The Versus Evil Winter Sale is now live on Steam! Get up to 90% off!
As we head into 2024, let's have a bit of a retrospective, shall we? 2023 marks 10 years since Versus Evil was founded, and we've built quite the portfolio over the last decade. We look back on early titles such as Yaga, Cardpocalypse, and Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire; we look back on recent notable titles such as First Class Trouble, Eville, and UnMetal; and now, we look forward to our upcoming slate of new releases such as Lil' Guardsman, Tamarak Trail, and Broken Roads. Whether you've been playing our games the day we started or are now just joining the fun, thank you for being on this journey with us. We're forever grateful. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1403440/Broken_Roads/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1924360/Lil_Guardsman/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1591220/Tamarak_Trail/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1989320/Monolith_Requiem_of_the_Ancients/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1220170/Eville/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/953880/First_Class_Trouble/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/560130/Pillars_of_Eternity_II_Deadfire/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1203710/UnMetal/

The Versus Evil Autumn Sale is now live on Steam! Get up to 90% off!
While you're browsing our catalog, why not check out our slate of upcoming titles if you haven't already: Broken Roads is a narrative-driven RPG that brings exploration, strategic turn-based combat and meaningful philosophical choices to an all-new Australian post-apocalyptic setting. In Lil' Guardsman, imagine you're a 12-year-old, suddenly in charge of the guard shed at the castle gate, where you decide if elves, goblins and 100+ other characters should be admitted. It's a wonderful combination of deduction, narrative and puzzle games. Tamarak Trail is a deck-building roguelike where you'll use a customizable dice set as you battle through randomly generated trails full of loot, mysteries, and danger to protect inhabitants from the evil that has corrupted the trail. Last, but certainly not least, introducing our most recently announced title, Monolith: Requiem of the Ancients! Journey across Gliese, a mystical world under threat by dark forces in this vibrant, action RPG. With the power of the Runic Swarm in your hands, crush the minions of evil on your path to fulfill your destiny and become the planet's savior. If you're discovering our games for the first time or missed past sales, now's the perfect time to get in! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1403440/Broken_Roads/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1924360/Lil_Guardsman/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1591220/Tamarak_Trail/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1989320/Monolith_Requiem_of_the_Ancients/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1220170/Eville/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/953880/First_Class_Trouble/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/560130/Pillars_of_Eternity_II_Deadfire/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1203710/UnMetal/

Hello, everyone! We hope the beginning of summer has been off to a great start for you all! Our annual Steam Summer Sale is going on right now where you can get up to 90% off, but we also want to mention Steam Next Fest where we debuted demos for several of our upcoming titles! We had not one, not 2, not even 3, but 4 demos to show off, and we thank each and every one of you who played them and spread the word. For those unaware, here's a short summary of what each title is about: Tamarak Trail is a deck-building roguelike where you'll use a customizable dice set as you battle through randomly generated trails full of loot, mysteries, and danger to protect inhabitants from the evil that has corrupted the trail. In Lil' Guardsman, imagine you're a 12-year-old, suddenly in charge of the guard shed at the castle gate, where you decide if elves, goblins and 100+ other characters should be admitted. It's a wonderful combination of deduction, narrative and puzzle games. Broken Roads is a narrative-driven RPG that brings exploration, strategic turn-based combat and meaningful philosophical choices to an all-new Australian post-apocalyptic setting. Finally, in Stray Souls, enter a world of nightmares in this third person, action-horror, inspired by the classics of the genre. Fight terrifying creatures, solve mind-bending puzzles, and unravel a horrid family secret to expose the chilling truth behind your existence. If any or all of them pique your interest, add them to your wishlist now! And don't forget to check out our catalog of existing titles for those glorious Summer Sale discounts! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1807210/Stray_Souls/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1403440/Broken_Roads/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1924360/Lil_Guardsman/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1591220/Tamarak_Trail/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1220170/Eville/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/953880/First_Class_Trouble/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/560130/Pillars_of_Eternity_II_Deadfire/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1203710/UnMetal/

The Versus Evil Spring Sale is now live on Steam! Get up to 90% off!
In addition to the sale, we want to shine a light on our most recently announced titles coming in 2023! First up is Broken Roads, an RPG that brings exploration, strategic turn-based combat, and meaningful philosophical choices in a rich, engaging narrative set in an all-new Australian post-apocalyptic setting. Next is Tamarak Trail, a deck-building roguelike where you'll use a customizable dice set as you battle through randomly generated trails. As a member of the Sturgeon Lodge, a secret society tasked with defeating a malevolent presence, you must protect all from the evil that has corrupted the Tamarak Trail. Finally, there's Stray Souls, a new third-person, action-horror game. Fight terrifying creatures, solve mind-bending puzzles, and unravel a horrid family secret to expose the chilling truth behind your existence. We look forward to sharing more about Broken Roads, Tamarak Trail, and Stray Souls with you all in the coming months! In the meantime, explore our ever-growing catalog of titles for those sweet, sweet deals! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1807210/Stray_Souls/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1591220/Tamarak_Trail/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1403440/Broken_Roads/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1220170/Eville/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/953880/First_Class_Trouble/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/560130/Pillars_of_Eternity_II_Deadfire/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1203710/UnMetal/

The Versus Evil Winter Sale is now live on Steam! Get up to 90% off!
Everyone is always trying to score the best deals during the holidays, and boy, do we have deals for you! Our newest title, Eville, recently launched a new DLC pack called the Frost Golem Pack! Become one of the mighty Frost Golems, an ancient denizen of the Frozen Tundra. This cosmetic pack includes several items including the Frost Golem Avatar, Ice Crystal Club Back-Item, Ancient Frost Mask Accessory, Making a Friend Painting, and Frost Golem Loading Screen! Celebrate the season with these winter-themed items! Want to experience more wacky antics with your friends? Then consider picking up First Class Trouble! More of a solo gamer? Not a problem! Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, The Hand of Merlin, Cardpocalypse, Yaga, and UnMetal are all lengthy single-player affairs that you'll end up dumping hours upon hours into! Browse our catalog, and may you find the perfect game and score the perfect deal this holiday season! Look forward to 2023, as it'll be Versus Evil's 10-year anniversary, and we'll have plenty of exciting things in store for our biggest year yet! Happy holidays from all of us here at Versus Evil, and we'll see you soon! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1220170/Eville/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/953880/First_Class_Trouble/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/560130/Pillars_of_Eternity_II_Deadfire/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1206600/Almighty_Kill_Your_Gods/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1203710/UnMetal/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/888530/Yaga/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/904400/Cardpocalypse/

If you missed out on last month's special deal, we're having another one, so act quick! Fantasy usually comes to mind when thinking about RPGs. How about adding sci-fi horror into the mix? In The Hand of Merlin, explore lands rife with otherworldly evil, make narrative bending choices, and search for the lost fragments of your soul across the multiverse while saving as many worlds as you can! Get The Hand of Merlin 40% off from now until December 20th! https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

The Versus Evil Autumn Sale is now live on Steam! Get up to 90% off!
Can you believe it's almost Black Friday again? It's crazy how quickly time flies. What's even crazier is the discounts for our slate of titles are the highest they've ever been, so strike while the proverbial iron's hot! Check out our newest release, Eville! Eville is a new take on the social deduction concept with realtime gameplay and interaction. You find yourself in a village riddled by a series of murders. Some say it might have been you - or was it? Convince others you're not a murderer to stay alive! Best of luck, villagers! Want more multiplayer mayhem? First Class Trouble is available! In First Class Trouble, players must work together and against each other to survive a disaster. You either deceive or deduce your way to victory in a charming, yet unsettling and often mischievous environment. Whether you do it sober or with a slight buzz, First Class Trouble will serve you a dangerous cocktail of difficult decisions and wacky possibilities! There's also our tried-and-true single-player offerings, such as Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, The Hand of Merlin, Cardpocalypse, Yaga, and UnMetal! They all have hours of content for you to sink your teeth into! Whether it's RPGs or CCGs, gameplay-heavy or narrative-heavy, single-player or multiplayer, we have a game just for you! Browse our ever-expanding catalog, and hopefully you'll find something new to enjoy! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1220170/Eville/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/953880/First_Class_Trouble/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/560130/Pillars_of_Eternity_II_Deadfire/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1206600/Almighty_Kill_Your_Gods/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1203710/UnMetal/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/888530/Yaga/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/904400/Cardpocalypse/

Fantasy usually comes to mind when thinking about RPGs. How about adding sci-fi horror into the mix? In The Hand of Merlin, explore lands rife with otherworldly evil, make narrative bending choices, and search for the lost fragments of your soul across the multiverse while saving as many worlds as you can! Get The Hand of Merlin 40% off from now until November 17th! https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Since The Hand of Merlins release, weve received an incredible amount of feedback from the community and weve read every single request, suggestion, and bug report. We cant thank you enough, and please keep them coming! Were excited to share that weve just released a new update containing some new features, as well as a wide collection of general fixes and quality of life improvements. Read below for full details!
New features: Revamped the control scheme when using controllers. UI navigation should now feel more intuitive, and aiming in combat should be more precise as well. Heroes can now be repositioned on the battlefield during the new Deployment Phase, just before battle actually begins. General fixes: Fixed a crash when starting the game after having played with a Hero added via a mod and then disabling that mod. Fixed a crash when starting the unmodded executable with mod content available. Fixed a rare crash that could randomly happen in combat. Fixed skirmish hints overlapping with the action bar. Fixed arrow trails not being visible enough when almost completely vertical. Fixed card tooltips being obscured by Map State Top Bar in TV mode. Changed the blacksmith prices to regenerate if the discount changes inside the same city (like in the Toledo encounter). Visiting the regular blacksmith first, then getting the discounted blacksmith and going back to the regular blacksmith will regenerate the prices, because that blacksmith is now either angry you went to the other one or happy you came back to him, so he adjusts his prices accordingly. Fixed a bug where reaction areas would remain in their original places after repositioning a unit (for example, Warriors passive). Fixed an issue where the portrait tooltip when hovering over a unit would be behind the reposition banner. Fixed an issue where large units didnt properly take into account the walkability of tiles just outside their range, which was most apparent for large toads using their leap ability where they could jump onto a tile with a unit just outside the range, causing the two units to occupy the same tile (small unit in a large unit). In Endless Mode maps, moved enemy spawn points so that its impossible for large units to spawn inside abyss or cover. Fixed a bug where bestiary notification would keep popping up even if there were no new abominations encountered in a fight. Fixed a bug when spawning wave units in the case where theres no room for the unit to spawn on any spawn point, which would lock out player controls due to the infinite loop. Fixed a bug where sometimes some aura effects could remain lingering, potentially causing gameplay issues. Fixed an issue where selecting spells for the loadout didnt work well on screen resolutions other than 1080p. Imposing Defense (upgrade of Warriors Fend Off skill) now has correct status effect name to be visiblly different from the base ability. Fixed a bug where all upgrades of Archers Vigil (Ranger skill) were treated as defense skills instead of offense skills. Fixed Mythic Wygar relic ability being counted as offense, when its a defense ability. Fixed an issue where Merlins Translocation spell used the wrong visual effect. Fixed a bug where the knockback from abilities that can push the caster wasnt shown during the preview before using the ability. Fixed an issue where Warriors Dreadful Rebuke status effect would sometimes trigger when not intended. Fixed an issue where killing the last enemy didnt let the rest of the skirmish actions finish, which included animation actions, causing units to T-pose at fight ends. Fixed the endless combat number counter not being correctly scaled. Fixed a bug where the icons for skills were incorrectly scaled in the Codex. Fixed an issue where the portrait bar floating controls were obscuring the buff/debuff icons. Fixed an issue where the tile tooltip was showing a floating control for hiding it without any context (aka added explicit text to it saying hold to hide this tooltip. Fixed some z-fighting issues with the mini portrait UI. Fixed various typos. Quality of life: Added a new options tab Progress. Moved the wipe progress button there, and added a new button for rechecking achievements / trophies. Updated the ability tooltips to show the type of skill (offense/defense/utility). Zoom level is now preserved across fights. Closing the game will reset this. Swapped the colors of relic backgrounds in the codex relic tab to make them match the color of the relic name. Improved the tile tooltip wording for AP and mana costs, dashing and reveal texts. Changed Volley projectile params to make the arrow and particles more visible during its travel. Added a new menu option for swapping the left and right mouse buttons. Gameplay balancing: Added a new species category for construct. Changed all decoys and automatons to be constructs. This means abilities which target abominations will no longer target player-summoned units. Carnwennan relic now has a 1 round CD. Changed Raise Shield (upgrade of Warriors Shield Block skill) to not decay from auto-use abilities or effects, such as reflected damage. Rangers Protective Partner skill (upgrade of Partner Up) can now reduce enemy accuracy to zero. Paladin passive description is updated to explicitly say it does not trigger on movement abilities. Edited description of Sword Sworn effect to say the attack must be targeted. Changed Warriors Fending Off status effects to only trigger when attacked by an enemy. Warriors Sword Sworn skill and upgrades updated description so to note that the caster can only mark one ally at a time. Thorntoads Miasma is now capped at 2 stacks max (previously, it was uncapped). Changed Basilisks Whip ability to apply damage (and Daze for the Dire version) before knockback, since doing it afterwards makes the damage be treated as ranged if the target was pushed. Armor bypassing skills on enemies have been toned down. Enemy Mystics abilities have been toned down. Enemy Alchemists now deal fewer stacks of Blind/Slow per throw. Linux / macOS: Removed x8 anti-aliasing option for macOS devices. Fixed crashes on Linux with AMD GPU that occured when the game was switched out of focus in fullscreen mode or when game window was resized. Fixed an issue where the Discord button did not work on Linux. Added support for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 controllers to Linux. Thats all for now. Thanks for reading!

