The Hand of Merlin News

Hey folks!

During the course of Early Access, we’ve gotten a steady stream of requests to localize the game to various languages. In this post I want to explain the situation.

When we launched the game to Early Access last year, the plan was to be in EA for some 4-6 months, to give time to add some of the content we still had on our todo lists, work on any feedback we’d receive from our players and take that time to localize the game. The game was QA tested before that to find the most obvious issues, and to be honest, we thought the game was in a better state than it really was.

Thankfully, our players gave us superb feedback and we realized the error of our ways :)
The game needed more development time, and more features and content was added during the last year than we originally anticipated. As the saying goes: no plan survives contact.

That brings us to localization. At the time, we didn’t have the full information about the amount of text we’d end up with. There were a few encounters that were still being worked on, and some parts of the game text was still in flux. We thought we’d get it done within about a month, and pass it on for localization. As such, we didn’t yet have precise numbers for the cost of translating the game to other languages.

Unfortunately, we’ve painted ourselves into a corner with this aspect. When we started creating the game, we did not anticipate we’d really end up with this much text. We don’t regret making the game this way, we’re happy with what we’ve made, but it does present a real logistical problem for translations.

For context, the game has around 250 000 words, which is between 550 and 950 pages of text, depending on spacing. As we’re a small indie team, we don’t exactly have a lot of resources to do expensive things, and localization is apparently very expensive. Each individual language costs anywhere between 20 and 45 thousand euros (pending language difficulty, etc.). To translate the game at this scale would cost almost as much as the development cost over the entire Early Access period.

Ultimately, because this would double the development budget, we decided to rather make the game as mechanically solid and fun as we could. That means the game won’t ship with languages other than English.

Of course, there’s the option to use crowd-sourced translations, but that comes with some risk as well. We’d want to make sure we are able to control the quality of the translations, ensure the important meanings and narrative tidbits get across correctly, all the while keeping the same old-timey English style in the various languages. That requires more logistical work on our end, which we don't have the manpower for.

For those that won’t buy the game unless it’s translated to their language, we are really sorry. We’re just 8 people conscious of our budget and we can only do so much.

All that said, since the game can be modded, it’s ultimately possible for anyone to take this into their own hands and start a crowd-sourced campaign to translate the game and make that a mod. We just wouldn’t be able to guarantee the quality of it.
If you’re interested in making a mod like that, you can always join our Discord server and ask how to go about actually making it, we’d be happy to help with that part.

MarkoP

Hey folks!

Since we’re still in playtesting and bug fixing mode, there aren’t a lot of juicy design topics to ramble about. We’re steadily ironing out the kinks from the game, and every report we’ve received on both Steam or Discord has already been fixed.

The only temporary setback to get those fixes out is a planned power outage that will affect our builder infrastructure. We were planning a patch for today, but due to this we’ve decided to push the patch for next week. We don’t want to risk releasing a patch today without a way to react to any unexpected crashes or critical issues it could have. Note that when I say unexpected, I really mean unexpected - the expected ones would have been fixed before the patch went out!

So in short, expect a patch next week with fixes to everything that has been reported on Steam so far, and likely anything that gets reported from today until then.

As for the title of the blog post….
*drum roll*
[h3]June 14th![/h3]

In less than a month, the game will receive the final Early Access update, Update 8: Endless Mode, and leave Early Access to become the full 1.0 version!

It’s been a long, bumpy and fun ride since we started Early Access. I’m sure we couldn’t have made the game as good as it is now without the support of the people who gave us feedback. Whether that feedback was some tiny annoyance or some larger concern (like character uniqueness), we tried to improve the game with all of those in mind, and even if we didn’t end up resolving every suggestion, I can assure you that each one was at least discussed.

That said, we’re still open to feedback and are ready to improve the game the best we can with our limited capacity all the way until release! Just note that, after all, we are just 3 programmers out of 8 people in total, so there’s a natural limit to what we can pull off.
So if you have the game and would like to suggest improvements for before or after 1.0, report bugs or give us some constructive criticism, come talk to us directly on our Discord server, or post here on Steam and I’ll reply as soon as I see the message!

Thanks for the support!

