Hey everyone!
Last week I showed you the book that acts as our interface to the party management screen, and the interaction with encounters. The encounters are short stories that describe what happens to your party when they arrive at a world location. The world map has a series of nodes, and each node will have one of these. Encounters can be a very short introduction to the combat you’re about to enter, just setting the scene, or they can be a story about a terrible robber that preys on rich travellers, a maiden in distress, a magical monocerus, fairy rings in the forest, and so on. As you can see, the world has some aspects of “magic” in it, however, we’re going down the route of “magic is just science that is not yet explained”. This ties into the reasons why our combat is low fantasy without magic - our units all just use science that would be available to them (alchemy, chemistry and the like), which is the baseline for our support class. The exception to this is a category of abilities we call Spells, but those follow the same idea (they’re spells to the uninitiated, i.e. the units), and I’ll write a post about the combat in a few weeks where i’ll explain all of that.



As you can see in the picture above, the encounters are split into short segments that can fit on one page. Each segment is usually accompanied with a set of choices the player can make to drive the story forward, or bail out on the encounter altogether. We try making it a point to allow the player to bail on the encounter several times in the buildup or introduction phase, since in most cases we don’t want to lock the player into an encounter which he doesn’t want to do (for example, forcing the player to spend gold without making it a conscious decision).




The dialog choices the player can make are written in a way that progresses the story and time forward. Each choice advances the “state” of the encounter, if it makes sense - imagine each option as an action the player makes in the moment. A ‘look’ action is not the same as the ‘take’ action, as one of them will alter the situation, and the other is just information gathering. Once the player makes a decision on what to do, (usually) there’s no going back. If you choose to sell a relic to a merchant, there's no chance he’s willing to sell it back to you. At least, not without increasing the price :) Deciding to walk over a rickety bridge might mean it collapses under you, losing you some gold or supplies, but it could also mean you narrowly make it to the other side before it collapses. The same encounter in one run can have a vastly different outcome in another run, all depending on the choice the player makes, and some internal randomness in each encounter (like the bridge example above). We won’t have any timers when choosing an option, since different people have different reading speeds, and different decision making speeds. Also, some decisions might require you to look at your party’s status (which is always reachable via the bookmark in the top left of the book), to determine if a choice is useful for your current situation. If your units are low on health, you might prefer a choice that heals your units instead of a choice that gives you gold, and the other way around if you’re full on health.



All of the encounters are written by the Kyratzes family: Jonas and Verena. They're a writing team that started by making story-heavy indie games like The Sea Will Claim Everything. Jonas then worked on The Talos Principle, and later Verena joined him on Serious Sam 4. Jonas also worked on Phoenix Point and The Eternal Cylinder. It’s through their work on The Talos Principle that we got to know them, and at some point, asked them if they were interested in working on the story and encounters for our game. They agreed, and have written several encounters to test the waters - how they would function in the limited confines of our presentation methods (we have to limit the amount of text per page due to clipping and to not have a wall of text for the player to read). Based on their feedback on writing the encounters, we wrote a custom syntax file format that allows a lot of control over how the encounters play out: randomness, different page paths, character specific actions, global state changes, combat spawn location variations, and more. Jonas and Verena have a lot of experience writing stories, and we are working on a streamlined process that allows them to think only about the story itself, and leave all the game balancing and pacing of the encounters to us. We look forward to seeing what great stories they come up with. :)


Next week I’ll start getting into the other aspect of our game, the combat scenarios. They’re turn-based grid-based party-based skirmishes, that pit the player’s 3 man party against various bandits and a sinister unknown threat from the beyond (ooo spooky).
As always, you can join the Hand of Merlin Discord server, and you can follow me on Twitter if you want to throw some questions about the game in my direction. I’m still learning how to effectively use the damn thing, but I might throw some exclusive screenies there from time to time.

Until next time!
MarkoP

Last week we talked about the first region of the game, and this week we want to show you what happens when you arrive at a notable location or world nodes. Every region is made up of a network of nodes that form a directed graph towards the boss fight for that region. Each node contains an encounter (similar to FTL), with a short story driven by player choices on what to do next. We call this interface “the encounter dialog”, and this went through its own evolution, first as a 2D scroll, and finally became the book we have today.



