We're super proud to be a part of Dev.Play 2020 and we've rolled out a fresh The Hand of Merlin demo! It will only be available during the show dates (Nov. 3-4) so grab it today, and join us on Discord to share feedback with us: https://discord.gg/ej8sjxx


And remember to vote for The Hand of Merlin TODAY⚔️: {LINK REMOVED}http://bit.ly/VoteForMerlin2020

Salutations!

Recently we started looking into adding more particles to the game. We knew for a while it’s one of our weak points since nobody on the team was experienced with making them. After a recent game release, we asked Croteam if we could borrow their particle creator, and they agreed, so now we have Alen, a person with experience who’s making a lot of our particles. He’s making them really fast too! We also added support for geometric particles (it’s basically just a model with a specific shader that makes it look cool). Today’s post shows how our particle visuals have improved since you last saw the game during the festivals.

Grail of Piety relic (reset ability cooldown to all allies)


Vial of Pure Water relic (heal health)


Vial of Poison relic (target takes health damage every turn)


Shield Block (take less damage per stack)


Hunter's Mark (target takes more damage from caster)


The design and art members are working together to discuss which things need particles, and how they should look. The current idea for status effects is to make all buffs use one and all debuffs use another effect. We figure this should make it clear what type of effect was granted, and inspection of the unit can help you note what the effect does. On that note, our lead art boi has started working on improving the UI elements, to make them a cohesive whole, which might prompt a change to how we present unit info. Once we have something done, I’ll be showing that off.

We could also use some feedback on something. One discussion point was about making each status effect to have its own unique icon in the particle effect, instead of having all buffs use the same icon and all debuffs use another icon. Do you think it’s better to have all status effects have a unique icon or is having a single icon for buff/debuff types good enough (like the Hunter's Mark and Vial of Poison gifs)? Give us your thoughts in the steam forums, comments, or our Discord server. I attempt to read all of those, but your 100% chance is Discord.

MarkoP

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

Sup!

Things are progressing at a steady pace. Some of the things we’re doing include:

• Updating animations for human units to look better
  
• Adding particles to all Skills
  
• Adding more props to our galleries for skirmish map beautification
  
• Adding more sounds to units
  
• Improved the camera bounds in maps
  
• Preparing encounter templates for zone 2
  
• Discussing encounter questlines
  
• Adding more relics
  
• Creating the “Ultimate” Skills for enemies
  
• Improving enemy AI
  
• Prototyping the hero unlock system
  
• Fixing issues that prevented us from having transparent objects
  
• Fixing all the bugs!

I think the most interesting bug we fixed is that selling the Grail to the relic vendor did not lose you the game. You can’t lose the Grail from having the bearer die, but we’ve intentionally left in the option to sell the Grail, as a temptation thing. Maybe we make it an achievement? Who knows!



Our idea for the Hero Unlock system is to make a flexible content-driven system that can be configured to track a variety of general game events. Once enough of those events fire, the unlock target is granted. For now, we’re only discussing unlocking heroes and achievements. This means that modders that create their own heroes can also make them unlockable by whatever means they want. Achievements will likely not be unlocked by content-driven data but hardcoded data, just to avoid cheesing through them by making a dead easy requirement that unlocks every achievement we make. That would be a crappy experience and destroy their value. Some example requirements we wrote down are “Deal 15 friendly fire damage with a single ability use”, “Kill 20 bandits and acquire 700 gold before reaching Jerusalem” and “Survive 5 battles in Marca Hispanica without losing a hero”. These are not final, mind you, because we don’t yet have the system done, but I’m working on it! If only I weren’t interrupted by other urgent things every day…



One other thing I want to talk about in this post and maybe poll for general feedback is one of unit visibility in maps. As mentioned above in the list, we fixed issues with transparency and now we have the ability to make objects that occlude the battlefield transparent so you can see what’s behind them.



We also added unit outlines and fill when behind occluding objects. Check out Morgan Tud below:



Which one do you prefer the most? Which one should we make the default? Give us some feedback in the comments or on our Discord server, where we’re always active. Especially me, I can be found there almost 66% of the day. The other 33% of the day I’m sleeping.

MarkoP

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

Hello!

This week I want to give a short report about what we’re doing with the game.
When we were preparing a build for the festival, we knew there would be some things that just wouldn’t be ready in time for the festival start. We decided to push those things into a patch on Friday, and we delivered that patch in the late afternoon for us. The patch notes were never shown, but a TL;DR would be something like:

• Added some new content
  
• Fixed some bugs
  
• Changed some balance values

I guess every patch for every game can be summarized with this, eh?

Before and during the festival our playtesting spawned some discussions on the design choices we made for that build. We had a long discussion on Friday about it, and then some more on Monday 2 days ago, and I’d like to give a short summary of what’s going on.

