The Hand of Merlin News

Hey folks!

This week we’re celebrating the existence of tanks in the world! Where would we be without having a good looking front line Fighter that soaks up all damage that makes him all scarred and not good looking? We’d be scarred as well!

Generally speaking, front line units in games are in a bit of a tough spot. In order to deal damage, they have to get up close to the enemies. This implies that, while they’re getting close, the enemy is roasting them with automatic fire from their bows or slings, and when they finally get close, they’re near death! You could give them an ungodly amount of survivability in terms of damage reductions and health, right? Sure, but then you have to reduce the damage they deal, otherwise they’d be too effective at everything, which is not ideal in terms of balancing.



We had this same issue at some point, which was around the time we redesigned their role and mechanics. This was also around the time we conceived of skill categories, the offense, defense, and utility types. Skills would fall into one of these, which allows us to roll one of each category on level-ups. Adding categories allows for some fine-grained control during combat as well, like disabling all skills of specific categories and similar. For the Fighters, the idea was to give them skills that increase their survivability and skills that allow them to move farther. This would allow the Fighters to close the gap to the enemies while still being able to deal with the incoming damage and still be able to deal some damage.



For instance, some fighter skills in our current roster are “Shield Block” and “Rush”. “Shield Block” allows the fighter to give himself a buff that reduces damage done to him. “Rush” allows him to move within his movement range and grants him 1 action point upon reaching his destination. This allows for some fun combinations, where the unit can use up to 3 skills on their turn if planned correctly. At this moment in time, we have 10 skills per unit, 3 per category (plus 1 for the default damage skill) that units can learn when they rank up. To make things more interesting and varied, each of those skills has 3 upgrades to choose from. Then to make things even more interesting, all of those upgraded versions have 3 more upgrades. For instance, “Rush” has an upgrade that grants the fighter a buff which increases his damage a bit. Combined with “Shield Block”, they make the fighter a good alpha strike unit that can deal with the incoming damage!



Thanks for reading! I hope you liked the images I personally made for this post :)
Be sure to wishlist the game if you haven’t already, and stay tuned for more information about our classes next week!
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MarkoP

Hey heroes!

Our current roster counts 9 heroes in total, 3 per zone. In this post, I wanted to show some heroes we have in Marca Hispanica.



Safir is the tank class. His character is mentioned in the list of Knights of the Round Table, and this is what our writers wrote about him as part of his notes:
“An honorable young knight of Saracen origin, who has converted to Christianity and joined King Arthur's court. A classic European knight, wearing full armor, but with dark skin and a scimitar.”



Wilfred is the ranger character. In the old version of the game, you’d find Wilfred in Albion in an encounter where some aliens attacked his house. We decided to move him to the second zone, purely because we find him a cool dude. His note is:
“An ordinary soldier in his early forties. Seen it all. Just a regular bloke. The Miles O'Brien of Camelot.”



Rana is a support class with a shamanistic theme, which is apparent in her wardrobe. Our concept/portrait/texture artist Kaz drew Rana’s portrait in the image of her sister, which I think is really cute. Her note is:
“She is a shaman from the far north. The spirits have revealed to her the threat of the Cataclysm, and she is traveling to Jerusalem.”

We are trying to make a varied selection of heroes to play with. The current plan - which I might have mentioned before and is not set in stone - is to have each hero be obtainable in any zone, with their own specific story for why they’re in that zone. Once you have a hero join your party at least once, the hero will be “unlocked” which means any future run will be able to start with that hero. We’re still working out how the starting unit selection will work, but we should have something working in the near future.

Thanks for reading! Join the Discord server for the Hand of Merlin, and come ask me stuff on Twitter! I'm happy to answer questions!

MarkoP

Hey all!

This week I’m showcasing some combat maps we have in Marca Hispanica. Since the entire zone is snow and mountains, it makes sense that all combat maps are like that as well!



Some of the levels feature very mythical scenery, which we embrace. Since we use the “multiple dimensions” concept for the story, it gives us some leeway for explaining their existence. Now, obviously, some maps might not be accurately mapped to their overworld location - a world location might be in a valley, but the combat map is set on a mountain peak with a large drop in the background. This is not something we plan to address, because it would prevent maps from appearing at arbitrary locations, and it would limit the creativity of our level designers.