MarkoP

Hey, everyone. Robert here. When The Hand of Merlin released into Early Access last year, many of you told us that its level of polish didn’t feel like an Early Access game at all. And what greater compliment can there be? Thank you for that!

Before we put on our party hats and light the candles, let’s kick things off with a fun fact. Did you know that The Hand of Merlin was not always called The Hand of Merlin? In fact, finding the right title took a while!



At first, we went with Guardians of Erda: Merlin’s Tale. Quite a mouthful, huh? It was supposed to convey the message of the journey, of saving the world, of getting back in touch with Merlin’s lost kin, the other Guardians. But it just didn’t roll off the tongue.

The title we landed on, The Hand of Merlin, is also very symbolic. It can be taken to mean that Merlin has a hand in shaping the world and its history. But it also represents the Heroes that help carry out his task: the fellowship itself acting as the hand of Merlin. Plus, it’s way shorter, so that’s good!

Over the past year, we’ve been doing live development in Early Access, while also porting the game to consoles. That includes pushing regular content updates at a steady month-and-a-half interval, with lots of small updates in between, usually weekly or bi-weekly.

Let me tell you – it’s been a brutal experience! 🙂 But also very fun, with lots of things we’ve learned on the way.



Thinking about some of the highs over the last year, we really enjoyed seeing popular content creators livestream or review our game. It felt good to hear folks praising various gameplay aspects, or just plain-old having fun with it!

Another high would be… um… helping folks with technical issues. No, seriously. It may sound weird, but it feels good to have a happy customer praise our technical support, especially since we’re such a small team and all spread so thin. There’s no dedicated community manager or tech support contact: it’s just us, the three programmers on the team, juggling coding new features, bug fixing, tech support, build system management, and everything else in-between.

And of course, you can’t have the highs without the lows. In the early days of EA, seeing those very same content creators across Twitch and YouTube finding a nasty bug was a bit deflating. One time, all the textures went haywire and started blinking with psychedelic textures during a stream. The chat exploded, and the guy was laughing, but we on the dev team just wanted earth to swallow us. 🙂 Fortunately, we were soon able to reproduce and fix the bug, but I promise that we will never forget that scene with flashing neon floors on livestream!

Even with so many people praising your game, it’s still difficult seeing negative reviews pop up. I keep track of all the reviews and posts, and every unfavorable one is a kick in the gut. Still, we sift through them and often there’s something actionable to be found. Something to address, to help make the game even better.

The worst mistake you can make as a dev, I think, is to react emotionally or start arguing. Even if there’s an angry post on the forum, I ask myself: how come that person is so angry? Is there something we can change to address their issue? Oftentimes, the answer is yes, and then the person goes from feeling angry to feeling vindicated. That’s such a great feeling when that happens! So, this actually started as a “low,” but became a “high” by the end! 🙂



And so, here we are: 365 days after The Hand of Merlin’s first day in Early Access. It’s been an amazing year, and we’re very excited to reach the end of our EA voyage and officially release version 1.0 in the near future (you’ll be hearing more about that very soon)!

Before we wrap things up here, I’ll leave you with one more fun fact about The Hand of Merlin: An artistic influence on the game was Excalibur, a 1981 film. The entire movie is a visual trip, and really hits the nail on the head with that weird, off-kilter medieval feel with dark mystical undertones.

The movie also features some very shiny armor, which due to the physics of optical lenses used in cameras, produced strong fringes of light extending from the borders of those bright suits of armor. This in turn caused the film to have an almost dream-like, otherworldly feel to it. We actually replicated this artifact – this feeling – with a strong bloom effect in-game.

Thank you so much for your continued support and feedback. You’ve all definitely made this first birthday all the more sweet!

New features:
• Added a few new sound effects for Abominations that were missing them on special attacks.
• Created a proper portrait for the final boss.

macOS fixes:
• Fixed an issue where mouse clicks would sometimes not work correctly.
• Fixed window not being interactable after switching from fullscreen to windowed mode until the window is moved or resized.