The Versus Evil Summer Sale is now live on Steam! Get up to 90% off!
Put down those books and pick up a controller, because school's out, and it's time to play some games until the next semester begins! Want some stealth-action with a side of laughs? UnMetal is for you! How about saving the multiverse with some turn-based tactical combat with roguelite features? Give The Hand of Merlin a shot! From Cardpocalypse to Yaga to Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire and everything in-between, we've got you covered no matter your favorite genre! There's never a dull moment playing First Class Trouble! The new Sci-Fi Noir Pack lets you channel your inner 1950s gumshoe with an assortment of classic detective-inspired items (with a sci-fi twist!) including trench coats, hats, shoes, a magnifying glass, a monocle, and a typewriter vruumba! How elementary! We love zany social deduction madness, and if you do, too, then check out Eville and wishlist it today! We have a plethora of games, both single-player and multiplayer, across a wide variety of genres. We welcome you to view our catalog, and perhaps you'll find your new favorite game among this great list! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1220170/Eville/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/953880/First_Class_Trouble/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/560130/Pillars_of_Eternity_II_Deadfire/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1206600/Almighty_Kill_Your_Gods/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1203710/UnMetal/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/888530/Yaga/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/904400/Cardpocalypse/

Hi folks! Our post-release work has been mostly focused on fixing all of the reported issues. This includes the very few crash reports weve gotten (stuff like mods and startup on other platforms) and implementing some misc features, but were not making any new content. We dont have an ETA for these to go out in a patch yet, but when we do, well let you know. Weve also gotten some feedback about a few enemies being a bit too punishing (looking at the armor-bypassing bandits), and weve noticed a few things on our own while recording some new footage to get streamed on the store page. Our designer is taking a short vacation, so when she gets back shell take a look at those reports to see how to tackle the feedback for a few balance tweaks. We have been publishing these blog posts every week for the last two years, as it made sense to do so during development when there was a lot more going on. Now that our work is mostly just fixing bugs, the contents of most of the posts would be pretty much the same, and in an attempt to not repeat ourselves too often, our blog post schedule will transition to a more irregular one, aka when we have some news or different things to share. Ofc, this doesnt mean were not going to be active. Our Discord server is still there, and well try to help everyone who posts on the forums. Just note that were very few people and some of these might take time. MarkoP

General fixes: Fixed a bug where switching the graphics API to Direct3D 12 through the Options menu would lock the game in a grey screen, or a splash screen. Fixed a crash when clicking on the Bestiary notification. Fixed a bug where the Bestiary would stop showing the "unknown" beast names when clicking on any of the beast buttons. Fixed a bug in Endless Mode where enemy wave spawning was not scaling correctly. Fixed an issue where changing the Max Rendering Resolution setting in the menu would sometimes not be saved correctly. Fixed a bug where user input was possible before the skirmish was fully prepared at the start, allowing abilities to be used sooner than normal. Fixed a bug where a Pylon could die without properly stopping a delayed ability, or die playing the wrong animation. Fixed a few mismatched icons for node tooltips on the World Map. Fixed a typo in the "Siege of Osraige" encounter. Quality of life changes: Changed the offset of the notifications so they don't occlude the game version number in the bottom left corner. Improved the timing of gameplay effects during Pylon death animation.

Hey folks! Yesterday we launched the game into its 1.0 incarnation! Endless mode is now available after you beat the game on any difficulty, and is retroactively enabled for everyone who had Hard+ mode already unlocked. First to address one issue most people have been experiencing: the bestiary notification on the left side of the screen is currently causing a crash, and we have a fix for it already and will push a hotfix later today, along with some other fixes. In the meantime, you can get to the bestiary if you open the book regularly via the button on the top, and clicking the bestiary bookmark on the top right side of the book itself. For our post 1.0 plans, there are a few things we are working on to be added in the near future. The first feature is the ability to reposition your units at the start of combat in a small area where they start. This should alleviate some frustrations with having units in weird spots or being sub-optimally positioned for your playstyle, preference or build. The other addition is to expand the skill listing in the codex to show all skill upgrades as well, instead of only the base skills. This requires some additional work on tooltips, so should be ready in a few weeks as well. Also, well do our best to help anyone who has issues running the game, just let us know what issues you have, and give us a bit of time to investigate and come up with a solution, if one can be done on our end. As usual, let us know what you think! We have a Discord server where were active, so join us there! MarkoP

New features: Added a new game mode: Endless. It's a survival gauntlet in a brand-new biome (the heart of the Cataclysm) which is unlocked after beating the Campaign once. General fixes: Fixed a bug where Surge (from Ranger's Surging Shot) was being granted based on damage dealt by any member of the warband instead of the attacking Ranger. Fixed a bug where Ranger's Hunter's Spree skill (upgrade of Shoot) and Hunter's Prize (upgrade of Hunter's Mark) interacted incorrectly with each other, causing only one of them to apply. Fixed a few small visual issues with tooltips. Quality of life changes: Enabled selection of graphics API in the Editor.

General fixes: Fixed an issue in the Lobby where Essence used for Blessings (when selecting a new Hard Mode+ run) was not returned upon returning to the difficulty selection screen. Fixed an issue where reaction attacks could still trigger even if the reacting unit is stunned or staggered. Fixed an issue where enemies could be revealed prematurely if Alain the White was in the warband. Fixed an issue with Warrior's Sword Sworn skill not activating when the other sworn ally kills the target after the first has already hit it. Fixed an issue with the Serpent Skin relic where it could apply Poison to its wielder in some cases. Fixed an issue on Marca Hispanica's Inquisition combat maps where some props blocked visibility of walkable tiles. Fixed an issue where some objects did not provide cover as intended on Marca Hispanica's River Path combat maps. Fixed a visual bug with cone attacks where some tiles could be visually excluded from the area. Fixed a typo in Tariq's encounter. Quality of life changes: The large, static Legend widget which was shown on the right on the world map is now revamped into a smaller, dynamic widget which is contextual. This makes it take up less screen space while also being more informative.

Hey folks! A week before release, I decided to finally do something about a few things that bugged me, one of which was influenced by a discussion here on Steam.

Legend

Hints

General fixes: Fixed an issue where some skills that target multiple units (like Ranger's Volley) could sometimes not be able to hit units in the same effect area with other units that could be hit. Fixed Mystic's Reflective Empathy skill (upgrade from Empathy) from triggering from non-damage abilities. Fixed some edge cases with Warrior's Sword Sworn skill, in case it was used twice in the same turn or by two different Warriors on the same ally. Fixed an issue on the Herbal Shop set of combat maps (in Marca Hispanica) were some models were not correctly set up as cover objects. Fixed an issue on Desert - Corrupted combat map (in al-Andalus) where less enemies would spawn than intended. Gameplay balancing: Mystic's Hallowed aura can now stack if used by multiple Mystics. Ranger's Hunter's Prize skill and its upgrades now only grant AP to the Ranger instead of the whole warband.

Hey folks! Its two weeks until 1.0 release, and were still playtesting and fixing reported issues. For today, we decided to do a round table for how the team actually plays the game. I think that an interesting takeaway from this is that even the members of our team play the game differently, and everyone enjoys the game in a slightly different way for a slightly different thing. Robert (programmer) [quote]I like playing on Hard+ mode and experimenting with different Blessings and Curses. Since I've played the game quite a lot, I know how skills and enemies work so it's fun for me to change things up and do challenge runs. I usually take a balanced party: one warrior (Safir), one ranger (Merewen) and one mystic (Morgan Tud). Safir is unique since his passive allows him to make an automatic attack when using a defensive skill, which lets me turn him into a proper tank and still deal good damage. I like Morgan Tud because he's the only mystic to start with an active armor restore skill. Merewen is awesome because her passive lets her reset cooldowns on a kill, and that gives her crazy action economy potential with the right upgrades. My favorite skill on a warrior is Shield Block (-50% damage taken), since that's a simple and powerful way to extend your survivability. Safir already starts with it (hence why I love him!), so I usually either take Rage (a stacking damage bonus per attack done, there's a defensive version which also reduces damage taken) or something like Stunning Blow or Bash or anything similar that can hard-disable an enemy for a turn. Crowd control is a life saver on Hard! On a ranger, I love getting my hands on Quick Draw, which lets you shoot twice (or even thrice). There's an accuracy penalty, but once you get around that, you're dealing insane damage per round! For a mystic, I lean on Haephestian Salts (armor restoration) a lot. For the second skill, I usually prefer getting Exploding Brimstone, which is a grenade-type skill that destroys cover and deals damage in an area. It's great for opening up a shot for my ranger.[/quote] Mia (designer) [quote]I usually play on Normal, officially the reason is that I'm trying to balance the baseline difficulty. Safir, Rana, and Rumayla is my go-to team composition. Safir takes all utility and defensive skills to proc his passive, Rana goes for full buff mode, and Rumayla is my damage dealer with damage over time effects: poisons, bleeding, fire everything. I like being able to pass a round with AP remaining just to see the enemies die on their own round. I often aim to get Warcry to increase the power of my mystics abilities, and any DoT ability on Rumayla, with preference on Noxious Fumes as a base ability.[/quote] Will (artist) [quote]I like to play on Hard mode, cause I have a gamers ego. The hero combination I really love is Salim and Rana, the warrior is less important. I take those two because of the super high single target damage that Salim can apply. The most important part of this build for me is upgrading Salim's bow to get better range so I can maintain the Measuring passive ability![/quote] AleLuja (artist) [quote]I am always playing on Normal mode because I enjoy it the most. Hard mode doesn't tolerate mistakes:) My favorite characters are definitely rangers, I love them all, and it's always a hard decision which one to pick, so it mostly depends. Usually I take one warrior, one ranger and Rumayla. For the skills, I love getting Partner Up, Archer's Vigil, and Fend Off, then I can partner up with a warrior, get closer to enemies, provoke them to attack me, and shoot all of the moving characters and bastards who are attacking my warrior.[/quote] Kaz (artist) [quote]I prefer Hard+ mode (and its Doomed World). My usual warband consists of Tariq, Rana and Alain which is a party I find most suitable for eliminating threats before they can make their move against me. My playstyle relies on heavy damage and crowd control, so the preferred skills for me are those which replenish AP (like Haste), allow for extra damage (Commanding Shot and Volley) and allow for me to manipulate the enemy positioning in order to group them up (Carving Cleave and Bash). I find Rana's Hallow ability to be very versatile, allowing me to choose between extra AP (Flash Hallow) or evasion (Dense Hallow) to compliment Alain's passive later on. And, of course, to make the most out of my damage output, I carry Merlin's Core because of its passive ability.[/quote] sanduk (artist) [quote]I love to switch between Normal and Easy. It depends on what mood I am in. I love Easy mode where you don't have to think much and just have fun, learn about all the skills, make reckless decisions and just play the game. Normal is where I want a challenge and have to re-think my tactics and it feels rewarding. I never managed to beat the game in Hard mode. Every run I take different heroes, I really don't have a favorite, I love to combine everyone. It is mostly fun to see which hero combination will die the fastest, and the other way around. Since I'm using different heroes every time I use different skills, but I choose some skills more often that can bring me success, and those would be Bash and Cleave for warriors, Decoy and Take Aim for rangers, and for mystics Noxious Fumes and Restorative Salts.[/quote] MarkoZ (programmer) [quote]I usually play on Hard+ mode with Curses because I like the extra challenge it brings. I really like playing with Safir and Merewen and any mystic hero that seems most fun at the time. Safir and Merewen are great for hitting enemies multiple times, and it's always very satisfying to see plenty of hits for only a few action points. Safir's passive works great with skills that restore and/or don't spend any AP, and Merewen's cooldown reduction passive together with reaction shots can set up unexpectedly strong turns.[/quote] MarkoP (programmer) [quote]Ive been mostly playing Normal mode due to being constantly distracted with fixing issues and having to run through the entire game to make sure later stages of the game arent busted, and higher difficulties would have made that process slower. Because of this, I dont have a favored warband composition, so I play with random units every time (and am happy we added a button for that), tho I do aim for rounded compositions (one of each class). I do have heroes that I like how they work: Zahras passive is very nice and strong, especially coupled with Isabel, Safir using utility/defensive skills for damage is also fun, Salim with Measured passive and abusing Merlins Teleport spell to never lose it, Alain and his Decoy are also very useful, as is Rana starting with Hallow. The skills I found fun are Specialty Arrow upgraded into Bodkin Arrow to fully bypass armor, Partner Up and Sword Sworn are similar and very strong that allow for extra actions or damage, Martyrdom for the extra action economy, Volatile Mixture for nerfing enemy actions, Lunge and Cleave for pure damage, etc.[/quote] Whats your playstyle? Which heroes and skills do you usually take or have had the most success with? Share your success (or failure!) stories with us, and consider joining our Discord server if you want to provide direct feedback or discuss stuff with us. The game is only two weeks away from its 1.0 release, so there are just a few more opportunities for improving the game for that occasion, and we love hearing your feedback! MarkoP

New features: Added a list of skills to the Codex, showing all the learnable skills in the game. Skills that were seen at least once (through rankup cards, unlocked unit base skills or unlocked by beating the game) are automatically marked as visible in the codex, otherwise the name is obscured and the icon is dimmed. General fixes: Fixed a bug which caused the Million cuts achievement to stop working. Fixed a bug with the Butterfingers achievement, which didn't work for all variants of Roland's Horn. Mystic's Raze skill now correctly affects friendly units as well. Fixed a rare bug with the Holy Grail where it would not grant mana on killing an enemy if said enemy was behind a cliff, abyss or high cover. Fixed a bug where knock-back and pull-in effects could move units into abyss and cliff tiles. Fixed a bug where Pylons in Mursiyah would not take damage from the Holy Grail. Fixed a bug where Ranger's Partner Up skill (and its upgrades) would sometimes trigger off of unintended enemy abilities. Fixed a bug where aura positions could get snapped to incorrect tiles for large units. Fixed a bug where some Journal UI elements could be left over on the screen in rare cases. Fixed Atlantes' Automata, Castle of Glass and Castle of Illusions spells to no longer cost nor require AP to cast. Fixed the Warrior passive from triggering Grail of Honor (applies Compelled Duel) and Expurger (applies Poisoned), as in some cases the warrior triggering the passive could apply those effects to himself. Fixed the Lacerate ability used by some bandits to trigger the effects on the target at the visually correct timing instead of looking delayed. Fixed relic pricings for each zone so it is no longer possible to buy and sell at the same price. Fixed encounter "The Castle of Maidens" which had an option which was too long and went out of UI bounds. Fixed a bug where the core spell unlock confirmation dialog wouldn't correctly unlock the spell if you first pressed on the dialog itself (not a button) and then confirmed. Fixed a bug where the end of game report in the Lobby was scrolling in reverse with the gamepad. Fixed the difficulty mode descriptions to make the Story Mode one not exceed its banner. Fixed a few typos. Optimizations: Reduced the game's overall memory usage by about 10%. Quality of life changes: Updated tooltips for Bleeding, Poisoned and Burning to indicate that these effects scale with the damage modifiers of the unit which last applied these effects. When using a gamepad, tile selection will no longer be able to go outside camera bounds. Gameplay balancing: Arcane encounters in Albion now will grant the first Essence even on the first run. Relic shops in places other than Albion now sell Rare relics as well. Reduced the range of Pylon of Disruption's random teleportation ability from 10 to 4 tiles. Furtive status effect will no longer be lost via reaction attacks.