The artists were pretty happy with the fact the zone will be snowy because it allowed their creative juices to flow with snow particles flying around. Since all our maps are hand made by our level designers Lucija and Mateja, they have full control over the positioning of assets. Another form of that control stems from the fact our camera has a fixed angle and is only able to pan around the map. That way you don’t get to see … hacks. :)



With each zone, we introduce more enemy creatures for the player to fight. Our designer Mat is hard at work at making these enemies have interesting abilities, and once we iron those out, we’ll make them behave autonomously through their AI. We have the capability to just flat out disable the AI and manually control the enemies on their turn. This is a great help when debugging abilities or just working out how an enemy should be using an ability.



Next week, more heroes coming up! Thanks for reading! Come join our Discord if you want to talk to us devs, or follow me on Twitter!

MarkoP

Hey all!

This week I’ve asked our lead artist boi Ivan to describe his process of making the overworld zones. I figured any aspiring artist out there might be interested in knowing how we do it.
The text he sent was god awful … kind of bad … barely useful … needed tweaks to make it presentable, so I’ve cleaned it up a bit and present it below. I’ll write my commentary underlined.

Here’s what he has to say:

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When approaching the world map design, it begins with the basic layout. First, we decide how many lanes we’d like each part of the zone to have and where they diverge and join. Using that sketch, I hide in my cave (an actual cave) and do some research using Google satellite imagery of the needed landmark area. The maps we make don’t need to be precise or exact, they just need to have the feel of being in that location on a symbolic level.



The world map for Albion was hand sculpted as we were quite certain that the layout is perfect and will never need to be changed. Alas, we learned from our mistake, so now I make the world maps in Houdini, using its non-destructive procedural magic (everything he doesn’t understand is magic). Because of this non-destructive approach, our game designer Mat can request changes to the world map, for instance moving a mountain, which is impossible for Albion at this point. After you spend almost an entire day hand placing mountains, hills, and creek beds, hitting that “Simulate” button within Houdini to see millions of years of land erosion passing in seconds is very magical for me (because he doesn’t understand it).



When you’re a small team like us (8 full-time people!), hours stack up really fast and you need to get all the help you can afford to speed up the content creation process. As a complete beginner that never opened Houdini before, I got a finished high poly mesh of the zone on day 2. This isn’t a brag, there’s nothing special about me, but the wide array of tools we have at our disposal these days that weren’t available a mere decade ago is amazing at speeding up this process! Comparing the cost of the hand-made sculpted model for Albion (that I still like, btw) which took me a week, versus the better-looking model with millions of years worth of erosion simulation created in a single day… There’s no comparison, and to me as an Art Director, it’s a no brainer.



From Houdini, we export a high and low poly world map mesh which has baked normal maps ready for further processing. At this point, we like to add some flavor to our creations. Kaz hand paints the world map texture, while the rest are sculpting low poly models for symbolic map elements - tiny trees, rocks, pathways, cities, villages, etc. They are placed as small explicit instances, to make the map as lightweight as possible. Finally, we add some cloud or fog particles, and that’s basically it.



We are looking forward to hearing about your experience while traveling the world we are preparing for you - from the green fields and forests of Albion, over snow-covered mountains of Marca Hispanica to the sand dunes of our yet to be revealed final zone.
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Thank you for reading, and a big thank you to Ivan for writing this up. If you want to get in contact with us, come join the Hand of Merlin Discord server, or follow me on Twitter and ask anything!

MarkoP

Hi there!

Last week I talked about the general design idea and this week I’ll talk about some general stuff in relation to the second zone.

The area is split into two main paths. In contrast to Albion, around the middle of the zone, there are links to cross the zone to the other path. This part of the map introduced an interesting challenge to our one-direction clause of the links. Ivan wanted to have two nodes point to each other, which initially caused some problems with calculating the distance from a node to the end of the zone (the infinite loop type). This wasn’t hard to fix and has given us the ability to have two-directional links between nodes where applicable. This won’t be used in very many places, but it’s good to know we’re stable in these cases.



As you progress through the game, new monsters will be gradually introduced in each zone. Our game designer Mat was pitching an idea for monsters having dire versions - bigger monsters with additional abilities. This allows us to increase the challenge of the same monsters by giving them more power or a new ability, changing how individual fights against them work. As you pass through zones, the state of the world escalates, having more and more sightings of the monsters and their presence being seen on the world map. Some world locations will have monsters present there as an encounter with a fight, and this should be presented with a special node symbol and some environmental change around the location. This should make it very clear where these tough fights are! We want to replace the flag models for the world locations because they have some readability issues when located at the bottom of the screen. We've made an initial concept pass over them, but haven's settled on the final design just yet. What do you think about them? Post a comment!



Thanks for reading! If you want to get in contact, we're on Discord and I check my Twitter a few times a day, so join us there!

MarkoP