General fixes:
• Fixed a crash that could happen if playing through multiple runs in one sitting.
• Fixed a bug with the final boss fight where it could get hard locked if a pylon died at the start of the enemy turn by a damage-over-time effect.
• It is now possible to view the unlocked rewards at the end of a run when using a gamepad.
• Fixed a bug with the Atlantes core achievement having wrong unlock requirements. The achievement should be now be granted for new sessions, both for the case of having already unlocked the core, and for unlocking the core for the first time.
• Fixed a bug where sunken areas in certain maps prevented some abilities from being able to effect units on the other side, most notably at Roncevaux Pass - the final map of Marca Hispanica.
• Fixed a bug where action points could sometimes be shown as negative on the unit header in combat (this was purely a visual bug).
• Warrior's Disrupting Taunt skill and its upgrades now properly disrupt reactions as well.
• Fixed Warrior's Sword Sworn skill to only trigger via direct damage, excluding reactions or damage-over-time effects (as was intended).
• Light Boots relic can no longer miss when used.
• Straw Doll relic and its status effect Paragon should now correctly trigger its decay rule only when Heroes take damage - Decoys should be excluded.
• Warrior's Bash Down skill now correctly applies Guard Down.
• Bandits' use of Martyr skill now properly triggers on player's turn instead of during enemy turn.
• Fixed an issue where some skills could only be used at 2 AP even though their cost is 1 AP.
• Fixed a bug where choice cards in an encounter could become broken if mashing buttons too quickly while they appear.
• Fixed an issue with "Florismart's Glade" encounter where it would not be possible to recruit Alain the White.
• Fixed an issue with "Merlin's Cave" encounter which caused it to give too much Essence.
• Fixed typos in various tooltips and encounters.

Modding:
• The testing roster can now define the starting relics, both for being equipped on heroes and stashed.

Optimizations:
• Fixed several memory leaks, where used memory would grow slightly with each level (around 1 MB).
• Fixed an issue where terrain material arrays could get reallocated when loading certain levels, causing a slightly longer load time.

Quality of life changes:
• Added a new hint to indicate how to gain Essence - primarily by visiting Arcane Nodes on the World Map.
• Added a menu option for controlling the size of the displayed tile grid in combat.
• In combat, hit chances are now shown only for units that will have effects applied to them, to avoid confusion.
• Changed the default value for unit outlines in combat to always - this should help with unit visibility.

Gameplay balancing:
• Mystic's Thundering Brimstone skill now applies Dazed to large enemies as well.
• The effect from Mystic's Blighted skill no longer decays, meaning affected enemy can heal attackers until it dies.
• Furtive status effect will no longer be lost via spells, reactions or damage-over-time effects.

Hey folks!

Starting last week, we've entered full playtest mode! Yes, that means the game is being prepared for full release! Hype!
While we're playtesting, we've got a content freeze. No brand new assets are being made, and all artists are promoted to the role of playtester. Programmers are partially promoted to the role, because, you know, somebody has to fix the reported issues as well.
We’re also keeping track of any bug reports on the Steam forums and our Discord server and fixing them asap, so if you're playing the game, let us know of any issue!

We’ve also got reports coming in from the QA team testing the game. They’re testing the game on Linux and macOS as well, and the reports for those should help with most of the obvious issues on those platforms. One of the issues that should now be fixed is the clicking issue reported on macOS, where sometimes the mouse either did a double click on every single click, or required a double click to register as a single click.
One of our programmers valiantly dug deep into the macOS handling code to fix that one, which was both hard to reproduce and hard to even debug to figure out what was actually going on, so the fact he got a fix for it is great! If you previously had this bug, try the game and let us know if it’s fixed for you so we know if the fix is working the way we expect it to.

So as you can see, by entering this mode we’re basically gearing up for our 1.0 launch in the near future. Our days are spent tracking down and fixing bugs, and our designer is busy with putting the guides for modding on Steam and handling balance changes as they’re reported.

We’ve also gotten some good general game feedback on our Discord server and Steam that we’ve been discussing internally. We’re actively looking to iron out the kinks in the game, and improve the situation for new players. Although we’re close to release, it doesn’t mean the patches stop until then, they will happen probably every week up to and a short while after the full release. We've actually got a patch coming today as well! So the more people let us know their pain points with the game, the better we can make it for its 1.0 sticker :)

If you have suggestions, please drop them in the forums or on our Discord server. We love to see them and discuss them!

MarkoP