Hey folks! During the course of Early Access, weve 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 wed 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 didnt have the full information about the amount of text wed 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 wed get it done within about a month, and pass it on for localization. As such, we didnt yet have precise numbers for the cost of translating the game to other languages. Unfortunately, weve painted ourselves into a corner with this aspect. When we started creating the game, we did not anticipate wed really end up with this much text. We dont regret making the game this way, were happy with what weve 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 were a small indie team, we dont 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 wont ship with languages other than English. Of course, theres the option to use crowd-sourced translations, but that comes with some risk as well. Wed 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 wont buy the game unless its translated to their language, we are really sorry. Were just 8 people conscious of our budget and we can only do so much. All that said, since the game can be modded, its 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 wouldnt be able to guarantee the quality of it. If youre interested in making a mod like that, you can always join our Discord server and ask how to go about actually making it, wed be happy to help with that part. MarkoP

Hey folks! Since were still in playtesting and bug fixing mode, there arent a lot of juicy design topics to ramble about. Were steadily ironing out the kinks from the game, and every report weve 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 weve decided to push the patch for next week. We dont 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*

June 14th!

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 didnt 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, lets 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: Merlins 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 Merlins lost kin, the other Guardians. But it just didnt 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, its way shorter, so thats good! Over the past year, weve 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 its been a brutal experience! But also very fun, with lots of things weve 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 were such a small team and all spread so thin. Theres no dedicated community manager or tech support contact: its 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 cant 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, its 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 theres 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 theres 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. Thats 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 Merlins first day in Early Access. Its been an amazing year, and were very excited to reach the end of our EA voyage and officially release version 1.0 in the near future (youll be hearing more about that very soon)! Before we wrap things up here, Ill 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. Youve 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. Were 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! Weve also got reports coming in from the QA team testing the game. Theyre 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 its 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 were 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 theyre reported. Weve also gotten some good general game feedback on our Discord server and Steam that weve been discussing internally. Were actively looking to iron out the kinks in the game, and improve the situation for new players. Although were close to release, it doesnt 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

General fixes: Fixed a crash when opening the in-game Options menu on macOS. Fixed an issue in the final boss fight which would cause the script to break (and the boss would never spawn) if player killed a Pylon in a certain way. Added a check to the lobby that automatically unlocks any heroes that are not unlocked in the profile, but should because they don't have any unlock requirements. This is notable for mods adding new Heroes. Added a fixup for Atlantes' core achievement for players who unlocked the core before the achievement was added. Fixed a rare occurrence which could block progress in Roncevaux Pass, making it impossible to progress into Al-Andalus. Fixed a bug where locked relics (rewarded for completing the game) could appear in encounters/relic shops before being unlocked. Fixed Canoel random encounter with the Thief: they should now properly steal a static amount of gold every time, and return it if caught. Fixed Keen status effect (granted by Breunor's passive) to properly expire at turn end. Fixed a bug where the self-buff part of Warrior's Taunt skill (Blocking) could sometimes miss. Fixed a bug with Grail of Piety relic where its extra healing effect would also erroneously reduce CDs by 1. Fixed an issue preventing Thorns status effect from reflecting any damage. Fixed an issue preventing different variations of Roland's Horn relic from spawning. Fixed an issue where Cockatrice's abilities were not affected by cover. Fixed a bug where status effects (and their visuals) could in rare occasions be applied to units that just died. Fixed multiple skills which you could not use at 0 AP despite them costing 0 AP. Added green and red diamond markers to tier 3 skill upgrades where they were missing. Updated Cockatrice's Wingslam VFX to better fit the ability's logical hitbox. Added several sound effects which were missing on certain enemies. Updated various hint images to display the latest UI. Updated descriptions of various relics and skills to clarify them. Fixed a rare bug where the grid outline in combat was sometimes flashing or was not rendered properly. Fixed missing footstep sounds on a certain skirmish map. Various minor visual fixes across several levels. Quality of life changes: Improved the automatic camera tracking logic. The camera movements should feel smoother and far less janky now. The rankup notification can now be shown even while the Journal is open (i.e. the player is in an encounter), which should help players not miss their rankup opportunities. Gameplay balancing: Attribute rewards at rankup have been adjusted. The choice is now between +2 Health or +1 Armor, but every four levels there will be a third choice for a random attribute.

This post was written by Will, our VFX artist. Hi everyone. In The Hand of Merlin there are a great number of status effects, (over 200 in fact) which grant the player various different boons and banes that players will have to manage to effectively beat the evil monstrosities they are presented with. The task of visually representing these needed to be broken down so that players could quickly and effectively see what type of status currently affects the units on the skirmish map. The gameplay implications needed to be represented were decided as follows;
Status effect VFX categories Buffs: [olist]

Incapacitated (unable to take any action, stunned) [/olist] So I designed some quick concept sketches which the team helped me to refine. Then it was time to test and check them in the engine.










This is how they all look overlapping and while there's a lot going on it's much more readable than it was.
We here at Room-C hope this will make the game easier to play and make it more obvious that a status effect is affecting a unit and indicate its type. You can share your opinions with us on our Discord server! Will

[ 2022-05-04 11:01:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

New features: Updated the VFX for most status effects, which should be now be more intuitive and readable even with multiple effects stacked. General fixes: Fixed an issue on certain Mac and Linux machines causing a "GPU not recognized" error message at game start. Fixed an issue where Hero Prowess unlocks did not work when defeating the final boss. Fixed an issue in the final boss fight where Mana would not be restored via the Holy Grail if killing a unit on the same turn it was spawned on. Fixed an issue where Dire Toad's Bristleback ability could trigger repeatedly off of reflected damage (such as Thorns). Fixed an issue where the choice cards for Ranger's Explosive Arrow skill upgrades showed the same text. Fixed a bug in the encounter "A Day for Jousting", where points were awarded incorrectly in the case of one broken lance. Quality of life changes: The "essence available" notification on the world map now pops up and animates only if you had no essence before gaining one. If you start the map state with one or more, it is still present, just not animated across the screen. Optimizations: Reduced clutter on several maps, which does not affect visuals but improves performance and reduces memory usage. Gameplay balancing: Replaced Ranger's Specialty Arrow skill upgrade which was overlapping with the new Exploding Arrow skill with a new upgrade - Stunned Arrow, which applies a stun to the target. The status effect Timed Bomb applied via Ranger's Explosive Arrow skill can now be detonated prematurely by killing the affected target. Mystic's Noxious Fumes skill is buffed: increased max charges from 2 to 3, and it no longer affects allies. Tendril Whip relic now has a 60-degree cone area of effect instead of a line.

Hey folks! On Monday we released our long awaited Content Update 7! Along with a bunch of fixes, changes and improvements, it also marks the release of our Editor to the general public. Thats right, you can now play the game in a modded environment and create your own mods or install mods others make! We have prepared several modding guides to help anyone wanting to try making their own. These span making new abilities, relics, encounters, maps, units, etc. If youre seeing this sentence here, it means the guides are not up as of writing this blog post. We expect to post them today (Wednesday), so when theyre up, there will be links here instead, so if you're interested in them, check back here later! Due to how the game is set up, some things are simpler to mod than others. Relics, skills and (by extension) status effects are for the most part a drop in and it works resource. They automatically integrate with their respective systems. Encounters, zones and skirmish maps are, to some degree, mutually dependent on each other. Zones require some number of encounters to work, and encounters that have a fight need to specify the skirmish map where the fight is, and each fight needs input from the encounter (if set up for it) on where to spawn enemies. The guides will go into more detail on each aspect of modding if youre interested. Other than this, we have a patch for later today that will fix some issues found at the last minute before the update went live and a few extra ones reported after, plus some additional VFX. This is about the time we like to either mention or write a whole blog post about the what next? question, the roadmap, the future, 1.0 release and adjacent topics. Good news! Theres one more feature weve got in the oven, the dreaded Endless Mode (name pending?). We have it playable internally, but we still need to playtest it and tweak it and see what the difficulty progression needs to be and all that stuff. Once were happy with that, well slap the big ol 1.0 sticker on the game and release it out of Early Access! Its really not that far off. After that, we plan on supporting the game with any updates the game can benefit from. Well be listening to every piece of feedback we receive and see which ones we can do to further improve the game! Just like, keep in mind were a small team and dont have the manpower to turn the ship (or the camera) in a whole different direction. Thanks! If you have any questions about either modding, our release date, or just want to yell at us for making a (great) game, join our Discord server and lets engage in some constructive discussions! Steam forums are fine too! MarkoP

Major Update 7 - Modding!

• Revamped the final boss fight with new mechanics. It should now be more engaging, but also more rewarding: every victory will unlock new skills and relics that can be found in the following runs.
• Added new skills for each class:
• Warrior: Charge, Fend Off, Hook, Rebuke, Second Wind, Slam, Sword-sworn, Taunt.
• Ranger: Commanding Shot, Disengage, Explosive Arrow, Partner Up, Supply Line.
• Mystic: Cleanse, Empathy, Incense, Observation, Volatile Mixture.
• Added new per-class passive skills:
• Warrior: Automatically attacks enemies moving into or out of melee range to apply Bleeding.
• Ranger: Gets a stacking bonus to power and accuracy against a target flanked by the Ranger's allies.
• Mystic: Applies a stacking healing-over-time effect to allies standing next to the target of the Mystic's primary attack.
• At rank-up, instead of getting an automatic Health increase, Heroes will now be able to choose to improve either Health, Armor or a combination of both (presented via choice cards).
• Added official support for macOS (10.13 High Sierra or newer) and Linux (SteamOS 3.0 or Ubuntu 18.04 LTS).
• Added official support for Steam Deck.
• Added modding tools and integrated support for Steam Workshop.
• To install mods, subscribe to them here:
• http://steamcommunity.com/app/600610/workshop/
• Then run the game from Steam and select "moddable" from the popup menu. You can view and manage mods from the Options / Steam Workshop menu.
• To create mods, install and run The Hand of Merlin - Editor. We'll be adding modding guides soon - stay tuned!

• Fixed an issue where closing the game in specific circumstances could cause the save data to get corrupted - this should no longer be possible.
• Fixed a crash in the relic shop when dragging a relic into a slot where there is no hero.
• Fixed a bug where the reroll button for skill cards was not usable with a gamepad.
• Fixed a rare bug where Tariq's Bladedancer passive would not work correctly in certain cases.
• Fixed a rare crash if holding down [Esc] while the game is transitioning between states.
• Fixed a bug where unit attributes weren't updated when a status effect that affects that unit had its stack count changed.
• Fixed an issue where toggling "show extended tooltips" (formulas) didn't trigger an update for status effect tooltips, for cases where they had a value derived from a formula.
• Fixed an issue where destroyed cover objects could sometimes still show up as whole and translucent when hovered-over by mouse.
• Fixed a rare bug where encounter cards could get overlapped if clicking on them extremely fast.
• Fixed the tooltip for Pheasant Feather relic, which did not list the actual effect applied.
• Irish Gorget relic can no longer miss with its heal effect.
• Fixed an issue causing the Skein of Thread relic to be unequippable.
• "The House of Peace" encounter now correctly grants Supplies when picking pomegranates.

• Fresh profiles will now start with 0 Essence, instead of 1. To offset this, winning the game now grants 1 essence every time as a minimum. This is a QoL feature because it eliminates the Core/Spell selection step of the loadout process for the very first run of a new player.
• Improved the Lobby UI (roster and loadout selection) - it should be both more informative and more intuitive now.
• Added "camera speed" option for the Lobby transitions.
• Removed the list of previous end-of-run reports from the Lobby, as this screen was very seldomly used.
• Improved the skill cards layout for better readability.
• Added stats tracking to Victory/Defeat screens: enemies defeated, turns taken, etc.
• Ability tooltips will now indicate the shape and size of an ability's area of effect in the tooltip header.
• Added an attribute breakdown to unit tooltips, for added clarity of various effects' interactions.
• All tooltips will now show formulas in parenthesis only if the formula is non-trivial (i.e. involves at least one multiplication).
• Added subtle box backgrounds for the various combat UI elements to make them easier to read in both light and dark environments.
• Improved the visuals of the in-game UI scrollbars.
• Improved the visuals of the in-game Bestiary's navigation labels.
• Changed the icons and names of the map nodes in the final zone (Jerusalem) to be more clear about what they reward.
• Renamed Mystic's Desecration skill into Raze, as this is more appropriate to the lore.

• Morgan Tud's Druid Physician passive is replaced with Thornwarden: it applies Thorns to adjacent allies after using Singe, granting them damage reflection.
• Zahra's starting skill (Stand Ready) is removed and replaced with Second Wind: it clears debuffs and restores armor to caster.
• Soft-disables will no longer be able to reduce attributes to zero, meaning they cannot turn into hard-disables. For example, Slow can no longer reduce Speed to zero, which would make it the same as Root.
• Mending now stacks with itself, but has a cap of 5 stacks.
• Bleeding now stacks with itself, but has a cap of 5 stacks.
• Ranger's Blinding Smoke skill (and its upgrades) have been buffed to apply stronger debuffs (now scaling with Power).
• Wilfred no longer starts with the Sprint skill, but instead with Shiv.
• Wilfred's passive (Non-chalant) has been buffed to deal more damage to Targeted enemies (now scaling with Power).
• Rumayla's passive (Piercer of the Veil) has been buffed - it now reduces targeted enemy's Power by -25% (instead of a flat -2).
• The extra damage granted through Breunor's passive (Keen) no longer applies to just one hit, but instead lasts for the whole turn.
• Zahra's starting Armor is now 25 (up from 15), and her starting Power is now 5 (up from 4).
• Zahra's passive (Resourceful) has been buffed - it now restores armor points equal to 50% of maximum Armor (instead of 1*Power).
• Ranger's Surging Shot skill (upgrade of Shoot) has been buffed. Grants Surge on damage dealt instead of health damage dealt.
• Abominations will no longer apply Poison or Bleeding - these effects are now reserved for players. Instead, monsters will apply Corruption, which has tighter rules on stacking and maximum damage per turn.

