The Hand of Merlin News

Hi everyone,

Drop by our Discord Server tonight! There will be singing and dancing and drinking and we might even answer a question or two about the game itself.

In fact, we’d like to use this opportunity to announce the week-long The Hand of Merlin Q&A session, which we’ll later extend to a record-breaking month-long session!

In other words, join us on Discord anytime and we’ll be happy to chat with you!

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


Cheers,
Room-C Games

Hi there!

In case you’re not aware, the Steam Games Festival is ongoing, and a lot of games have their demo versions available for playing for the duration of the festival.
The Hand of Merlin is also among those games. We’ve worked on this game for so long, and this is probably the first time a really public version is available to the masses.

It contains 3 fights, two of which require you to replay the game to reach them since they’re on exclusive paths.
There are around 40 something encounters, some with internal variations based on the initial random roll for the King, which changes (sometimes drastically) how the encounter flows and ends. On any particular run, you’ll see around 10 of them for the single variation. Want to see them all?

If you haven’t tried it already, I urge you to do so, and after that join our Discord server and tell us about your experience. Did you run into any issues? Did you have fun? Did you find parts of the game confusing? Is the UI intuitive? We welcome any and all feedback because we want to make this game really good before release this winter.
That said, there are some aspects of the game the demo is lacking which we know about, but we absolutely don’t mind you telling us about them. It means those aspects are so important that just about everybody and their mothers notice them, which gives us a priority factor for those issues. :)

We’re also having an AMA on our Discord today (Wednesday) at 8PM CEST / 11AM PDT, so come ask any question you have, we’ll try to answer them all.

Support us by wishlisting the game!

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

MarkoP

Oh hi Mark there!

Allow me to shift gears a bit this week and tell you a story of how I became the prince of a town called Bel Air. Wait, that’s a different story, this is the story of how we joined the Steam Summer Festival.

Last month we became aware of the Steam Festival when we were looking for someone to help out with the marketing aspect. At that point in time, we were remaking most of our human unit animations so the artists can have full control of them and be able to fix any issues quickly (which is much harder with mocap animations). We found out the deadline to submit a build for the Festival was 2 weeks out, and we’d need to finish those animations and make a self-contained experience of the game (which by itself isn’t that long as well - we’re aiming at around 4 hours playthrough, with high replayability value). For the demo submission, we wanted to make a bare-bones experience of around 4 node jumps, that ends with a fight and loops the demo. For basic replayability, it would have around 8 encounters, so every attempt would at least be somewhat different. Each encounter in the demo also has internal variation - mad props to our amazing writers Jonas and Verena - by making a random roll for which King rules the land at the start and having most encounters use that information to control different paths through the encounters with potentially very different outcomes. So those 8 encounters actually end up being worth more than double because there are 3 different Kings.



The deadline for submission was coming near, we’re fixing any last-minute bugs and are mostly happy with the build when our builder machine decides to throw a fit and start showing red. No problem, I just have to connect to it and delete some files to make the build finish, but doing so prolongs the build slightly (we resolved this issue after that). Midnight rolls over, the builder decides it’s time to do a full clean build. Seeing it’s actually a virtual machine running on a slow physical machine (so horribly slow builder), this takes almost 2 hours of waiting. It’s now 2 in the morning, we finally upload our build without immediate problems and are happy. We pass out for the night.
A week later we get the notification from Steam that they’ve done their review and we will be participating in the Festival. We’re both happy and terrified at the same time. :)
Tech side note: the builder is now on a better machine and takes 15min for a full clean build. FML.

We start working on adding more interesting things and fixing other less common issues. Doing plenty of playtesting before the deadline, Mat was suggesting expanding the demo playthrough to more jumps, something like 10. We tell him it would take many more encounters, and he’s already working like mad to make both the encounters and the combat. We decide we need another person to do the encounters, and after a pretty quick interview process led by Mat himself, we got another member for the team! Mia is our quest designer and is pretty great at writing out the mechanical flow of the encounters that are ripe for the taking by our writers to do their magic. (Hi Mia sorry for not introducing you before :3) So thanks to Mia, we now have 45 encounters ready for the demo (what! I didn’t even know this, just found out because I’m writing this post). Couple that with the internal variations of some encounters, the effective count probably just shot up to 60 or more, I can’t even guess.



With all those encounters, we’re pretty happy with how things are turning out. We have our levels, the combat works fine, no visible bugs, no crashes, we added hints, and we think we’re improving the player experience. We can’t know this without players tho, and we need to know how we’re doing, so join our Discord and tell us after you play the demo!
We make a final submission of the build. We’re happy. The next day we find the festival has been pushed back a week. Oh nice, another week to cram more stuff in, why not :D

So there you go, a short story on how we expanded the demo from having 8 encounters and 1 fight to 45 encounters and 3 fights, of which 2 are exclusive to each other, so you’ll have to replay the game to see them all. Most of what I've shown so far in these blog posts will be available in the demo, and we really hope you’ll like it. There will be more skills, units, monsters, and encounters in the final game once it comes out this winter, and I hope you decide to join us for the ride. We could really use some public feedback.



