balancing issues. We’re fixing up bugs, adding QoL features, updating UI where needed, etc.

The state of the game is, in our opinion, good. That said, there might be obvious issues (see the note above about QA) that we’ve become completely blind to. If you find anything you have issues with, please tell us about it because we can’t fix it unless we know about it. Our current plan is to do weekly patches, most probably on Fridays. The patches would contain any fixes done during that week by our 3 programmers, any balance changes our designers Mat and Mia decide on, and any visual polish and alternate maps and general art improvements our 4 artists do.



Please keep in mind that we are not a large team. As you can count above, we’re 9 full-time people who are trying their best to bring this game to life. We can’t do everything under the sun (like, for example, custom party character creation), but we try our best and prioritize things based on impact, importance, and reality. The more people tell us something is broken or something should change, the more likely those things do get prioritized and done, assuming they're even possible.

Some changes might be easy, some not. I’ll try to communicate these things via blog posts where possible, and we’re always present on our Discord server and Steam forums. If you want/like immediate communication, Discord is your best bet. If you’re on the other side of the world from Europe or we’re asleep, Steam forums are good enough as well. I usually make it a point to myself to respond to most questions and topics that benefit from an answer or at least an acknowledgment.

So yeah.
Holy shit release next week!

MarkoP

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