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Hello there, players. My name is Kaz. Im a 3D and concept artist who was working on the Hand of Merlin from its very beginnings. For todays blog post I gathered up some very old concept art to take you through our monster design journey. When the game was still in its diapers, we had no concrete idea what style or atmosphere we wanted our enemies to portray. We had general narrative pointers - but no aesthetics to accompany them. This was an important decision to make early on because enemies are, of course, a very important part of communicating the nature of the danger youre facing and for complimenting the overall story of the game. We knew we wanted them to feel completely alien to our heroes, but still aesthetically fit together with each other to make it clear that they come from the same place. Very dangerous and strange place. A different universe, even. We went through dozens of distinct ideas, ranging from the remains of prehistoric animals to creepy half-functioning robots from the future. Even a combination of the two, perhaps animated by some unknown alien force. We gave crystals and elementals a go, carnivorous plants, tar and slime, rock/lava themed goliaths, insects and even some fleshy horrors inspired by the Silent Hill series. At one point we even entertained the thought of animal hybrids, though we decided those looked too familiar and not scary enough, even if explained by external alien corruption. Its important to note that the design of the abominations was heavily influenced by the technical and gameplay limits, as well. For example, the fact that the enemies were supposed to fit a square-shaped tile underneath them made any ideas for monsters with elongated bodies unviable. A lot of quick sketches were made, many of which were never even fully coloured, let alone finalised.

Picking a colour theme for our abominations was important as well. We wanted the creatures to sport hues which were as uncommon in nature as possible, to make them more alien. This colour palette would also be the identifying aesthetic of the corruption itself - the strange force seeping into our healthy world and gradually killing it. The monsters were to be its deadly harbingers.

After a lot of testing (with fire-orange and neon green being a dominant choice in the beginning), we opted for the dark purple, red and black. We felt that the combination of these colours represented the right amount of darkness and mystery, while looking very unnatural and dangerous when placed on the world and skirmish maps against the rocks and foliage. It really popped out in contrast to the healthy green and made the scenery look infected, sickly. The monsters born from this unnatural darkness would be a combination of aliens and insects, with a dash of something reminding the players of plants and vines. Something, we believed, would be the strangest and scariest from the perspective of the people in the medieval times who had no concept of any monsters beyond their era-appropriate mythology. We also decided to avoid giving them eyes (with the exception of the Redcap, our eyeball-pancake), realising that the monsters looked much more scary and unrelatable if they had no identifiable face. Most of the early concepts never saw the light of the day, being pushed under the rug with the rest of the discarded ideas. However, some early drawings were a nice base for the evolved purple designs later on. Once we had our general aesthetic flashed out, we could make new designs or modify some of the existing initial ideas to fit the needs of the gameplay mechanics assigned to the particular monster. Heres an example.
Our game designer, Mat, needed a monster which could run around freely and attack from a distance. This fit nicely with the existing birdlike (or dinosaur) concept we already had, since it looked quite agile and was designed to shoot quills. However, Mat wanted this monster to have a lot of health at its disposal, while not being particularly well armoured. Hence, its sturdy armour plates were removed or shrunk, while its overall mass was increased by adding tumours and wild flesh. This made the enemy look like it could soak more damage to its HP, while also playing on the morbid/sickly aesthetic. Next, Mat wanted this creature to be able to infect the heroes with a lingering ailment from afar, but also to push away the units in its melee range without causing a lot of damage. This lead to the quills and needles of the original design being dropped, in exchange for something big and blunt. In this case, to stay true to the dinosaur inspiration, a set of heavy protruding tail bones were added. For the lingering negative status effect the poison of choice was Well, poison. More accurately, venom. A dash of sickly green was added to the swollen tumours to represent the venom sacks; and with that the monster design for the Basilisk enemy was finalised. Heres a picture of this enemy as it looks now in the game.
I hope you enjoyed this short overview of our monster creation history. I, myself, find its evolution to be quite interesting. Join us on our Discord server! Kaz

This post is written by Mia, our gameplay designer. Hello there! Two weeks ago we mentioned there will be some new abilities coming to The Hand of Merlin, today wed like to tell you a little more about them! There are at least a dozen new abilities (not counting the upgraded versions) coming to the game, warriors gaining the most since they needed a few more abilities in their pool to match the Rangers and Mystics. These warrior abilities which were missing will be readily available in the ability pool right away, the other abilities however will need to be unlocked! By saving worlds (winning) youll begin to unlock new relics and new abilities. This will allow further exploration of combinations and synergies, different builds and strategies. For every hero that survives the final battle, youll have a 66% chance of unlocking a new skill for their role, the other 33% is getting a new relic unlock. Should you for example already have all the mystic skills unlocked, instead youll have a guaranteed relic unlock (unless youve already unlocked everything, that is). You can unlock abilities on any difficulty, so if you'll be in a hurry Easy Mode is an option as well. All of this is susceptible to change if we see that its not as rewarding as we thought it would be. Some of these unlockable abilities are: Warrior - Hook Disrupt and pull your enemies to your warrior. Set up combos with your rangers or drag them through fire. Theres numerous ways to use it, offensively and defensively.
Ranger - Partner Up The new abilities of the rangers play around teamwork, and Partner Up is a great example of this. Designate another hero as your rangers Partner, whenever your Partner is attacked the Ranger will shoot at the attacker in revenge.
Mystic - Incense Most of the new mystic abilities are heavy on support duty. Incense is an aura which applies a debuff to all enemies in its radius, lowering their accuracy and evasion. Thisll help your rangers nail those Quick Draw shots and your warriors to evade attacks. Each upgrade of these abilities adds another function to it, giving you more ways to strategize. Were still ironing out some of the new abilities, as well as having our VFX artist hard at work trying to make them all look good as well. Its a work in progress, but were quite happy with how these new abilities act and interact with each other and the old abilities. If youre curious and want to know more before the update itself is out, feel free to poke up on our Discord server where we might share more. Mia

Hi all, Robert here, this time to talk about - Steam Deck!
Yup, that's right: we got the opportunity to test our game on Valve's fancy new piece of hardware, and I have to say: it's a pretty powerful device, and with all the optimizations we'd already done for the other consoles, The Hand of Merlin already runs on Steam Deck at a smooth 60 FPS. Some of you - the lucky ones - may already have a Deck in their hands, and if you do, you'll notice that Valve assigned us a yellow "Playable" tag. But over the last few days, we've been working on getting the few reported (minor) kinks out, so that we can have that nice green "Verified" tag. So let's unpack the journey of porting to Steam Deck, as short and pleasant as it was. First things first, we've already been working on supporting Linux natively. Although we haven't ticked the box to make this official on the store page yet, the native Linux (and macOS) executables have been available for some time now, and a few of our dedicated fans have been helping out with compatibility testing. This means we do not require Proton (a Windows emulation layer) to run our game on SteamOS / Steam Deck. In other words, there's no risk of an emulation layer introducing bugs or instabilities, plus there's zero overhead, which improves both performance and battery life. Secondly, the biggest gruntwork was updating our Steam API support from a fairly old version (that came by default in Serious Engine 4) to the newest one required by Steam Deck. This allowed us to correctly identify the input controls: both the touchscreen and the gamepad, and I have to say - planning ahead really helped us out here. With Steam Big Picture mode already supported via our dynamic UI scaling system, font legibility was no issue at all. Having already done full gamepad support, once we updated the Steam API, the controls also Just Worked(TM). Fortunately, Serious Engine also already has built-in support for touch input, and it helps that our UI does not require more than a single mouse button for most operations. There was just one small but important tweak we had to do: if using the touchscreen, you now always get a small confirm / cancel button before executing a move or attack action. This really helps prevent mistaken actions. On top of this, our engine works just fine with multiple input sources, so switching between the touch and gamepad controls on the Steam Deck felt really smooth and seamless, so much so that I found myself using the right analogue stick for quick and precise camera panning, and the touchscreen for most UI interactions. And finally, as I talked about in a previous blog post, we had done some significant optimizations in a push to bring the game to consoles. To properly support Steam Deck's hardware, all we had to do was correctly identify its GPU and set up appropriate default graphics settings. And voila - smooth, stable 60 FPS! Well, unless of course you limit the FPS from the Deck's Quick Access menu in order to preserve battery. But even if you do - the visuals won't change. The game will look just as good, but the battery will last longer. So, there you have it. Full support for Steam Deck incoming. :) For any questions or comments, find us on Steam Discussions or our Discord server. Robert

This post is written by Mia, our gameplay designer. Hello there! A good number of feedback weve received has mentioned a problem regarding classes. Specifically, that they arent different enough or lack some class-specific mechanic. We wanted to tackle this problem, but doing so without fully reiterating every ability, since we are approaching full release and running out of time. So just as every hero has their own unique passive, now so will each class have a passive related to it.

• Warriors For warriors, the loudest complaint weve heard is the lack of a zone of control - or rather, attacks of opportunity! And guess what folks, warriors are getting exactly that! The first enemy (per round) that tries to move next to a warrior will get whacked. Of course, we already had an ability that did exactly that. Stand Ready is being removed and replaced with a new ability - Provoke, which is also a very requested feature, a taunt!
• Rangers Rangers, primary damage dealers, are getting a strategic teamplay element to them - flanking. For each ally an enemy unit is adjacent to, the rangers gain bonus damage and accuracy against that enemy.
• Mystics For mystics we had several options, but settled for a passive which plays into positioning and teamplay. Morgan Tud will share his (old) passive with the other mystics now. On attacking an enemy with Singe, nearby allies are granted Mending which restores armor gradually. As for Morgan, hell be getting a new unique passive of his own, Thornwarden which plays into his abilities.

Hi all, It's Robert again - but now, I've put on my "game designer" hat and tackled the Final Boss! (To help out our other game designer who is, of course, knee-deep in the mucky innards of Endless Mode.) In any case, we had heard feedback that the battle of Jerusalem felt a little lackluster. We had also heard from some players that they didn't feel much of a pull to do another run after having beaten the game once or twice. So, we sought to change that. We set out to accomplish these two things: 1) Make the final battle feel more epic, and more engaging. To achieve this, the mechanics of the final battle are now quite different. Of course, all the recognizable elements are still there: there are still Pylons, and you still have to use the Holy Grail to strip the Pylons of their immortality, and you still feed the Grail mana by killing Abominations that keep pouring in. But this is where the similarities end! Before, each Pylon was relatively easy to kill, and while they came in ten different flavors, their differences did not really require you to change up your approach. Other than that, the boss itself was just a background entity which did not participate in battle directly. But the new, redux'd battle will have you face off against the eldritch monstrosity head on! The fight itself has 3 main phases. The first phase is a single Mega-Pylon: a massive, living structure, with a lot of Health/Armor and tons of damage potential. There are two variants, and both have unique reaction abilities that you cannot ignore. One will prepare a ray attack against the attacker each time it's hit, meaning you have to be careful with your action points or you'll get stuck in the blast zone and ripped apart. The other will spawn a temporary cover underneath the attacker, knocking them back, and then prepare a nova-style blast, damaging anyone not in cover. Again, care must be taken! But - both of these powerful attacks will also damage other Abominations, meaning you can make these Mega-Pylons work for you through careful positioning. And you will need to do this, as the wave spawning is relentless. But remember, every kill gets you a point of mana, which lets you power up the Grail and wreak holy havoc with it. :) The second phase is another of these Mega-Pylons (the variant you didn't see in Phase 1). These first two phases are really there to teach you the mechanics and not overwhelm you, while also giving you a chance to deal some damage and/or break immortality on the Pylons, before finally, the Boss itself emerges... And then you face off against all three at the same time! Without going into too much detail about what exactly the Boss does, let's just say it should make the battlefield feel dynamic with ever-shifting covers, while also drawing power from any Pylons left alive. Make sure to read those tooltips! ;)
2) Make winning a run feel more rewarding. As for this point: well, if the final battle itself feels more engaging, that's certainly rewarding in and of itself. But, we wanted to do even better! So, we're adding special rewards that you can gain by defeating the final boss: new skills and relics that you can unlock and add to the random pool! So completing a run successfully means you have new toys to play with in the following runs. Yes, this means we'll also be adding new abilities to complement and augment the skills you can already learn through ranking up. These won't just be variations of the same abilities; we've coded in some new mechanics, too. And the design principle between these additions has been one particular pillar of design: teamwork. Or in other words: more synergies between classes! But more on that topic in a later blog post. So there you have it. Pretty big changes are coming up! Let us know what you think about these on our Discord server or here on Steam. Robert

*This post is written by Mia, our gameplay designer.* Hello there! In Dev Blog 104 - Release when? you may have noticed that we mentioned a new game mode is in the works. The work-in-progress name for it is Endless Mode, and as the name suggests, it is a mode in which you can fight the abominations, in theory, forever. In Endless Mode Merlin sends his puppets into the Void itself, sealing their fate. Its a one-way ticket and a noble sacrifice in an attempt to curb the Corruption at its source. There is no happy ending for the heroes here, the only goal is to cull as many abominations as you can till you ultimately fall. This sacrifice comes in hopes that it may save a world one day. For while there are infinite worlds, there is only one Void. The story here takes a back seat though, as the focus and point of this mode is to just test out different builds and enjoy the combat strategy. Its meant for all the players who arent that interested in the journey and stories experienced on the path from Albion to Jerusalem. In Endless Mode, the pages between fights are short and more focused on the mechanical needs. After each fight theres a random gear upgrade available, and after every other fight, theres a relic available. Survive long enough and you could have your whole warband pimped out. Difficulty wise, it is not going to be easy. While it may start off as such, the difficulty ramps up steadily and continuously (up to a point). The main issue youll face will be managing your health, as it is the Void there is no friendly face around that could assist in healing your wounds. Good use of spells here will be important, to mitigate that, each fight rewards 1-3 mana. Its a work in progress, but the base has been set up and were now entering the testing phase and modifying accordingly. What we do have is some pretty new maps wed like to show off!



If you have any good ideas on how we should actually name this mode, feel free to drop in to our Discord server and let us know!

