The Hand of Merlin News

Hello there!

With our change to the UI, we took the opportunity to also consolidate some information into one screen. Last week we talked about achievements, and in blog post 43 we talked about unlocking heroes. We mentioned that we’ll need a way to show the progress for unlocks, and the Codex is our solution to this.

When we initially created the hint popup dialog, we knew we wanted a way to also see all previous hints. Our first idea was to put this information into the book as an extra chapter on the right side. As time went on, our understanding of what we want with it changed, and so now we’ve put all meta information into the Codex, while all in-world information is viewed through the book. The book shows the information about your warband and has controls for ranking them up, as well as the interaction with encounters.

The codex has 4 tabs. The first one shows hints for the overworld map or the fights, depending on whether you’re on the map or in a fight. We intend to update this so all hints always show up there regardless of your current “location”.



The other tabs track information about unlockables. The first and most obvious ones are the achievements. We don’t yet have them in the game, but it’s on our plate for next month. We just need to make a set of icons for them and link them all up with a set of hardcoded requirements. Excuse the temporary text here :)



The heroes tab lists the unlocking progress of all your heroes. Our first implementation of this was a dead button that just showed a tooltip with all this information in it, which was… not particularly good :D Knowing we’d have to add an achievement tab anyway, and they both use the same underlying system for unlocking rewards, it was a simple thing to just use the same layout for the heroes. Note here that while Morgan is unlocked (by default), his Prowess is still locked. It has a temporary description here, but the idea is you have to start and finish the game with a hero in order to unlock his Prowess.



Finally, a tab that we never even talked about having, but once I had the idea, everyone was on board with it. The relic tab tracks all relics you’ve found on your journey and owned at least briefly. Here you can see the characteristics of all relics, which might help you find interesting combinations of relics on specific character builds, and maybe something to chase for the collectors out there.



Do let us know what you think about the whole concept on our Discord server. We’re very open to feedback and scrutiny.

MarkoP

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

Hey folks!
Today’s post was written by Mat again, as we recently started looking into adding achievements. We needed a preliminary design for these, and since Mat has done some of it, we pressured him into writing a bit about it. Just note that the achievement icons and requirements below are all WIP and mockups, nothing surrounding them is final yet.
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Achievements have become expected in most modern games and platforms, as a way to celebrate a victory or to let your player know that they did something noteworthy or rare.
To some players, it’s a neat surprise. To others, it’s sort of an objective to pursue in itself! Each game has its own design philosophy though. Here’s a bit on ours:

We believe that achievements work best as little breadcrumbs that you offer the players to let them know what sort of level of play can be expected if they want to become true masters of the game. Sometimes this is letting them know that a battle can be won without losing health, or that you can reach a certain level… Or hey, sometimes is just playing the game a lot, and in different ways!

In that space, we created 5 different categories for Achievements.

1) Tactical Skills
These represent complex combos or actions that take some effort to pull, but if you can do them consistently, you will have an easier time in the Tactical layer. We also add particularly impressive feats, here, like surviving a tough battle without losing a hero. Here’s an example:



A player that wins that achievement learned something neat: some of the abominations can be weaponized against their allies, and knowing how to do it consistently will help you out!

2) Strategy Challenge
With these, we want to celebrate unusual luck or resource management during your travels. These achievements will direct you to some expectations, but also let you know that you are having a noteworthy run.



Getting the fairies to cooperate is rough, but will pay off!

3) Grind
Sometimes, you’ve played the game so much and did things for so long, that we want to give you a bit of a thank you, it’s all - we hope you had fun!



4) Progress
Roguelikes can be a bit daunting, but part of the game is inching your way into a new zone or finishing an unlock. These achievements celebrate that!



5) Oddities
Finally, there are some events or actions that are just plain… unusual? Rare, hard to do, or just dumb! But hey, at least you got an achievement out of it.



But yeah! We have around 50 entries for launch being prepared, with their technology being implemented as we speak. Got any ideas? Any suggestions? Let us know!

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Working on achievements must mean we’re closing in on release, right? :)
Thanks for reading! Join our Discord server if you wanna make any suggestions. We’re all there and happy to chat.

Mat & MarkoP

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

Hiya peeps!

One of the things we wanted to add to the game for a long time were quest-like encounters that span multiple zones. Lately, we finally implemented all the pieces to make this work, and we have a couple of questlines added to the game.

The main reason we wanted these in the game is to create an opportunity cost to get some cool things. Some of the questlines will be fairly basic, like getting a bunch of supplies and taking them to a castle in the next zone. Some will potentially span three zones, and grant you a really cool relic. We want to reward players that pursue longer questlines with something important, like relics that cannot be obtained in any other way. We also want the longer questlines to actually be rewarding, because of the way they’re positioned in the world.


(note that we added the current party portraits to the world map!)

Our world generation is fairly simple and straightforward. There are several manually created layouts of the node network you see on the map. We opted out of generating these positions because of landscape restrictions like preventing nodes from spawning on mountains or on the sea. It is also relatively difficult to generate connections between nodes that create interesting choices. Doing them manually is also not too much work, and gives us nice control over how the nodes are positioned and connected.