We’re changing enemy Skill loadouts. This means that every enemy should be very distinct in terms of his behavior and Skills used. The biggest offenders are the bandits - they look similar, and outside of their name it’s hard to notice which one is which. Most bandits will now have unique abilities that force different approaches to “solve” the combat against them.
We’re also adding so-called “ultimate” Skills to enemies. These will be very dangerous and telegraphed abilities that are meant to throw a wrench into your plans and unit positions. They should be easy to avoid but require a change in plans in order to do so.
We also talked about enemies having some innate Evasion value. The Evasion attribute is used against Accuracy in order to determine if a hit occurs. Some enemies had this value set to 1, which means that you had 90% chance to hit them out in the open (outside of cover). We determined this felt crappy, and have removed this from enemies. From now on, Evasion is gained only through active actions: moving behind cover or using Skills that grant it.



We’re changing the Redcap abomination to be less annoying. It’ll have different Skills that force repositioning, such as leaving ground effects when moving around and generating ground effects through an active Skill.
We’re also making reactions and telegraphed Skills cancellable. Some player Skills will have the keyword like “Disrupts” which means it can be used to stop an enemy from using his reaction or telegraphed Skill. Both of these will now be tied to a status effect to make it visible when a unit is using them. The plan is to make any Skill that does Knockback or Stun also disrupt.
We’ve also discussed removing full misses from the game and replacing them with a minimum damage amount. For now, we’re keeping full misses due to removing the innate Evasion from enemies to see how it works out.
We’re finalizing some straggler encounters in Albion, and then moving on to writing encounters for Marca Hispanica.
We’re also introducing new encounter types, the Quest encounter. These will be acquirable in Albion and Marca Hispanica and be completable in Marca Hispanica and Al-Andalus respectively. There will also be three-step encounters that start in Albion and span through all 3 zones. The last zone is the boss fight zone and will just be wrapping up the story and journey, so no quests there.

There’s a bunch of stuff going on, and I don’t want to make these blog posts be walls of text, so I’ll spread out what we’re working on from now on out. Come discuss the game with us on our Discord server!

MarkoP

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

Earlier this year, just two weeks before the lockdown, Mateus Farias arrived from Brazil to Croatia. A week later, a not-a-very-nice-magnitude earthquake devastated downtown Zagreb, leaving our game designer without a roof. He found a new place to stay, but that's when the floods came...

The Hand of Merlin is a game about the endless struggles in life. We wrote this sentence down in the game design document, to give some deeper meaning to the game we're working on. Just in case someone asks what's it all about and if the aliens are a metaphor, or, you know, we had to write an artist statement.

Yes, it's about fighting aliens with your Arthurian medieval knights, and yes, Merlin is an alien, and it's all grim (and leftfield) as it sounds. The plot owes everything to our lovely writers' duo, Verena & Jonas Kyratzes, but we wanted the game to really be about doing the right thing, even when it's hard. And about those occasional sparks of magic in our lives that help us push through.

One pandemic, one earthquake, two floods, and one engine switch later, Room-C is doing great with the hardships! We're fairly light on those magic moments so far, but this is all about to change when the game finally gets out there and we can feel that magic already: we were happy to see The Hand of Merlin accepted and recognized by so many shows (we made the PAX Rising selection just recently, and the game was featured on Digital Dragons and TGS). And finally, we're here, at Steam's own Autumn Festival - thanks for checking out The Hand of Merlin and playing the demo!

---

The Hand of Merlin is a roguelike turn-based RPG, coming soon from the engineers of The Talos Principle and Serious Sam, and written by Verena & Jonas Kyratzes (Phoenix Point).

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

You know that you can Join us on Discord anytime and we’ll be happy to chat with you! However, we'll be hosting a special live Q&A session on our Discord this Friday, October 9th, so here's a reminder to... well, set a reminder on the right side of this screen! At the same time, we'll be live streaming The Hand of Merlin Demo gameplay here on Steam.

This probably goes without saying, but The Hand of Merlin Demo is now live, with new updates and improvements, and we'll even have a fresh build ready soon, before the festival is over. So give it a go, play the Demo, and join us on Friday to let us know your thoughts and we'll be glad to answer all of your questions and share some of our plans going forward.

Once again, singing, dancing, and eating cheese during this session is not only allowed but is encouraged. To get things going, we might even drop a key or two! :wink, wink, nudge, nudge:

In the meantime, have a great festival, and please remember to wishlist and follow The Hand Of Merlin.

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


Cheers,
Room-C Games

Hey there folks!

The last opportunity for playing a public build of The Hand of Merlin has arrived! Today is the start of the Steam Games Festival: Autumn Edition, and we’re participating! If you haven’t tried it yet, there’s no time to lose! It only lasts until the 13th of October, after which we close shop until release!