We wanted the interface to be a physical object that you can interact with, and we looked for inspiration in several places: Skyrim books for one, and the feel of Tom Riddle's diary from the second Harry Potter movie, with how it absorbs the text. Our 3D modeling artist Toni modeled and animated the book, while Marko, the other programmer on the team, implemented the text dissolve and most of the code driving its’ animations. Everything you see in the book is essentially a standard UI widget, we just display it as a page in the book instead of it being on the screen as a HUD. The book is internally split into chapters. The Warband chapter is where you can check the stats of your current party members, the Encounter chapter is where we go through the encounters themselves, and there are a few other chapters for features we’ll talk about in the future.



Marko is a student in his final year, finishing his degree soon (hopefully, it’s been long enough, dude!), and Toni is a self-taught 3D modeling artist. Toni helped the rest of the team learn Blender, and eased the transition from 2D to 3D. Marko is also learning Blender in his spare time, even though it doesn’t do him any good in his daily tasks, as he’s busy working on game features and bug fixing.



In the next post we’ll talk about the encounters themselves, so stay tuned. You can join us on The Hand of Merlin Discord server.

MarkoP

Last week we talked about the game in general, so in this post we wanted to talk about the first world region. The game starts with the player gathering his party of heroes (we’ll talk about heroes in a future post) and setting off on a quest to find the Holy Grail. The game uses the mythos of Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table, and using some creative freedom, we’re purposefully skewing the legends surrounding Camelot and Arthur in order to tell a story that sounds familiar, but not quite exact or correct. We’ll talk more about the story in a later post. For today, we wanted to show some pieces of the region you’ll be going through when you start the game - Albion.


(Albion, circa 2017)

The first iteration of the region was a bare bones background image with a bunch of points linked together with lines. Not the most impressive of sights, but it set the foundation of the gameplay for that part of the game. The first working (as in, not a prototype) version was represented as a table with a map of the region drawn on paper, and the notable locations were marked with flags (as they are today). As the game was 2D, and we wanted to fit the entire map on the screen at once, we had some trouble putting every important element on the screen. That version went through many iterations to nail down the gameplay feel, and after the transition to Serious Engine, we decided to simply make the map a full 3D environment, with an in-world camera that can pan around. This solved the issue with having to put everything on a single screen, so we were happy with that.


(Albion today)

All of the mentioned art was done by our lead artist, Ivan. He started as a digital 2D artist and animator, and was in charge of making the first units, back when it was all 2D. After we decided to change units to be 3D, over time Ivan learned how to use Blender and 3DCoat. Leveraging his formal education as an artist, he became quite good at it and today we can even say his art doesn’t suck anymore. Mostly. ;)
As our lead artist he usually drives the tasks of the other artists, and makes sure the art style is consistent. If we need to make a decision on something related to art, we usually all chime in with opinions, pros and cons, and make a group decision since we all sit in the same room. However, if anything does go wrong we just blame Ivan. Even for things unrelated to art.


(the tool we use to make the regions)

In a later post, we’ll write up about how we create the regions themselves, but for the very next post we wanted to talk about the presentation of encounters to the player - the Book of Merlin (made up title, because it’s just an actual in-game book), so stay tuned and join us on The Hand of Merlin Discord server if you have any questions or suggestions for blog topics you’d like us to write about.

MarkoP

Hey everyone!
As promised last week, this week we’ll share some details about the game, how it all started, and introduce the project leads of the project.

Robert and Karlo were both working in Croteam when they decided they wanted to make a small prototype of a game in their free time. They were inspired by The Banner Saga and FTL, and wanted to try combining some aspects of those games into one. Since both had experience with building engines, they built a small engine for a 2D prototype game. Slowly, over time, the prototype grew to something with potential, and they got the green light to hire some people to work on the game full time in the same office: a programmer and a few artists. The prototype had all of the core features that are still present today, albeit in a different form and implementation.



As time passed, some basic issues were found. The game has isometric perspective with a fixed camera, and we wanted units that had full rotational animations. Only the units were expected to be able to rotate so their backs were visible, so they were the only assets planned to be fully animated (the environment objects were animated, but didn’t require full 360 rotations drawn). Once we measured how fast we could create a single, fully animated unit, we realized this required too much time (5 animations minimum per unit for each of the 4 directions in a tile based game, with 10 units planned as a baseline), and as we had only one animator, the decision was made to move all units to 3D. Most environments were still done as 2D sprites, and the team had little experience with creating 3D assets, so we hired a 3D artist to help out with the units. Having 3D units would reduce the strain for creating the same animation 4 times per unit, since all we had to do was create the animations once, and simply rotate the unit to face a different direction, so the cost of having to create the few units from scratch was worth it.