First, we pick a random layout out of several we have per zone, then we do a content generation pass over all nodes. Nodes are grouped into lanes, and each lane has its own set of controls for allowing nodes to become special, how many of them may do so, how far apart they must be, etc. The questlines are part of that pass as well, which means if you manage to start a quest (which is random right now), you will have a guaranteed node in a future zone be a quest continuation node. It will likely be positioned in such a way that you’ll have to choose what you want to pursue in that zone. You might want to ignore the questline because you want to hunt for an Arcane node or a City node, it’s your choice. For example, you might want to not finish the questline that grants you 15 supplies to take to a zone 2 location. Maybe you're greedy and want to keep all those supplies! It's one thing less you have to worry about, but you lose any reward you might get by completing the quest. It's all about tradeoffs!


(screenshot is with Alt pressed down which shows info for all nodes, not just hovered ones)

If you enter a zone that has a quest encounter spawned, there will be a special indicator on that node telling you about it. You might want to scour and look over the map before you decide which way through the zone you want to go down. Sometimes they might be a ways off. :)

Thanks for reading! If you want to ask us stuff or suggest stuff, you can do so on our Discord server, we’re all there!

MarkoP

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

Hi folks!

Today’s blog post was fully written by Mat, our system designer, which let me spent just that bit more time programming the game, so thanks Mat! All text below is from his perspective.
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Have you ever felt that weird sensation when playing an MMO or a long-term RPG where you feel like the battles are too similar and you are just going through the same rotations, doing the same things?

Well, when you have to play every map multiple times in order to test new abilities, new AI, or just get a better bead on balancing, you’ll feel the extreme version of that.

And that’s a bad thing for a roguelike, man!

Our original intention when designing maps and skirmishes was to create interesting scenarios around cover placement, types and quantities of enemies, and waves. Then, we let players loose to play around with their load-outs and approach the battle anyway they see fit. That worked out pretty well, and the curated nature of some of our maps, like Ruined Basilica or Hilltop leads to some interesting combat scenarios. They just, you know, can get old quick.

So here’s how I’m trying to fix that feeling.

I divided all enemies into “Categories”, representing sort of their “Power Level”, or the way I like to describe it, “Level of Disruption”, referring to how likely the unit is to require specific maneuvers to play around, or how much it disrupts a plan. People interested in game design might associate this with Birkhead’s Enemy Types, but it’s a common approach in the design of enemies.



Then, for each map, Mia and the writers come up with the “Skirmish Conditions”, or how an encounter itself changes the combat. A choice might lead to better cover, or you might get ambushed. I script these conditions, place spawn points and all that, and then define how many of each enemy category to put in and at which positions. This is where most of the balancing lies.

The final step then is to allow some of these enemies to be randomly picked inside their categories! What that means is that instead of two Mandrakes and a Thorntoad (2x Minor Abominations + 1 Medium Abomination), you might get a Wyvern, a Redcap, and a Cockatrice, which, by virtue of their skillsets, changes your expectations for that fight and forces you to reconfigure your plan instead of learning the map by memorization.



A lot of exceptions, of course. Some encounters mention enemies by name, and some maps work better with a specific enemy roster. That’ll all be respected, but this low-amplitude randomness will definitely make the game a bit more resilient to that awful feeling of “getting old”.

And that’s a good thing for a roguelike, man!

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Very interesting, Mat! If you want to ask him questions about any of this stuff, you can join our Discord server, where you’ll find all of us happily working on the game. Thanks for reading!

MarkoP & Mat

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

Hi!

If you’ve played the demo on one of the several opportunities last year, you might have noticed that when you start the game it immediately loads up to the main menu. This means that you’d start the game without much context into what was going on, and what your main goal is.

We intended to solve this issue with the intro cutscene, a small image stream with voiceover narration to explain who you are, what’s happening, and why you’re doing what you’re doing. We didn’t have the time to make the cutscene for any of the demos before, although we did get close to having it around November. Ultimately, it was pushed back when we decided there weren’t going to be any demos, so we focused on the more immediate features. Shiv has done his side of most of those things, so he went back to making the cinematic.



Our writers have written the text that would be narrated over the cinematic, and Shiv has already drawn most of the images we are putting into it, so the only thing that remains is to make the actual cinematic. The Serious Engine has capabilities to make cinematics, so we’re leveraging those to have everything be in-engine, and also because the engine doesn’t handle video playback with consistent framerates.

The intro cinematic will play the first time you start the game and would be viewable through the options menu or something, we’re not yet 100% sure on that because we were missing the actual cinematic in order to implement playing it back on demand. One possibility we might consider is also just playing it every time you start the game and having it be skippable after the first time it’s played. I’m not sure what the best way is, so if you have any opinions on that, tell us!

The general context the cinematic sets up is that there are many worlds (dimensions) that are all threatened by the all-consuming Cataclysm. Merlin has hope it can be stopped tho, and to that end, in each of those dimensions, he has created Arthur and the Grail, which would have the ability to heal the wounds in reality. However, Morgana lost faith in him and trapped him for many years. After a long while, he awoke weakened and saw that Arthur had failed and was replaced with lesser men. Being so weak, he cannot exert much control over the mortal realm except some dream-state suggestions to the heroes, telling them to get the Grail, go to Jerusalem and save the world.



This is the gist of it, the full text is somewhat longer and has more flavor to it, and you’ll be able to hear it during the cinematic when you start the game. Because we didn’t have the cinematic in the previous demos, we tried to replicate the context in the very first encounter you see in Albion when you reach Camelot. We don’t yet know if we’ll cut that encounter down a bit for the full game since it won’t be absolutely necessary to explain everything over again every time you start a new game, but no plans for that yet.

Thanks for reading! You can find us on our Discord server if you wanna chat with us!

MarkoP

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