Hey folks! A little while ago, we were working on improving the skill upgrade process. The idea was to show the base skill on the screen during the upgrade. Even though this information was already there (through a tooltip on an icon between the cards), it wasnt very intuitive or obvious. When I was working on adding the middle card (which you can see in the game today), I was hanging out with a friend on discord and chatting about our work. Shes a UX designer, so she started giving me ideas for improving my situation. When I passed the ideas along to the team, after a bit of back and forth, we decided to hire her for freelance work to go over the UI/UX in the game. Now, a month later, we have a bunch of suggestions to improve the games UI. A lot of these are changes to font usage, text sizes and small layout tweaks, but there are a few that are a bit larger. Heres a list of items I consider notable changes:

• Difficulty selection screen will have all difficulties on the same screen instead of in sub-screens
• Hard mode + modifier selection screen gets a new layout
• Core selection screen gets a new layout
• Hero selection screen gets a new layout
• Codex hints will be rewritten to a different format
• Victory screen after combat gets new information
• Cards will be changed to a better information layout
• Warband book page tweaked layout
• Blacksmith tweaked layout
• Unit portrait tooltip tweaked layout

New features: Created new VFX for Cockatrice's Wail and Thorntoad's Blast (prepared ultimates). General fixes: Fixed a bug with the in-game menu's "Save and Exit" functionality, which incorrectly saved the game progress without any checks, which could lead to various issues in some cases. Fixed a bug where dead units would still be detected as turn injectors, preventing the turn from ever ending. Quality of life changes: Hero tooltips now show a better and clearer attribute breakdown.

This post was written by Will, our VFX artist. Hi, Will here! Today I'm talking about some of the exciting work I have been tasked with. When I joined there was a very large backlog of effects the team wanted to have created or tweaked and it has been my great honor to go through and rework and reinvigorate the games already existing effects. My most recent task however has been to come up with a new way to represent a very dangerous interaction for players; the prepared ultimate abilities of our Abominations. This is a place where the team feels the peril of the abilities were not being shown clearly enough to our players. I was as such given the freedom and time to really explore some options and come out with an effect that fulfills 3 key criteria. 1) Players know at a glance that the enemy is building up to a powerful attack. 2) Players should feel like they must deal with the impending threat in some way (either by focusing down the enemy or running away from its impending attack) 3) After the ability fires players should recognize how that attack was much more powerful than a regular attack. To that objective here are a couple of gifs to show off the difference between the old and new Wail ability. Before:
After:
We're making sure that all enemies that do a similar dangerous ability get a proper visual indicating so. This is all still work in progress, but at least it's a glimpse of what we're working on. As always, be sure to let us know what you think, either on Steam or our Discord server! Will

New features: Added notifications for Feats of Strength, unique accomplishments deemed too difficult to be classified as Achievements. These are hidden at first, but will appear in the Codex under a new tab when unlocked. Added and/or improved several visual effects on Heroes and enemies. General fixes: Fixed the Warband achievement from being unlocked after only 9 prowess unlocks to being unlocked after 12. Fixed a bug that caused Morgana or Atlantes to be unable to spawn once you started/progressed/finished the other one. Fixed a rare occurrence where it was possible for status effects to recursively trigger each other to infinity, causing a crash. Fixed a rare bug where triggering multiple effects that grant an out of turn action and action points would fail to resolve all of them and only leave the effects of one of them. Fixed an issue with Warrior's Coordinated Parry skill where it would fail to grant the nearest ally 1AP when attacked. Keen status effect will now correctly expire after a single attack (e.g.: Warrior's Cleave will deal extra damage to all targets, but Ranger's Double Shot only to the first target as it is 2 attacks). Warrior's Vengeful Parry skill upgrade is now different from its base version: can be used every round. Warrior's Sharp Vigil skill will now grant appropriate debuff to enemies on hit. Warrior's Fencing Lunge skill can no longer miss with the Evading buff. AP gain from Positive Warp spell can no longer miss. Piece of Avalon relic now grants appropriate status effects. Heroes will no longer get unusable rank up points if they have nothing to spend them on. Fixed wrong node labels in Jerusalem world map, which would say "City of Outpost" instead of just "Outpost". Fixed an issue where the camera could behave strangely in the final fight in Jerusalem if you started combat with a status effect. Fixed a bug in the Lobby where the hero selection X for removing a hero from warband didn't do anything. Fixed a bug where: if you were using a gamepad in a skirmish, had a Hero near the Hero portrait bar or enemy near the enemy portrait bar, hovered over that unit in the world and pressed Y (show unit tooltip), the tooltip would stay on screen when you released Y. Fixed an issue where the gamepad control hint for End Turn would be partly cut off from the screen. Fixed an issue where some tooltips could flicker on mouse press. Fixed various typos in encounters and tooltips. Quality of life changes: All cutscenes now support a "hold to skip" feature (with a non-intrusive info message) instead of immediately being stopped on a keypress. Removed icons from confirmation dialog buttons. Instead, the buttons are hover sensitive now. Added mouse wheel scrolling to the core selection and hero selection columns. Gameplay balancing: Lindworm's Gob now only applies 1 stack of Rooted to target (down from 2). Thorntoad's Leap (including its Dire version) is now classified as an offensive skill, meaning its use can be prevented with a skill like Warrior's Slam. Grace status effect now has a stack cap of 1. Miserable status effect no longer reduces AP.

This post was written by Robert, one of our programmers. Hi again! Robert here, programmer at & founder of Room-C. At long last, it's my turn to write a blog post again! A while back, I wrote about porting the game to Linux and macOS. In the meantime, we decided to expand into consoles as well. But rather than talk about consoles themselves, I wanted to make an overview of all the great things that came out of the console porting efforts that made the PC/Mac version better, too! So, here goes:

• Gamepad support Well, duh! :) Can't have a console port without them. But I daresay, after several iterations, we got the gamepad controls to a point where it's quite nice to play with a controller even on PC/Mac.
• UI improvements There's a couple of big things that happened here. [olist]
• Dynamic UI scaling We knew we wanted to support resolutions like 1080p and 4K. So instead of just keeping the UI tiny and small on 4K, or scaling it up naively to cause blurry text, we made sure to support this properly and deliver crisp, legible UI and fonts on any resolution.
• TV mode But what if you play the game on a TV? For me at least, my TV is a lot further away from my eyes than my PC monitor. So even though the TV is bigger, the picture still seems smaller. And that means we had to upscale the UI even further, to make sure our text-and-UI heavy game is legible even when played from the couch. How does this benefit PC players, you ask? Well, there's Steam's Big Picture mode, which we were able to add support for easily.
• UI clutter reduction Last but not least, simply scaling the UI up revealed design problems. We had a lot of stuff on our tooltips! Too much for it all to fit, in fact. It took some creative thinking to reorganize and simplify, to reduce clutter while still being informative. That alone was a major improvement for all players anywhere! [/olist]
• Optimizations Now, this is a huge topic. In short, we were able to get pretty big gains in performance, while also reducing memory usage quite a bit. On top of that, we made sure there are no performance swings - all areas of the game, even during spell casting and wrecking the destructible environment - retain consistently good frame rates. This means the game now runs better and smoother than ever, even on older PC/Mac hardware.

Texture optimization Oversized textures mostly have to do with wasting precious memory, but they also affect performance. By "oversized", I mean using textures which have too many pixels for the size of the object on the screen. Imagine a small rock, which uses up a small area on the screen, say 100x75 pixels. It makes no sense to apply a 2048x2048 texture to it, right? You can't even see those pixels. So, I created a tool in our Editor to visualize texture density in shades of gray. The lighter the image, the higher the density. That made it easy to spot light (dense) spots in any scene, at a glance.

Mesh optimization With meshes, it's a similar story. Why waste thousands of vertices on an object which only takes up a small area on the screen? Also, excessively dense meshes affect performance more so than memory, so there were big gains to be made. However, decimating a mesh is not as simple as downsampling a texture. Luckily, our Editor already had a powerful QEM (Quadric Error Metric) mesh decimator built-in. But - we have upwards of 800 unique meshes in the game. How do we process them all, making sure we decimate each one just enough, but not too much to introduce visible artifacts? Well - we write a tool, of course. :) And so, I wrote an automated tool which tries to guess an appropriate decimation factor, applies the decimation, and takes screenshots of the mesh from all six cardinal directions (north, south, east, west, up, down). If the before and after screenshots don't differ by more than some percentage of pixels (say, 3%) - the decimation factor is accepted.
Then it's a simple matter of trying an increasingly or decreasingly aggressive decimation factor until a sweet spot is found. Voila! You let the tool run for a day, and you have meshes guaranteed to use up as few vertices as possible without visible artifacts. This gave us FPS boosts of up to +50% on lower end hardware.

Whispers of Doom introduces a complete overhaul of the games VFX for the games hero and enemy classes. Core to the VFX upgrades was the ability for the game to show the sci-fi orientation of the game more clearly. Cosmetically, the visual overhaul now better represents the distinctions of character skills such as the Mystic, who creates effects through knowledge rather than magic like a traditional wizard or mage would. Also added in this latest update are legendary questline encounters which may reward relics of legendary power, as well as a new Guardian Core from Siglorel. The Corrupted core is awarded to players once they defeat the doomed world scenario, beating back the corruption in Jerusalem in Hard Mode with all Curses activated. This features 9 new and unique spells. Alongside a whole host of bug fixes and performance enhancements, the Whispers of Doom update now splits easy mode into two options, easy story and easy roguelike. Easy story mode presents the easiest option for players looking for a more narrative led experience with very little challenge. Easy roguelike on the other hand presents a good starting point for newcomers to tactical or roguelike games but who still want to be challenged. Additionally, the option to create a randomized party when starting a new game run based on the heroes a player has already unlocked has also been integrated in this update, this also automatically picks Prowess unlocks if available. Last but not least, 3 new achievements have also been added, Can't Run Forever (unlocking Atlantes' Core), Faevoured (unlocking Oberon's Core), and Legendary (obtaining a legendary relic through a questline).
Our early access journey with The Hand of Merlin is now complete as we look to align our full version 1.0 launch. Being able to harness valuable community feedback has been immeasurable to us, and has helped us deliver six updates that have enhanced balance, challenge, meta progression and skill sets, not to mention lots of exciting new game content added as well, Said Robert Sajko, Creative Director at Room C Games. Patch Notes - Early Access Build 677290 New features: Added a new Guardian Core: Siglorel's, with 9 new and unique Spells. It can be unlocked by winning the doomed world scenario: beating back the Corruption in Jerusalem in Hard Mode+ with all Curses activated. Added new questlines which may reward relics of legendary power. Visual Effects overhaul: Hero classes' (Warriors, Rangers and Mystics) and enemy abilities' VFX updated where appropriate. Easy Mode is now split into two: Easy (Story) and Easy (Roguelike). The former is meant to hardly present any challenge at all, and is meant for those seeking a narrative experience above all else. The latter is a good starting point for newcomers to tactical or roguelike games but who still want to be challenged. Added 3 new achievements: Can't Run Forever (unlocking Atlantes' Core), Faevoured (unlocking Oberon's Core), and Legendary (obtaining a legendary relic through a questline). Added the option to create a randomized party when starting a new run. The selection is made from the Heroes you have unlocked, automatically picking Prowess unlocks if available. Added several new encounter illustrations. General fixes: Fixed an issue on macOS where the game could have issues starting in fullscreen mode on Retina displays with resolution scaling enabled in OS settings. Fixed an issue on macOS where the Journal could sometimes appear solid red. Fixed an issue on macOS where in-game clickable URLs did not work (such as the button to join our Discord server). Fixed an issue on macOS where the Command button did not expand tooltips (like Alt does on Windows/Linux). Updated hints and tooltips on macOS to refer to the correct keys for that platform. Fixed a crash in the Lobby when removing Heroes from the party. Fixed a rare crash when using a gamepad during an encounter on the World Map. Fixed an issue where the run would be lost if game is stopped and started again during a certain encounter in Al-Andalus which interacts with the Holy Grail. Fixed a bug where force-closing the game during a transition between zones could leave that run in an invalid state, causing it to be lost. Fixed a bug where the fast-forward feature in skirmishes would affect the menus as well. Fixed a bug where enemy wave spawning in the battle of Roncevaux Pass didn't work correctly. Fixed a bug where the Blacksmith prices were not reset when arriving to a new Blacksmith. Fixed an issue where Salim's Measuring stacks would sometimes not get removed upon moving. Fixed an issue where Dire Thorntoad did not use Blast and Jump abilities as often as intended. Fixed an issue where the setting to confine the mouse cursor to the screen wasn't saved/restored when quitting/starting the game. Fixed a bug where multi-target abilities couldn't be used with the mouse on the same tile without first moving the tile away (i.e. it wasn't possible to double click a single tile). Fixed a bug where enemies that die affected by an aura didn't properly unregister themselves from the aura, potentially causing a crash or other incorrect behavior. Fixed a bug causing Wyvern to not trigger its Opportunist passive in case it was spawned in an ambush scenario. Fixed a bug where the auto-targetting logic of Morgan Tud's Druid Physician passive would not work correctly in certain situations. Fixed a bug where some effects could be applied to a unit after it died, if the sequence happened as part of the same ability use. Fixed an issue in Mallorca corrupted alternative skirmish map causing a potential AI chokepoint. Fixed an issue with the Blessings/Curses screen elements not scaling correctly on 4K / TV mode. Fixed an issue with the Blessings/Curses screen where the back button could be repeatedly triggered to constantly restart the animation. Fixed various cases of text clipping in Big Picture mode. Fixed a bug where the camera could still be manually controlled during the short cinematic momement of revealing the final boss in Jerusalem. Fixed a bug where screen fading would sometimes not work correctly when transitioning between game states. Fixed an issue where the Bestiary bookmark could reopen itself when not intended. Fixed an issue where bookmarks could sometimes not be clickable. Fixed an issue where reroll or cancel buttons were not reachable by gamepads when selecting skill cards at rank-up. Fixed "The Pen Is Mightier" encounter which would offer recruitment if party is full, rather than if not full. Fixed a bug where the portrait tooltip attribute breakdown didn't correctly show the base attributes for heroes with an active prowess unlock. Fixed a bug when gaining status effects where the scrolling combat message would show an incorrect number of stacks gained if they were higher than the max possible for that effect. Changed the description of Holy Desecration to note that it deals damage only to abominations. Changed the wording in the nourishment descriptions from past tense to present tense for the health/armor increased/decreased state, since they indicate state, not change. Fixed several typos in various tooltips. Optimizations: Cleaned up and optimized several combat maps, to reduce memory usage and improve performance. Greatly reduced the impact of all destruction effects on performance, without noticeable visual differences. Quality of life changes: The intro cutscene is now automatically skipped after being viewed at least once. It can be re-watched by clicking the Intro button in the Lobby. The vision pool in Merlin's Cave (the Lobby) will now show a view of the correct zone for the current run, rather than always Albion. Relic tooltips will now state the item's rarity, as well as use a color scheme to further help distinguish item rarities. The Guardian Core UI can now be accessed even during an encounter. Added separate icons for quest start and quest turn-in nodes. In addition, quest turn-in nodes will display the quest name. In addition to clicking the Shuffle button, random event cards can now also be clicked directly to initiate shuffling. The Hide Cards button, shown while selecting skills during rank-up, now says Cancel to make it clearer what it does. The Reroll button for skill cards is now disabled when the player doesn't have enough essence to use it. When selecting a skill upgrade, the current (base) skill is shown in the middle, with animated arrows pointing left and right to the skill cards available as upgrades. This should make it easier to compare the choices. Improved the Blacksmith tooltips to make it more clear that each upgrade tier is a replacement of the previous tier, rather than a stacking bonus. Improved Bestiary gamepad navigation, which should now feel more intuitive. Improved the presentation of the card selection screen in Big Picture mode. Skills with 0 AP cost which are self-cast now require the specific Hero to be targeted and clicked (or double clicking the ability itself) to activate it. This is to prevent accidently activating an ability when a hero is left with 0AP and is selected. Bandit enemy types now have names which should be more evocative of their signature skills, such as Executioner (Execute). This should help make them (and the threat they pose) more recognizable. Added prowess indicators to Hero selection screen in the Lobby, to make it clearer which type of Hero is selected for the run. The post-run report will from now on also show the modifiers (Blessings and/or Curses) that were affecting the run, if any. Changed the wording of the rendering resolution options to make it clear which resolution they represent. Added new sliders to the Options / Sound menu, for master volume, overworld music volume and combat music volume. Gameplay balancing: Changed the Fey Touched achievement to have a lower fey reputation requirement (7, down from 10). This will apply to all new runs started with game version 677290 or higher, but not on-going ones. Changed the Well Stocked achievement to use nourishment instead of hunger damage for the condition.