As always, thanks for reading, and throw me a message sometimes. I long to hear from you. :)

MarkoP

Hey folks!

The last class is probably even more important than the other two, but it’s hard to say which one you can do without! The Mystic class is a roster of alchemists, druids, shamans, priests, and other professions that deal with the less straightforward arts and helping others achieve greatness.

The Mystic class is designed mostly as a support type class, with skills that provide buffs to allies and debuffs to enemies. For a long while, this class didn’t have much in terms of design or intended skills, we just had a rough idea for it. Being a half-range class (more range than the Fighters, less range than Rangers), they would have a bit higher movement range to be able to get to their allies quickly to heal or buff them. Since most of our combat was designed in terms of units having 2 action points to use on skills, spending two points on movement to get in range felt wrong. Having higher movement would allow them to reach their allies with one action point and use the other to use a buffing ability. Although, Mat did try increasing movement range to all units across the board, so we'll see what happens with this in general.




Mat came through with this class as well and gave it some much-needed love from the previous work we’ve done on it. We also renamed it from support to Mystic, so… You know. It sounds cooler now. Considering the fact that unit health is persistent across the game and is a vital resource (heh pun), being able to restore health with abilities felt like it would be cheesed really fast and easy. So instead of healing allies, the Mystic can restore their armor (which is restored at the start of every combat anyway), and buff them with various other substances - granting increased movement range, more damage to armored units, create hallowed ground which grants bonuses to multiple stats (and has an upgrade to an aura), and so on. Along with being able to buff/debuff units, they also have some skills that allow for partial control of the battlefield itself. For instance, “Arbor Dianae” creates destructible cover, and “Explosive Sulphur” destroys existing destructible cover.




In the last two posts, I went over some combinations of skills the units could use in combat, but for the Mystic I want to just list a few abilities that are insanely useful.
“Stimulants” (gif above) grants all units in a cone a buff to movement range. Just be careful when using it, since it can also buff enemies (a mistake I saw people make during playtests, including myself).
“Mercurial Blessing” (gif below) grants the target extra damage against armor, but it can be upgraded so it’s cast on an enemy which makes that enemy take extra armor damage from anybody!
Most of these names might not be final, but you should get an idea of what we’re cooking up for you.




Lastly, some exciting news: we’ll be joining the Steam Game Festival next week, from June 9th - 14th, with a playable demo of the game. It should give you a good enough idea of what the game is about, so be sure to try it. The demo will have a link to join our new Discord server (also linked below) where you’ll be able to talk to the entire dev team directly and give direct feedback on things you don’t like, things that are confusing, things you don’t understand, things you feel should be explained better. Constructive criticism, basically, is very welcome. We also accept praise, it would help the team with morale and enthusiasm. We’ll also maybe do some half-public testing with people who join the server. I know Mat will be happy to have more test subjects for his playtests.
The demo build is still considered alpha, so it's entirely possible there will be crashes and bugs. If you play the demo and encounter one, we would be very thankful if you tell us about it so we can fix it. We hate crashes with a passion, so we want to get rid of them as much as possible!

Thanks for reading! I hope you come talk to us next week with any feedback from the demo!
Here is the link to the new Hand of Merlin Discord server, and my Twitter as well which I haven’t learned how to use properly. If you have tips for me which I could put into practice easily with my busy schedule, do come tell me :)

MarkoP

Hey folks!

This week is all about our main damage dealers, the Rangers. Bow in hand, Rangers are great for hurting faraway units, at the cost of being unable to hit adjacent units at all!

The core idea behind the Ranger class was always to limit their fighting capabilities in close range because they have the longest range among the other classes and can (mostly) safely attack other units. This is also the canonical class with access to Overwatch, a staple skill used by our role model XCOM. I’m not sure how XCOM does Overwatch internally, but we expanded this general functionality to be usable by any unit with any ability. So units will be able to “react” to enemy movement or attacks with any ability we can make. Stuff like “unit enters an area, give him a debuff”, or “unit tries attacking, prevent half his damage”. It’s wild :)



So after Mat came on board, he got tasked (amongst all other stuff) to make a list of skills for all classes that follow the upgrading idea I wrote about in the previous post. The ideas he came up with are pretty cool (in my opinion), that play with the notion of the ranger keeping his enemies at bay while trying to hide or run away from them. He also plays with boosting his own damage or increasing the likelihood of the enemies to take damage from the Ranger.



For instance, there are two abilities I find interesting as a combination. They require some setup, but when pulled off, allow the Ranger to deal a lot of damage. The skill “Hunter’s Mark” applies the “Mark” status effect on an enemy, making him take more damage from the Rangers attacks. Then the Ranger can use “Take Aim”, which grants him increased accuracy, and with an upgrade also grants him more damage for his next attack. The downside of “Take Aim” is that it roots the Ranger in place, but since we’re dealing damage, we don’t care! So we Mark, Take Aim and Shoot to kill (or just really hurt the guy). To compensate, the enemies have a lot of effective health, so this is a combination most people will probably want to take advantage of.



Thanks for reading! Wishlist the game if you haven’t already, and stay tuned for more information about our third class next week.
Hand of Merlin Discord server My Twitter

MarkoP