The Hand of Merlin (tuxdb.com)

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The Hand of Merlin is a turn-based rogue-lite RPG in which Arthurian legend clashes with cosmic horror. Recruit a company of up to three mortal heroes and guide them in spirit on a desperate journey from Albion to Jerusalem. Explore a richly-imagined medieval setting on the brink of apocalypse. Trade with merchants, improve your heroes and unearth ancient relics. Search for the lost fragments of your soul, scattered across the multiverse - and save as many worlds as you can.

Enjoy a compelling story inspired by Arthurian legend, the Matter of France, and the history of Al-Andalus - with an unusual twist. Make choices in interactive encounters that change every time you play. Written by Jonas Kyratzes (The Talos Principle, Serious Sam 4) and Verena Kyratzes (The Lands of Dream, Serious Sam 4).

Master the tactics of squad-based and turn-based combat to conquer both human and demonic foes. Your enemies will be tough and ruthless; make use of cover, set up ambushes and coordinated attacks, harness synergies between different Hero classes and skills.

Carve a path across the lands of Albion, Marca Hispanica and Al-Andalus. Will you take a dangerous route, risking life and limb in pursuit of a legendary relic? Or will you choose a safer path? Plan and prepare. Negotiate, barter, fight. Tackle challenges. Suffer losses. Recruit new Heroes. Earn Gold, Supplies and Renown. Be careful: your choices are permanent, as is death. But don't tarry - evil never rests.

Use Renown to level up your Heroes, and choose between a randomized set of new skills or improved attributes. But choose wisely! Select skills with great synergy and balance your party for the road ahead.

As you jump from one parallel dimension to the next, history is reshaped. Different kings rule the land, changing the encounters, characters, and events. No two worlds are ever quite the same, and each journey will be unique. And should your heroes fall, remember: defeat is not the end, only a new beginning.

Seek out towns to improve your arms and armor, or stumble upon hermit artisans in the wild. With every day that passes, the world plunges deeper into darkness, and you will need all the equipment gold can buy.

From a peasant's humble luck charm to the legendary sword wielded by Arthur himself, items imbued with magical power are scattered about the world. Some you will be able to purchase from merchants and collectors, but others will have to be earned through acts of heroism - or displays of wit.

Rain thunder and brimstone upon your foes! Seek out and gather Soulstones to restore your power and unlock new Spells. Even if defeated, your spirit will retain all of your collected arcane knowledge as you jump into the next dimension.
There are as many worlds as there are stars in the sky. In each stands Camelot; in each there is a Grail. But there is only one Merlin, and his eternal burden is to stand against the horror from beyond. Each world that is saved is saved forever; each world that is lost is lost for good.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Dev blog 83 - Making New Enemies

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer.

Hello guys and gals! Today I wanted to share with you a bit about how we go about adding new stuff to the game, particularly content.

The Hand of Merlin is what I like to describe as a rectangular game, meaning it is validated not by its systems, but by its content. A roundabout way of saying that the game is fun or not depending on what you face, discover, and do in the game.

That means that we have to take extra care in creating cool encounters, enemies and skills for you to use and recombine, and the processes we use to go about creating said content needs to be constantly revised.

In the context of enemies and skills, its a three-stage process.
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We identify a fantasy or a niche. This is the verbal stage. Its usually down to a sentence or two. In the early stages of the game, they were mostly aesthetic, like Bashing someone with a shield sounds fun or I had this image of a big, beetle-like monster, which would evolve into Bash and Behemoth respectively. Nowadays, so close to full release, we tend to find more mechanical or thematic niches to fill, like The Warrior could use some self-heals and So many enemies punish the melee characters, how about we do the reverse? turning into Malice and the upcoming Basilisk.

Then, we Systematize - my personal favorite! We have to translate the idea into actual game terms. What does it mean to push someone with a shield? How is it different from a basic attack? Why would you pick it? This stage is still theoretical, but we have to start thinking about how to implement it in-game, often checking with MarkoP to see whats possible, or making some small tests in-editor. A great example is how Thorntoads Bristleback passive went from a desire to dissuade the player from focusing fire, into a process: whenever he is hit, hell deal melee damage and become more resilient to damage, via the addition of another status effect, Thick Skin.
As a side note, Relics can often start in this step. Whenever we are doing a new skill or fix, we discover a possibility in the design and come up with a relics functionality first, before finding a fantasy/historical element to it.

Then, we Implement. For most skills and enemies, we could give the artists and programmers a heads-up in advance, so by the time the design team reaches this stage, we have the assets ready to slot in and see them in-engine. We can find out some impossibilities in current technologies, or discover some inconsistencies with our plans: thats normal, we just go back a step and try again. After a bit, we have something testable. For the Basilisk, we actually were lucky enough to be able to use some pieces of other enemies, like Mandrakes movement AI and some lessons we learned from Wilfreds Nonchalant passive, and the implementation was quite quick.

Then, Internal playtest! Up until this point, the skill or enemy was built in a vacuum, with theories and desires alone. We thought it would be a neat idea if, say, Redcaps Ooze, that ground effect he leaves, actually could heal other abominations. But once you actually see it happening in live play, with 2 Redcaps and a Mandrake, you notice that it doesnt make a lot of sense. Its not properly explained, the players cant do a lot about it, and Ooze is already a hassle on its own Often, the ideas are scrapped or retooled.

In this stage, its very important to bring other members of the development team into the loop, since the people that developed the idea from concept to implementation can become numb to its issues, or only see the results from a specific angle. I often gloss over poor descriptions or AI mistakes in the content I implement myself, and have to be reminded by my fellow devs, simply because Ive been seeing the thing for so many hours that the small details dont strike me as odd anymore. This is a great piece of advice to any designer: Designing something in a vacuum is dangerous! Get someone else to see and approve your deliverables.

Then we can move on to Iterating. Very rarely do we actually see a piece of content go from concept to seeing live play without at least one touch-up. As an example, an early implementation of Redcap had passive Evasion, meaning that no matter what you did, there was always a 10% chance that youd miss it. When I designed it, it made perfect sense: The players have it, and its good that you build redundancy in your plans, to account for the randomness factor. But other devs played it and found it frustrating! So we iterated: maybe the Gaze ability could introduce the same randomness and require the same redundancy, but in a more straightforward way, that the players can play for. Maybe we can make another enemy gain evasion only if you attack them, like Wyvern turned out to be. We re-systematize, re-implement, retest until we find it acceptable.

Then you come in. Live feedback is the greatest (and most overwhelming) thing to happen to our game dev process! We show our content piece to you, the players, and see what you think. Sometimes you think that The boss fight is a bit meh, or that A specific map in Zone 2 is the worst, or, in a brighter light, that cooldown reduction makes you feel powerful and dealing direct health damage is cool. We take that into consideration, try to account for it, and fix whatever bugs and errors you (or our extended QA team) find out. This step can happen over and over and is still ongoing for many aspects of the game, but it's one of the most important ones too, as it makes the game a better product for you!
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So there you have it! The process of how we add content. Now that you know how important your voice is in our development process, be sure to show up on our Discord server to share your feedback with how the game is turning out, so we can keep improving it!

Mat

[ 2021-08-25 11:02:18 CET ] [Original Post]