This post is written by Mia, our gameplay designer. Hello there! With the new update being released today, we wanted to take the opportunity to talk more in depth about what you can expect from the new Guardian Core. To start off with, the new Core belongs to Siglorel, a sorcerer like Merlin, who traveled into the most extreme and dangerous dimension. His ventures gained him many new insights and knowledge but left him slightly mad as well. Theres small tidbits of information you can find of him throughout the game, but hes mostly shrouded in mystery. One thing that we can say is that one of the dimensions Siglorel has been to (or perhaps even still is in) is the dimension from which the abominations are invading our worlds. Because of this, Siglorels Core is intertwined with corruption. Thematically, his Core is unlockable by saving a Doomed World which even Merlin himself harbors little hope for. A Doomed World is ventured into by selecting all of the negative modifiers in Modified Hardmode difficulty. Its a proper challenge, even for us who know the game inside out! If youve already beaten this mode, Im afraid youll have to do so again as the Core is not gained automatically, but rather as part of the epilogue after defeating the final boss. Obtaining his Core marks a true achievement and mastery over the game, as such we wanted to have the Core feel truly powerful. The passive gives one mana for each hero at the start of each combat, which should make mana feel cheaper and more expendable, allowing you to test out the spells in earnest. Sticking with the corruption theme, the spells are modified versions of what the final boss can do, but tweaked and buffed in your favor. Siglorel allows turning their own power against them, quite effectively so!
Among the other content added in this update, being the Questlines, youll be able to find a legendary relic made by Siglorel. Its a relic which combined with any Guardian Core should feel quite powerful, that is, if you manage to find it and repair it.. We hope you will enjoy exploring the new stories added in the update! If you have any questions or feedback for us, or just want to chat, feel free to join us on our Discord server! Mia

Hey folks! As were trying to finalize the next patch, we wanted to finish up the VFX showcase trifecta with the Warrior skills. We asked Will to type out something to accompany the gifs weve prepared, and heres what he wrote. Will: When doing the visual update of the Warrior, I have been challenged to find a grounded and realistic way to show their abilities. I have tried where I can to keep the effects subtle and I have worked to revise some of the "placeholder" effects that were in place. For the most part it has been a case of reducing the colour saturation and emissive strength of the effects we had in place. A few places I got to really rework the current effects and so, skills such as upgraded Haste's and Warcry have had a fairly complete visual overhaul. Heres how some of them look!
Warcry
Haste
Stagger Since our game is set in a low fantasy setting with no actual magic (remember the quote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic ?), having grounded and subtle VFX fits perfectly with the game. Not that were always doing so, some aspects do need a more overt VFX to indicate stuff is happening, otherwise we wouldnt be able to indicate that a unit gained a status effect that changes a stat that has no external representation! In our previous post, we mentioned a patch coming this month and were working on getting it out next week. Legendary questlines, more relics and a few QoL changes based on feedback! We hope you try it out, and encourage you to join our Discord server and tell us what you liked and didnt like, and any other changes you feel would be beneficial to the game! MarkoP

Hey folks! Many people have been asking when were planning on releasing the game. Id like to use this post to outline whats going on internally regarding this. Our initial plan when we launched in early access last year was a 4 to 5 months period to polish up the game and then launch 1.0, and boy, was that initial time estimate wrong! After we started getting some good feedback from our players, we had to re-evaluate how to go about working on the game. All that player feedback directly informed our first content update which featured a skill revamp and making heroes more unique with their passives. The stuff we planned to do during EA were new heroes, enemies and maps, which all went live in content updates 2, 3 and 4, the last of which also featured the hard difficulty and improvements to meta progression, both of which were influenced by some player ideas. Lastly, the most recent content update featured new guardian cores with 18 new spells. In a meeting after our winter break, we brought up the topic of a concrete release date/window for 1.0. January was too hard to pull off since we knew we had more work ahead for polishing what we already have, so we looked at February. Theres a lot of big games coming out this month, so we decided to have a chat with our publisher about it. After that meeting, the decision was made to aim for release in Spring. We dont want to commit to any specific day yet, since we want to see whats going to happen as time goes on, but definitely expect more news in the coming months as we iron out all the details. All that said, the question came up about what wed be doing in the meantime. Well be releasing a patch this month, likely within 1-3 weeks. It will contain Legendary questline encounters, the last guardian core from Siglorel and a way to unlock it, all the VFX improvements Will worked on, and some content optimizations. After that, sometime during March, the plan is to release the editor, so anyone interested in modding the game would be able to start messing with it. We would also start officially supporting Linux and macOS. Keep in mind that just as with all other plans, stuff could happen that messes them up, and Ill try to keep you informed if stuff goes horribly wrong or were forced to re-prioritize anything. One other thing were working on is an additional play mode. Were currently calling it endless mode, which would be a chain of combat maps to test out your tactical prowess. Youd pick out your warband as usual and try to win as many combats as possible with those units until they die, ranking up in between fights and getting random upgrades and relics. We dont have a lot of details on it other than that, since we basically just started working on it, but as it gets more defined, designed and implemented, well be sure to share information about it. So tell us what you think! Share your thoughts in the forums or join our Discord server if you want to chat directly with any of us, or want to pitch ideas about endless mode! Wed love to hear from you! MarkoP

Hello, everyone! Happy Lunar New Year! As with every special occasion, we have many special deals to offer! First Class Trouble is celebrating Lunar New Year with the Lunar New Year Pack! Take part in the festivities aboard the Alithea with all-new Lunar New Year-themed cosmetics including hand fans, masks, and updates to your Vruumba! If you can't get enough social deduction mayhem, then wishlist our latest upcoming title, Eville! Eville pits Villagers against Conspirators in a medieval setting with character roles and individualized motives. No matter which side of the law you fall upon, you'll need your savvy social deduction skills to stay alive! We hope everyone's year has started off strong, and we can't wait to share more with you all in the coming months! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1220170/Eville/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/953880/First_Class_Trouble/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1203710/UnMetal/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1206600/Almighty_Kill_Your_Gods/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1222340/Sockventure/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/888530/Yaga/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/904400/Cardpocalypse/

Hey folks! Continuing a bit with the VFX updates :) Will worked on the ranger lately, so ive recorded a few gifs to show them off. Theres really not much to say in this post, so ill let the gifs speak, even tho they dont actually have mouths.





Join us on our Discord server! MarkoP

*This post is written by Mia, our gameplay designer.* Hello there! With 1.0. release on the horizon were digging in and trying to polish the game on as many fronts as we can. A big part of this is in the hands of Will, our VFX artist, as hes got a plate full of going over all the abilities and status effects and giving them a fresh face. As we did not have a dedicated VFX artist before, theres plenty of room for improvement and adding new effects to those we considered good enough as is with animations alone. The Hand of Merlin is more sci-fi orientated than fantasy - the heroes that you select are still only human. The Mystic, for example, is not a wizard or a mage, theyre more of an alchemist or a shaman who can create these effects not through magic but through knowledge. We want the VFXs to properly communicate this difference as well. The first thing we did now was to go over all the abilities and try to categorize them depending on 3 factors.

• Gameplay Effect Eg: Damage, Buff (damage, movement, evasion, etc), Debuff (damage, movement, evasion, etc), Movement, AP, DoTs, etc.
• Manifestation An in-character look at how the ability works (eg: physical, emotional, alchemical, corruption..)
• Animation Used

Hey folks! The team is back from vacation this week. We had a long meeting on Monday to see where were at and what weve got left to do for the game. We talked about a potential release date, and while some rough dates were thrown around, none of them stuck to the wall yet, because they werent sticky enough. The output of our meeting was a rough list of things we want done for 1.0.

• Theres one more Guardian Core were working on which is super endgame content and more of a penultimate reward. There wont be any achievements bound to it since we cant expect everyone to get it, and it would just feel crappy to have that one thing out of your reach due to difficulty. It's the most powerful core we've made, and will break the game when used, but because it's the very last thing you get, we don't really mind that. :)
• We've had legendary questline encounters on our todo list for a while now, and we're aiming on getting those in for 1.0. These encounters span several zones and reward you with very powerful relics on completion, so you'll likely want to chase them. Is Excalibur finally coming to the game? Only Mia knows!
• More map optimizations are also in progress.
• Were currently writing guides for modding the game. A bunch of them are already done, and we want to have everything (or at least most of it) covered before release. The editor will also likely come with the 1.0 release, or soon after.
• Since we now have Will, our dedicated VFX boi, hes redoing a bunch of older vfx made by other people to be consistent with the stuff hes made. We have an internal list of all the things, and Will is hard at work to make all of them gooder.
• There are some bugs and issues we need to go through as well. The external QA team has been helpful in finding technical issues. Everyone that reported an issue on either our Discord server or on Steam, thank you!

Hello, everyone! The holidays have arrived at last, and do you know what that means? Discounts, discounts, discounts! Our favorite wacky 1950s-inspired social deduction game, First Class Trouble, recently released a plethora of cosmetic DLC packs! Now you can assist (or viciously betray) your fellow ISS Alithea residents in style! Get into the Christmas spirit with the Christmas Pack, which includes outfits inspired by Santa Claus, his helpers, and Rudolph! Feeling cold? The Winter Pack includes warm and cozy options such as sweaters, ponchos, scarves, and even a penguin outfit! Additional outfits and other cosmetics are also available in the New Years Pack, Runway Pack, Supporter Pack, Vruumba Pack, and Wedding Pack. Happy Holidays from all of us at Versus Evil! We'll see you all in 2022! https://store.steampowered.com/app/953880/First_Class_Trouble/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1203710/UnMetal/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1206600/Almighty_Kill_Your_Gods/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1222340/Sockventure/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/888530/Yaga/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/904400/Cardpocalypse/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1003120/Hitchhiker__A_Mystery_Game/

New features: Improved visuals of Ranger's Shiv skill. General fixes: Fixed a crash when an enemy is killed in one shot. Fixed a possible crash when spawning units in a wave. Fixed a rare crash in combat related to using gamepads. Fixed an issue with Warrior's Raised Shield skill causing it to expend stacks when not intended. Fixed several typos in hints. Optimizations: Cleaned up and optimized several combat maps, to reduce memory usage and improve performance. Gameplay balancing: Changed the order Nourishment's effects are applied in relation to other sources to make Blacksmith upgrades constant. Mystic's Flash Hallow skill (upgrade of Hallow) no longer grants 1AP on casting, instead just on turn start. Salim's Measuring passive is no longer triggered by Spells.

This post is written by Mia, one of our gameplay designers. Hello there! As the year draws to a close, we wanted to take the opportunity to look back at how far The Hand of Merlin has grown and changed. Its not an overstatement to say that the game has matured significantly since its release into Early Access on March 17th this year. Out of curiosity we dug through our patch notes and prior dev blogs and have some interesting data to show off! Since the release in March there have been a total of 19 minor updates/patches, not counting today and not counting the 5 major content updates. Taking into consideration there have been a total of 39 weeks since, on average wed have a minor patch every other week and a major update every two months. Looking back we are pretty proud of what weve accomplished and all that weve added to the game itself. From the artists weve gotten hand drawn cutscenes, map variations, new vfx for spells, more encounter images, and their help in the realization of new enemies and heroes, visual improvements of skills, spells, and so much more. They made the game as beautiful as it is. The programmers have worked their magic to add so many new features, quality of life changes, polishing every aspect of the game to work as seamlessly as it could. They managed to make the most out of our engine to make new things possible. Gamepads, porting, dealing with the designers Theyre the backbone of The Hand of Merlin. The writers have built the story of HoM and fleshed it out to make it truly feel as if youre traversing the multiverse, helping these worlds which are all different no matter how similar they may look. Theyve added quests, additional variations, and more stories to be told. Your choices matter thanks to them. Mat and I as the designers have been doing our best to try and flesh out the direction for HoM to grow. Theres been a lot of balancing, reworking, and questioning old assumptions. From how to set up the different difficulties, making each hero feel unique, or simply adding more content (such as the new guardians, relics, enemies, etc.) to going through a complete skill overhaul. Weve kept ourselves (and others) busy! I cant speak for everyone, but personally Im very proud of what our team has accomplished this year. Especially for a small indie team, the Hand of Merlin has had a great year, and I hope itll continue to improve next year as well with its full release coming up soon. Also, this lovely little team of ours will also be taking a well deserved two weeks vacation over the holidays! Feel more than welcome to join our Discord server to tell us what you think, to chat, or ask questions if you have any! Or you know, just to hang out. Cheers! Mia

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer. Hi all, Mat here to give you all another glimpse to the plans we have after our latest patch, The Gathering of the Gods. So, as MarkoP has been pointing out in both our Discord server and in the Steam page, were walking steadily towards a 1.0 (very) early next year. Were nearing the end of content creation and adjustments, and focusing quite a lot on our console development as well. Still, heres a quick rundown of the features you can expect for when we leave Early Access:

• Questlines: We already introduced a few to test out the waters way back then, but we got several more quests spanning all three main zones, including some that feature unique relics, like Tudwals Whetstone.
• More Common and Rare Relics: If you are starting to see the same old Hunnic Arrows and Thunderstones a bit too often, worry no longer - well focus on getting a few more cool Relics to make your runs a bit more varied.
• Capstone Reward: Mia had a pretty cool idea for a reward if you can defeat our hardest challenge - Hardmode with all curses enabled. Look forward to a bit of a gift!
• More VFX reworks: Will is hard at work revisiting spells now, but hell soon pivot to give the warbands skills a bit more love and visual polish.
• Achievements: Not only do we have a few to rework, we added so much more content that some more achievements could find their way in! If you are the kind of player to platinum The Hand of Merlin, keep an eye out!