More time passed by, and we played around with a gameplay concept of having high ground in the terrain where ranged units would get some benefit (accuracy and/or damage). This was around the time when the team was offered the chance to move the game to Serious Engine, which would allow us to use the rendering capabilities it already had, and the options to release on multiple platforms, which our small engine just didn’t have, and would require much more time to implement. Since we wanted to have a good rendering pipeline to make the dark fantasy vision of the game, we decided to make that move. We just had to rewrite the entire game logic again, and make all of our assets again. Yay.



This time, armed with knowledge of making 3D assets (as our artists learned the ropes of 3D, even though they were originally 2D artists), we decided to create every object as a full 3D model, as our old 2D sprites just wouldn’t look good enough in the new engine. So, over time, we made a lot of assets, hired a few more people, and were done with porting the gameplay to the new engine. Creating an isometric, tile based, turn-based, tactical game in an engine not created for this task was not easy, but we did our best, and people at Croteam were amazed of what we did with their engine - they almost couldn’t recognize this was the engine they were using to make their first person games. The praise gave us confidence we were doing something right.



Robert and Karlo, as our overlords founders, don’t have much time to work on the game itself anymore, as they used to. They planted the vision of the game, which the team has taken and grown into the game we have today. They offer us technical knowledge about the Serious Engine (after all, they have 10+ years of experience with it, and we have 1.5), and help us with design when we need additional eyes on the problems at hand.

To expand on some of the tidbits we’ve mentioned in the post, the game is low fantasy themed, sort of an answer to the question of “what would happen if the xenomorphs from Alien came to Earth in medieval times”. Our vision is the image of a knight charging with his sword against an alien threat. It has an overworld part with encounters akin to FTL, and the combat shifts to an XCOM style turn based view on relatively small maps.

Next week, we’ll introduce the first region of the game, and one of our artists who worked on it, so stay tuned! You can also join our Discord server for The Hand of Merlin.

MarkoP

Hello everyone!
It's been quite a while since we created the steam page for The Hand of Merlin, in which time we have, unfortunately, never posted anything. Well, this is something we're aiming to fix, all the way until the release of the game. Our plans include a regular blog post, with a mix of design, art and tech topics that should cover most of what the game offers. In this first post, we wanted to share what has been happening with the project behind the scenes.



In its first iterations, the game was supposed to be a 2D isometric game, visually similar to Banner Saga. We wrote our in-house engine as a tool to create that vision of the game. Over time, the number of cool ideas, and the scope of the game grew, and we decided to transition the game to 3D, in order to solve some asset issues (for example, 2D animations vs 3D animations, since we had only one animator). The engine itself wasn't made for 3D, but it wasn't impossible to extend it, and a couple of weeks later, we had our first 3D model running around the game world.

After working on the rest of the 3D tech for a while, we were offered the option to port the game to an already established 3D engine, which was in parts similar to our in-house engine. For a bit of backstory, the founders of Room-C Games, Robert and Karlo, have been working at Croteam full-time for almost a decade now as programmers on the Serious Engine, which was in part an inspiration for the core tech of our engine. The offer was to move The Hand of Merlin to Serious Engine, which had a lot of tech already written, meaning we would be able to focus more on the game itself instead of writing the core technology required for a standard 3D game nowadays.

The work to move the game from the old engine to Serious Engine started back in mid 2018, and the base of the game was ported after 6 months. The switch also meant we couldn't use any of the old assets, which was at the same time good and bad: the old assets were all pure 2D, and would look out of place in the new engine. Around the same time as the tech port, we started making all new assets, this time as full 3D models. So we got to work, and recreated almost everything we had in the old version of the game (some differences are expected as the design of the game evolved as well).

So here we are, The Hand of Merlin is running on Serious Engine, and are charging full speed ahead with the rest of the content, to bring the game to release at the end of 2020. Late last year, we updated the store page with how the game looks in the new engine (and we still made more improvements after that), so check those out and share them along with any of your turn-based-loving friends.

As for our update schedule, as already mentioned, the plan is doing regular blog posts right here on Steam, targeting Wednesday, and various other content on other platforms as we move forward, so stay tuned for that. In the next post we plan on spilling some details about the game itself, and start introducing our small team, so see you next week!

Room-C Games