The demo for this festival will be mostly similar to previous versions - the entire first zone of Albion is playable from start to end, culminating with a fight against a Behemoth. A large moth.
There are a lot of changes and improvements in this build, most notably around 25 new relics for you to either buy or find during your travels, and Mat has listened to your feedback and done some work on making the game easier by changing the stats on all enemies. Another thing we’ve introduced is gaining some attribute stats as your units rank up, which currently means that your units will gain small health bonuses per rank. The same feature technically allows for enemies to gain bonus stats based on their spawned rank, which allows us to bump their power slightly for later zones as your units get more powerful.



Additionally, we have changed how some of the gameplay mechanics work. At the start of the game, you are given the Grail from whoever rules Albion. The Grail is a relic that can be equipped on units, however, if that unit dies, the game is immediately over because relics are destroyed along with their heroes. The big change here is that the Grail has received its own stash slot, which means it cannot be lost due to combat, and if the unit carrying it dies, it automatically goes into that stash slot, preventing immediate loss. The old mechanic seemed interesting on paper, but after more playtesting, it was just too annoying and felt bad.
We still have some work planned to be done for the festival demo by the end of this week, so there will be a mid-festival update with an additional landmark encounter for the Stonehenge with an accompanying combat map, more particles for abilities, improvements to visuals, tweaks to AI and probably more stuff that are too detailed to list here. I’ll have to improve my “what’s changed” game once we start pushing out patch notes :-P



We will also have a live stream on Friday and maybe Monday, exact time should be available on the festival event schedule if you want to look it up front, and we’ll most likely post an event post an hour prior, so if you want to tune in, follow the Hand of Merlin page so you can get notified of this!

Tanks fur reeding. Join our Discord server to chat with us and axe questions about the game, we’re really a fun crowd! For instance, I love puns.

MarkoP

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

Hey there folks!

A little bird told me you really dig the story encounters in the Hand of Merlin and we're thrilled you like them so much! The driving force and the culprits behind all these stories are Jonas and Verena, husband and wife in literary crime.

Mia, our mighty quest designer, handles the mechanical setup of the encounters that pertain to flow, rewards and balancing, but it's Jonas and Verena who write all the lore and flavor texts.

As a heavily story-oriented game, for this Hand of Merlin blog post, I decided to do a quick interview with Jonas and Verena, so let's hear their side of the story.

Q: Hi Jonas & Verena! Where did you get the inspiration for the story for The Hand of Merlin?
A: The inspiration initially came from trying to find a type of story that would work well in a roguelike, allowing us to have story encounters without getting repetitive. From there we got to parallel universes, and then we hit on the way in which the many contradictory versions of the Arthurian stories complement that idea. We’ve also simply always had an interest in that material.

Q: How do you approach writing the story for individual zones? (i.e. Albion or Marca Hispanica)
A: A number of elements go into each encounter: overall theme, tone, research, etc., but the proportions change. So some are heavily based on some historical or literary detail specific to that region which we want to build upon (e.g. a character from Le Morte D’Arthur or a chanson de geste), while others are more about the atmosphere in general. Albion is a faded kingdom; in the Marca Hispanica we see the effects of constant religious warfare; whereas Al-Andalus is actually more civilized, but at the same time the Cataclysm is much more advanced there.

Q: Do you feel confined in the strict structure of the encounter templates?
A: Not really, since there’s plenty of flexibility, and if something really doesn’t work, we can talk about it and find a solution.

Q: How do you get started on writing individual encounters?
A: It usually starts with a core concept, either a premise (“you meet a robber in the woods”) or something drawn from worldbuilding needs (“the player should meet Sir Brastias”). Then we develop it as we write it, and later return to add more variations and details.



Q: How much do you collaborate with the designers?
A: We usually have weekly meetings to keep up to date, because there is some overlap between our jobs and both sides need to know what the other is doing.

Q: What is the biggest challenge you face when writing encounters?
A: Creating interesting choices for the player without being too random or punishing them too much. We have to keep players paying attention over multiple runs, but what happens must never feel arbitrary.

Q: Do you ever request a specific template for an encounter?
A: We need templates for classes of encounters so that we know we are serving the needs of the gameplay. If we have a specific idea for an encounter, that usually means we already know how to structure it. Then what we need to request is input on rewards/costs for the player, to keep the game balanced.

Q: What else do you write for The Hand of Merlin?
A: Pretty much everything, except blog posts. While there are some placeholder elements in the game currently, so the designers can do their thing, in the final product every item and spell and message should be part of a cohesive whole.

Q: What was the most fun/interesting thing to write?
A: The most fun to write is probably everything to do with the metagame progression and the deeper mysteries of Merlin’s universe because it’s like peeking behind the curtain and seeing where the legends come from.