Titled Gathering of the Gods, the latest update introduces new features to the game including two new Guardians to aid you in your quest to stop the Cataclysm: Oberon and Atlantes. As the king of faeries, Oberon communicates only through an emissary, but watches the battlefield closely. Treating the flora and fauna well gains his favor and raises your Faerie Reputation. The value of which can produce either a blessing or a curse upon the party later on.
Atlantes is a cosmic being like Merlin himself, but one who is not particularly bothered by the fall of each world. Amused by Merlins desire to save worlds, Atlantes provides aid to the party, but conceals his true motivations. Each Guardian bestows a unique benefit upon the party, and gives you access to an array of powerful new spells to thwart the invading abominations.
The Gathering of the Gods update also adds a brand new Nourishment system, an upgrade to the current Supplies resource. You will now get stacking buffs (or de-buffs) based on how long you travel well-stocked or poorly stocked. These attributes will affect Heroes combat stats in a significant way! New Relics are also introduced in the update along with sound effects for encounter events and improved visual effects for several existing spells. In addition to these new features, the latest update will also include various small bug fixes, optimizations, and balancing: Full Patch Notes Early Access Build 676569 New features:

• Added two new unlockable Guardians: the scientifically-minded Atlantes, and Oberon, king of the Faeries. And between the two, 18 new Spells total!
• Added the Nourishment system. Players will now get stacking (de)buffs based on how long they travel well-stocked, or poorly-stocked. These (de)buffs will affect Heroes combat stats (health and armor) in a powerful way.
• Added six new Relics: Jade Statuette, Orpheus Set, Giant Cauldron, Irish Gorget, Selkie Medallion and Tudwal Whetstone.
• Added sound effects for encounter events, such as the bells tolling during Faerie encounters.
• Improved the visuals of several existing Spells.

• Fixed a rare crash in combat, related to ground effects.
• Fixed a bug causing Windows Mouse Keys to not work correctly with the game.
• Fixed a bug where Safirs Paladin passive would pick its target in a deterministic way, rather than randomly (as is the intention).
• Fixed a bug where enemy prepared shot abilities could be started while under the Staggered status effect.
• Fixed a bug which could allow the C-Combo achievement to be awarded when not intended.
• Fixed a bug where the camera would not focus on the unit being selected (such as when pressing the Tab button to cycle through units).
• Fixed a bug where the tooltips in the Journal could flicker in some cases.
• Fixed a bug where relic and spell abilities on the Action Bar would show keyboard hotkeys even when using a gamepad.
• Fixed a bug where the map legend could show its tooltip if the currently visited node was underneath it while using a gamepad.
• Fixed an issue with the Mans Best Friend encounter where the options/outcomes could potentially loop indefinitely.

• Reduced the memory footprint of various combat maps, which also improves performance.

• Added an option to confine the mouse to the games window, available in the in-game menu.
• Removed the unit fill/outline buttons from the Action Bar and added them instead into the Gameplay tab in the Options menu, to help reduce combat UI clutter.
• The Lobby and Journal UI now fully support navigational-style control when using gamepads, which should feel more intuitive to players accustomed to console dashboard UIs.
• Removed various references to mouse/keyboard controls from hints (and embedded images) when using a gamepad.
• Added display of players name (Steam profile name) to main menu, options and in-game menu.
• The undo operation in combat should now work with a broader selection of movement skills and movement-interacting effects, such as Tariqs Bladedancer passive, Rangers Sprint skill tree, and various relics.
• Changed targeting rules for Rangers Volley skill (and its upgrades), so its more in line with similar skills for different classes.
• Hero passives (and some other non-scaling effects) no longer have stacks associated with them, to clarify their static nature.

• Slightly increased enemy stats in Marca Hispanica and Al-Andalus as counter-balance to the overall buffs of the Nourishment system.
• Hard Mode no longer requires 3 Supplies per character per node jump. Instead, the Dread Marches modifier is reworked to increase the amount of Supplies required per jump.
• Redcaps tooltip should now better describe its ooze effect.
• Dire Redcap no longer restores health from its own oozes.
• Ranged bandits should now slightly prefer to shoot decoys over Heroes (but its still not a guarantee).
• The Reflex Bow, a blacksmith upgrade option for Rangers, no longer relies on a conditional damage effect, now being a flat increase to Power.
• Warriors Lunge skill (and its upgrades) now only costs 1 AP, but has reduced movement range.
• Warrior Heroes should now only gain 2 Health per level up, down from 3.
• Heroes hired during encounters will now use a random unlocked prowess, assuming at least one prowess for the hero is unlocked.
• Effects associated with Mystics Martyrdom skill now only affect allies, not the caster.
• Grail of Piety. Instead of reducing Cooldowns when healed, it now increases all healing by 40%.
• Grail of Honour. Instead of a refresh effect when killing the last hitter, it now uses a duel mechanic, where the target of your last attack deals less damage to other units.
• Circlet of Gold. Increased cost to 60 gold (up from 50).
• Increased the cooldown of Morganas Sacrifice spell to 4 turns (up from 1).

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer. Hello again! Mat back to introduce everyone to our next patch - Gathering of the Gods! We are introducing two major content items here. First and foremost, we got two new Guardians: Oberon and Atlantes. Oberon, The Fey King, can be attained by making good deeds across the continents, calling the attention of his court. He features wondrous nature/fey-type effects, including the ability to absorb damage, creating flowery covers, and increasing movement based on the amount of buffs you have. Atlantes, on the other hand, is a more recluse sorcerer. You already met him during your travels where he explained your fate, but theres far more to be discussed with him. As you visit more Arcane nodes, youll know more about his stance in the Struggle, and eventually will be able to wield his technological powers, including removing enemy passives, applying global buffs, and even summoning a friendly automaton to fight for you! But thats not all! Introduced in the previous blog post, the Nourishment System is ready to be played with. Now supplies are a running resource that will increase your characters health and armor, if you can keep everyone fed. Standby for adjustments and updates on the exact numbers, and let us know what you think! Of course, enemies received small attribute boosts across the board to account for the power creep - so play it safe as you get to know the new system. Were closer and closer to 1.0! Let us know what you think of the new update on our Discord server, and good luck out there! Mat

This post is written by Mia, our gameplay designer. Hello there! This time Markos Wednesday post is being usurped by Mia. Hello! Im the other game designer (other than Mat, that is) that is working on The Hand of Merlin! Today I bring you news on what else is coming up in the next big content update, along with the two new Guardians. It is the Nourishment System which is an overhaul on how the supplies worked till now. Supplies are one of the resources that you can gain, lose, and trade in the game. While having supplies (other than in easy mode) would virtually mean nothing, not having supplies would cost all of your heroes one health point for each node visited without supplies. It was apparently something that was easily ignored and not that impactful on the game. The damage may have been a bit more brutal in hard mode but it was still just not rewarding or interesting enough. So, we sat down and brainstormed on what would make the supplies more impactful and actually make you want to go out of your way to buy or pick them as a reward. A lot of ideas were thrown around but what we settled for in the end is

The Nourishment System!

Hello, everyone! Black Friday is almost upon us once again, which means discounts galore across our entire catalog! Earlier this month, First Class Trouble left Early Access and launched into Version 1.0! Not only that, but First Class Trouble also launched on PlayStation platforms, and with the power of cross-play, you can play with PlayStation users! Check out the new elements and improvements in Version 1.0 if you haven't yet! In other Versus Evil news, UnMetal won "Most Fun" by Indie X Online 2021's Award Ceremony! Huge congratulations to the UnMetal team! Why not play the game to see what's so fun about it for yourself? We're offering some of the biggest discounts ever on our titles, so go and snag them while you can! https://store.steampowered.com/app/953880/First_Class_Trouble/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1203710/UnMetal/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1206600/Almighty_Kill_Your_Gods/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1222340/Sockventure/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/888530/Yaga/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/904400/Cardpocalypse/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1003120/Hitchhiker__A_Mystery_Game/

Hi all! Im back with a story about how we improved the undo functionality. To give a bit of background, the skirmish portion of our game is implemented so it can be simulated in advance of actually using an ability. Every time the hit tile changes, we make a copy of the relevant game state, and run the whole game logic through it, with some flags set to make the end result usable for other things. The output of that process is a list of actions that change the original state to essentially match the simulated one. The original reason why we did it this way was that we wanted to have a spell like revert time which would play the last sequence of actions in reverse. This obviously never went in because of lack of time and some additional tech issues, but the general infrastructure is still proving to be useful. Since we have a copy of the game state with all the changes an action would do, we can query differences between the original and the cloned state. This is how we implemented exact previews of how much health a unit would lose and whether it would die from the hit, where a unit would get pushed or pulled to, which covers would get destroyed, etc. The only way this can work consistently is if all relevant objects are referenced with an equivalent ID. Since the codebase is in C++, the option of pointers is there, but is not useful because theres no easy way to translate/map pointers to between two copies of an object that are considered equivalent or the same. Thus, we use handles. Pretty much every important thing is mostly referenced to with its handle, which is in practical terms just an index into an array. Each thing would be an element in an array, and if we ever needed to destroy the thing, we would just mark the slot as no longer in use. This means we could reuse slots when, say, status effects expired and a new one got created, it would just be placed into the same slot as an expired one. This was the main issue with the system to prevent full undo functionality. Undoing a sequence of actions where one status effect expired and another one got created in the previous ones slot means information loss. There is no easy way to restore the information about the previous status effect in that slot because the new one overwrote that information. This is why creating and destroying things in those arrays wasnt able to be undone. The change we did was to no longer reuse slots. Each thing that gets created has its own slot which is forever owned by that thing and nothing else. When a status effect expires, its slot is marked as retired, but the information it had is still there, untouched. If we wanted to revert/undo the expiration of that effect, wed just undo the retire operation on that slot and thats it, the thing is back just as it was before. Ofcourse, each action has a set of micro operations that need to happen to fully restore the state back to where it was. A status effect tracks the units its affecting, the units which are considered the affector of that effect, both types of units also track which status effect is affecting them and which effects they caused, the creation and removal of status effects can cause unit attributes to change, etc. Each change to any of these things is a micro operation that has to be fully revertable for the system to work properly. To prevent everything to actually be undoable, abilities will define whether their use can be undone or not. All position changing abilities are currently undoable (Run, Sprint and upgrades, Translocation, and a relic or two). And the whole point of this was to fix Tariq from being unable to undo his Run ability use, because his passive effect is implemented as an aura that has a feedback loop with the status effects created on enemies to increase Tariqs power. And there you have it. A sneak peek of how we do stuff with code! If you want to ask questions or comment on something you read, you can find us on our Discord server. Cheers! MarkoP

New features: Improved the visuals of several of Merlin's Spells. General fixes: Encounter state is now saved at every page turn, preventing cheesing random outcomes by restarting the game. Fixed a possible exploit for infinite Supplies through encounter interactions. Fixed a bug that could cause a rare scenario where you only needed to kill two Pylons in Jerusalem to win the skirmish. Rana's passive (Primal Presence) should no longer trigger after she dies. Far Striker (gained via Hunnic Arrow relic) should now only trigger from ability use. Wyvern and Dire Wyvern can no longer trigger their passives out of each other. Stasis status effect should no longer expire if a unit took damage from Poison/Burn/Bleed type effects. Fixed a bug when using the gamepad where tile grid could remain visible in the world even when not in tile picking mode (i.e. targeting an ability). Fixed a bug when using the gamepad where the tooltips could remain visible during enemy turn. Fixed several typos. Optimizations: Optimized AI, reducing its think times by up to 50%. Optimized many meshes without loss of visual quality, reducing the game's memory requirements and increasing its performance on lower end hardware. Optimized light sources on some combat maps, offering substantial performance gains on lower end hardware. Optimized away the stall/freeze that could happen when first starting a game, after loading is complete and just before entering Lobby. Quality-of-Life improvements: Added a loading progress when transitioning between game states (lobby / overworld / skirmish) in case it isn't instant (such as on low end PCs with slow disks). While targeting a unit with a damaging ability, a skull icon will now be shown if the target would die from the damage dealt. Changed visualization rules for Decoy, Desecrate and Volley skills, making their effect area clearer to read. Gameplay balancing: Changed the status effect granted in "Castle of the Moons" to grant 1 AP in next combat (instead of extra damage dealt to large enemies). Disable effects (Rooted, Staggered, Stasis and Stunned) now decay at turn end (instead of at turn start), making their exact duration clearer. Green version of Oozing Singe+ (upgrade of Mystic's Singe) now deals Rooted instead of Slow. Reduced the base cooldown of Ranger's Hunter's Mark skill (and its upgrades) from 3 to 1. Mystic's Scavenging Singe skill (upgrade of Singe) now only refills ability uses once per match on a kill, instead of on every kill. Removed friendly fire from all versions of Warrior's Cleave skill. Now, players can choose between 'Wider Area + Pull', 'On-kill effects', and 'Debuff effects' variants. Renamed Judicious Cleave into Carving Cleave. The debuff inflicted by Warrior's Dueling Slash skill (upgrade of Slash) no longer reduces damage dealt only to the attacking Warrior, but to anyone. Basilisk's Toxic Buildup and Dire Basilisk's Toxic Reserves are no longer passives. Instead, they're regular status effects, meaning they can be purged via skills or spells. Basilisks now have to spend their first turn gaining the initial stacks of Toxic Buildup.