Q: Do you ever get writer’s block when writing for the game? If yes, how do you get over it?
A: No. Getting stuck doesn’t have to do with writer’s block, but with unresolved narrative design issues. If you’re getting stuck, something is usually wrong and the only way out is to figure out what it is and fix it (or circumvent it).

Q: Would you like some ice cream?
A: Yes, we would like some ice cream.

Thanks for reading, and a big thank you to our writers for taking the time to answer these burning questions! If there’s anything you want to know that hasn’t been answered, come join our Discord server and ask! We’re all a friendly bunch!

MarkoP

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

Hey folks!

The Cataclysm monsters that are invading the world Merlin is trying to save are weird creatures that came from the minds of our creative art team. Says a lot about their weird heads, eh?

So far, we’ve shown 4 monsters through either the blog posts or the demo itself. The first demo we put out was structured for a 5 world location journey across two paths, with a total of 3 fights against a combination of Mandrake, Behemoth, and Wyvern enemies. This was during the Steam Summer Games Festival.
After that, we decided to apply/be on more events during the year, like the PAX event that just finished or Gamescom a few weeks ago. Our current event participation means that the current demo will be available all the way until September 27th (27.09.2020), when it’ll take a break from being ravaged by all you players, and then return strong for the Steam Autumn Games Festival on October 7th (07.10.2020) for some 6 days. The later demo should receive some fixes as we make them, but no new content is planned (not planned doesn’t mean there won’t be any added if we decide it’s worth it).

The monsters you’ve seen in the current demo won’t change, and we will likely keep the same structure for them for the full game as well. Mandrake, Wyvern, and Redcap are monsters you’ll be seeing during your Albion travels, with a Behemoth at the end. In Marca Hispanica we’ll be introducing the Thorntoad, with a Cockatrice at the end. In Al-Andalus, the sandy zone, we add the Lindworm to round up the monster roster (heh it rhymes). The final battle in Jerusalem will remain a secret.



Here’s a short development story: In our old engine, we had a worm enemy as well, given life by yours truly, and i made sure to make it as annoying as possible. It had an attack that ignored all obstacles, essentially lobbed a projectile at you from behind cover at a large range. So naturally, the AI moved that enemy to a position that was fully shielded from ALL of your units and attacked you from there. It also didn’t help it had unlimited movement range, to facilitate the fantasy of it burrowing into the ground and emerging just about anywhere. This meant you had to spend at least 1 action point to get to a position from which you can attack it, and spend the other action point to deal damage.
And the best part?
Every time you hit it, it split into two, each copy having half health of the original, then both copies moved into a new position.
The team hated it (and me through proxy), but I found it hilarious!
Hopefully, the new Lindworm won’t be as annoying, eh? :)



As a final note, some abilities and relics will have effects that apply only to these monsters. For instance, there is a relic that reduces damage against humans and increases damage against aliens. Mat wanted a different name instead of “aliens”, so the writers have come up with the term “abominations”, which we’ll use in all ability tooltips that affect them specifically.
What are your thoughts on this name? Give us your opinion on our Discord server, or in the comments!

MarkoP

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

Hey there!

PAX Online is currently ongoing, and it’s integrated with Steam, so a bunch of cool demos are available for playing. Our demo is also available, so make sure you try it if you haven’t already. It contains the entire zone of Albion, and includes an epic fight at the end of the zone! Some people on our Discord have even managed to win that fight without losing any units!

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

Speaking of units, in the demo there are six units you can start your run with. Our current idea is to have only three units available at the start, and the rest have to be unlocked as you play through the game. The idea was inspired by FTL, where you unlock ships as you play the game, as a meta progression aspect. There were mentions within the team that unlocking heroes isn’t ideal and there were some issues with it, so we’ll have to discuss what the final form of hero meta progression will be.
That said, there are three heroes in the game that are not available in the demo. Their descriptions below are pulled from our document describing them, as written by the writers.

The Warrior among them is Zahra al-Zakiyya: a young Arab woman, she has no use for faith and as such doesn't bother wearing a veil. Instead, she wears trousers and a revealing blouse, reasoning that if her sword fails her, she might have to rely on her feminine charms to get out of a tricky spot.

The Mystic’s name is Rumayla al-Qriqiyya: An older woman of Greek descent, grey-haired and wise. She is seeking to understand the cause of the Cataclysm.



The Ranger is called Salim al-Darir: a young archer in the caliph's army who lost his job when he accidentally shot his superior. Tall, gangly, maybe a bit goofy. He has been stripped of his rank and uniform, and as such his outfit is that of a commoner, but he still has his trusty bow. (dude is still missing a texture - he'll get there!)




You’ll be able to play with these heroes in the final game. Mat made sure that each hero has unique stats and interesting starting Skills, so every run should start differently, coupled with the fact encounters and special node locations are random in the world.
Thanks for reading! Come join our Discord server and tell us what you think about the game!

MarkoP

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