Hi peeps! Last week we introduced you to Will, and hes been hard at work getting to know the engine, and the project. One of his first tasks was to revisit our Spell effects, particularly Merlins. Here are a couple of gifs of his work. Restoration
Translocation
Thunderbolt
Starfall
What do you think? Let us know on our Discord server, we're always there! Mat

Hi, everyone! Mat here once again. One of the areas we want to polish up a bit more is VFX. This includes getting some eye-candy for the cool Guardian Spells, specially for the upcoming ones. To that effect, we are currently onboarding a new member of the Room-C group, straight from Bristol, UK: Will! I wanted to take the opportunity to follow in MarkoPs footsteps a bit and give him the round of questions we usually give our newest additions. Q: Hi, could you introduce yourself? A: Hello, Im Will. I am a Real-Time VFX artist hailing from England. I love the natural world and nothing keeps my interest more than watching the forces of nature play out in that landscape. Whether its paddling in the powerful surf of the Ocean, catching a sunset looking beautiful or the low glow of a campfire set against a starlit night sky, I am happiest when I find time to spend time in the world. It is also an excellent chance to gather reference for when I try to recreate such effects within the dark sorcery of a game engine's powerful particle editor. Q: When did you start messing with VFX? What got you into it? A: I first became interested in VFX when I was in my final year of university. I was initially compelled to try it as I realised there was a high demand for RT-VFX artists in the games industry. I quickly fell in love with the process as making effects requires a lot of creative problem solving and design thinking to best represent important gameplay features to players. Q: What was your impression of The Hand of Merlin? A: When I first looked at The Hand of Merlin, I thought it looked like the kind of game Id normally play. I initially thought it was a unique re-theming of a well trodden genre that I enjoy. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the game had some very interesting differences to contemporaries Ive played; while still being easy to pick up for a veteran strategy rogue-like player such as myself. Q: How do you make a specific VFX to fit a specific ability or spell? A: The most important job of VFX in my opinion is gameplay. So the first thing and last thing is always to make sure that the effect I am working on shows the player a visual embodiment of their inputs. This is achieved by working closely with design and programming to ensure that the effect is aiding player understanding of mechanics they are interacting with. Q: Can you tell me more of the challenges of being a VFX artist? One of the biggest challenges I face often when I am creating VFX for any given project is the number of options available. Often a VFX artist has many different ways to tackle the problem at hand. They must then pick the method that will give the best result within the constraints of the project they are working on. The answer to how to solve any given problem again goes back to strong communication about the gameplay purpose of an effect and understanding which workflow is best suited to tackle it. Q: What things do you do when not making rad visuals? Any hobbies? A: I like to try and get outside as much as the weather allows. Camping and hiking are things I highly enjoy. With a job like mine, theres a lot of sitting at a desk. So to stay active I generally try to do some yoga every day and go climbing 1-3 times a week. I would also say that I often get lost in my guitar and music is a fun hobby Ive been engaged with and I am always learning something new about. And there you have it! Will is now present in our Discord server under the handle Badfish, so feel free to drop by and ask him any questions! Mat

Hi all! Next next patch will bring a tech change that will prevent the remaining cheesing/save scam opportunities that are readily available inside of the game on the world map. I want to take a bit of time to explain how it happened and why were only fixing it now. When we initially added encounters to the game, they were pretty tightly coupled to their presentation within the game. Specifically, the way we presented the encounters (the book) was directly in control of advancing the encounter state forward, and just was the encounter state. We would inspect the encounters for a page, prepare all the UI widgets and show them. Clicking on a button that advances to the next page would look directly into the read-only encounter resource, change the text of the page, change the buttons and that was about it. Later, when we added randomness to encounters, we had the issue of pages changing something that should be perceived as a fixed value, like the amount of gold to grant or the required hero to use an option. This was fixed by finalizing the encounters, which essentially means making a copy of the encounter resource and pre-rolling all random value ranges to fixed values. After that, we wanted a tool that would make sure the encounters are not busted, like having dead ends, or a page having no clickable options and the like. The encounters are just text files, after all, and it's easy to make mistakes. To make this possible, we had to change how we present the encounters, and it could no longer be tied to the presentation. While the tool is not perfect because the encounters are very complicated, it at least finds most of the issues. At this point, we pretty much had the capability of driving the encounter state forward without having a UI for it. This was the final piece of the puzzle needed to even be able to make no cheesing possible. I consider cheesing anything that makes it possible (and easy) to abuse the games save system to gain resources infinitely or retry choices. This could be abused by getting resources from an encounter, closing the game or returning to lobby, then continuing the game. The result would be that the previously gained resources were still there and youd restart from the beginning of the encounter. Not good. This is pretty much the reason why the game was never saved during encounters, and why you could restart them by the quit+continue combo. My latest change fixes all of these issues. Any time you do anything that one would expect to have a permanent effect (picking new skills, upgrading them, spending resources, advancing through encounters, etc), we save the game, which now contains your current encounter state. This means if you leave the world map for any reason then continue your game, you will be set to the same page you were on when you closed it. There are two main reasons I wanted to do this. The first one is the reroll ability cards button we added to hard mode. Until the patch hits, the button is disabled during active encounters because of the aforementioned tech reasons: you could in theory reroll your ability cards, see ones you dont like and decide you dont actually want to spend the essence on it. All youd have to do was leave the game, then continue and youd be reset back to the start of the encounter with no changes to your resources or your party in case you leveled them and picked skills. This is obviously bad on many levels. The second reason was the remaining few cheese/scams that were possible. You could advance through an encounter, reach the random card choice (which was always fully randomized to account for the quit+continue cheese), pick one, and if you didnt like the outcome, quit+continue and youd be back at the start of the encounter with another chance to get a better outcome. The change done here solves both issues and will make all of your choices during the world map fully permanent in your current run. The other improvement Im making is one thats been bugging me for a while, and now I have time to devote to fixing it. Ill likely write another blog post on the topic once the fix is up, but in case I dont, heres the short of it: for some player characters, their movement during fights isnt undoable (Tariq specifically, if not a few others as well). The issue has the same cause as being unable to undo movement for a Mystic character that has the Hallow aura active. Thanks for reading, I hope you dont mind the little glimpse in the technology part of the game. If you wanna ask stuff, or suggest stuff, join us on our Discord server or post here on Steam. Till next time! MarkoP

The end is near, Wizards & Warriors! You've asked for it, and with our latest update, we're thrilled to introduce Hard Mode and new metaprogression features. Hard Mode One of the most common requests we receive from you all is to make the game harder. Well, we love a challenge, too, and Hard Mode is the result of our efforts! But what exactly does that mean? It means your runs are about to get a serious dose of abomination wrath! To distinguish Hard Mode from the current player experience, the first step was to add more complex resource management and, of course, make your enemies tougher. Check! More specifically, youll be introduced to Dire Units, which are super-buffed versions of the abominations you already know and love. Meaner and nastier, expect these baddies to radically increase the challenge thanks to higher HP, more armor, less cooldowns, and unique passive abilities, just to name a few upgrades Curses & Blessings System Dont despair just yet, because were also adding new metaprogression features, which will help you grow stronger with each run! As you gain more and more Essence, youll need a place to spend it, which is where the new Blessings and Curses system will come in. In Hard Mode, youll spend Essence in exchange for temporary benefits to your run. Blessings are positive benefits, such as increasing your maximum mana level or earning larger gold rewards. But theres a catch of course there is. Spending Essence on only Blessings would make Hard Mode too easy, so to balance it out, youll also have to select Curses, which produce negative effects on your run, such as more Bandits or less gold.
Each benefit is assigned a Doom Value, and your Blessings and Curses must balance. Hate math? So do we, so allow us to simplify it: If the Blessings you select equal a Doom Value of 3, then you must also select Curses to go with it that equal a Doom Value of at least 3. MUWAH HA HA HA! It's Spooky Season We'd be remiss not to acknowledge the fact that this update is releasing during Halloween week! To celebrate, enjoy explosions of pumpkin guts raining down on the battlefield between October 30 - November 1. Trick-or-Treat! And more! Here's a full rundown of everything included with this update: Patch Notes - Early Access Build 675833 New features: Added a new Hard Mode, which greatly amps the difficulty and is tuned for Heroes with Prowess unlocks. Added Dire Bandits and Dire Abominations - bigger, meaner, uglier versions of enemies which have a chance to spawn in Hard Mode runs. Upon beating Hard Mode once, players unlock Hard Mode+, which allows adding Curses and Blessings to add extra challenges to a Hard Mode run. Added seasonal destruction effects. Covers and units will explode with pumpkin chunks between October 30th and November 1st, and candy canes between December 24th and January 1st. General fixes: Fixed a crash with gamepad after opening and closing the in-game menu while in portrait tooltip. Fixed a potential crash when a unit is killed. Fixed a crash that could happen when an enemy unit would be reduced to zero Range. Fixed a bug where the difficulty settings in session weren't restored properly when reloading the save game. Fixed an issue where the option to recruit Rumayla al-Qirqiyya would sometimes erroneously not be generated in her encounter. Fixed an issue on some skirmish maps where Heroes could spawn in invalid locations. Fixed a geometry error in the Tavern skirmish map, which allowed enemies to enter tables. Units that don't end up moving from a knockback or a pull-in effect will no longer trigger reaction attacks. Fixed an issue with Warrior's Gritting Slash skill where the Grit effect would sometimes not be applied to the Warrior. Fixed an issue with Warrior's Staggering Bash skill (and its upgrades) where it could sometimes fail to impart the Staggered condition to the target if the knockback was interrupted. Fixed an issue with Warrior's Judicious Cleave skill (upgrade of Cleave) where it could sometimes fail to disrupt prepared actions. Added a missing line in Warrior's Bash skill description about its disruption capabilities. Alain's passive no longer triggers Mesmerized when an enemy uses a non-damaging ability against a decoy (such as Redcap's Gaze). Ranger's Ensnare skill (and its upgrades) can no longer miss. Berserk Status effect and its derivatives, associated with the Warrior's Rage ability line, no longer increase damage done to self. Alain no longer poisons himself when under the effect of Expurger (from the Mystic's Expurging Totem). Thorntoad's Leap skill now correctly triggers reactions like Archer's Vigil and Stand Ready. Fixed various typos in encounters and tooltips. Optimizations: Reduced the polygon count of most meshes in the game, greatly improving framerates on low-end PCs, and without noticeable loss in visual quality. Quality-of-Life improvements: Removed the gamepad controls legend from the game. Instead, individual UI elements have contextual control labels, which takes up less space and should be more intuitive. Action bar number hotkeys are now only visible when using mouse and keyboard. When using a gamepad, there is now a hover indicator to connect the disabled encounter option with the tooltip explaining why the option is not available. All heroes that have their Prowess unlocked will now by default be set to the first unlocked Prowess in the list in the Lobby. Tooltips for relics viewed in the Journal will now show formulas, since exact numbers can be inaccurate and uninformative outside of combat. Gameplay balancing: Status effects that reduce damage (Heavy Armor, Resistance, Expurger, Shielded, etc) no longer reduce damage done from Spells. Spells, however, still benefit from damage-increasing effects, such as Vulnerable. Increased max stacks of Bleeding effect to 10 (up from 5). The Well Rested status effect now stacks. The Paladin status effect (Safir's passive) now deals 1*Power damage when using non-offensive abilities, up from 0.5*Power. Morgan Tudd's passive (Druid Physician) now also works on himself, rather than strictly other allies. Wilfred's passive (Nonchalant) increased to +3 damage (up from +2). Warrior's Coordinated Parry skill (upgrade of Parry) no longer costs AP to use, like the base version. Ranger's Specialty Arrow skill (and its upgrades) have been buffed. Increased CDs (2->3 in most cases), but increased base damage (0.5x -> 1x), as to not make it so reliable on its conditional effect. Exploding Arrow (one of the upgrades) no longer needs to target unarmored targets to deal its explosive effect. Ranger's Archer's Vigil skill (and its upgrades) now deal slightly more damage. Also changed Defensive Vigil upgrade into Sharp Vigil, which grants Guard Down as a debuff. Slightly increased AoE of all skills in the Ranger's Volley line (1.5->2, Wide 2.5->3). Reduced Ranger's Quick Draw skill line's accuracy penalty to 30% (down from 40%), making the ability more reliable. Slightly increased base Health and Armor in most rangers, bringing their average defenses (Health + Armor) to 30, up from 26. Recurve Bow blacksmith upgrade line (Balanced Ranger Weapon) now also grants +1 Evasion. Roland's Horn relic now has a simpler and stronger design - it debuffs all enemies on the map, reducing their Power. Medicinal Bandages relic no longer costs AP to use. Added a starting cooldown on Wyvern's Jump skill. This should make getting ambushed less punishing.

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer. Hey! Mat here, once again. Hardmode is just around the corner, so I hope you are as excited as we are! I wanted to take a moment to explore one of the latest features we are introducing to Hardmode: rerolling ability cards. It's simple. Whenever your warband gains a rank, you are able to pick a new ability or upgrade an existing skill. If you are in Hardmode, you can now spend Essences to get another roll, with the first card being guaranteed to be a new one when upgrading. This will allow you to spend the Essence you earned in Hardmode in order to have more control over your build, making the run a bit more likely to succeed. This will come in handy when you engage with Curses and Blessings, as those runs can be quite challenging, even if they give you a lot of Essence. Its another reason to bank some Essences before attempting a harder run, for sure. In fact, this whole idea was brought up by MarkoP when considering other uses for Essences, and also a way to address how random the game can be for high-level play. We sat on the idea for a bit, but once the changes to the Essence economy happened in Hardmode, we just felt like it was time to try it out! Now, were looking at the first few days after we launch the End Times update to see how we can improve the experience, but we already have a few plans. MarkoP is working on removing a tech limitation to allow you to reroll ability cards when you are inside an encounter (currently it can only be done when not in an active encounter), and we are investigating ways of improving the UI as well. The more important part though, is to hear from you guys what you think is the effect of this change! Did it kill the vibe of the game? Did it feel more strategic, or more grindy? As you play our new update, be sure to let us know on our Discord server! Best of luck out there! Mat

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer. Hi there! Preparations are almost done with our Hardmode update, dubbed affectionately as The End Times. Hope you are as excited about it as we are! Last week, I called for some beta testers to play our initial attempt at Hardmode, to figure out how they felt about the whole thing. We got a few people through Discord, we added our own internal players and some of Versus Evil Heralds - our most vocal supporters in social media. Im always pleased to discuss game design and balancing with our players, and this event was quite productive already. Heres some of our takeaways: Presentation - Curses and Blessings: we introduced the Curses and Blessings screen when you clicked on the Hardmode banner at difficulty selection. This was deemed a bit odd: I already selected a difficulty mode, so whats with these customization tools? How do I just play Hardmode? was the overall feeling. We took that as a bad sign and changed how it's presented. Now, when choosing Hardmode, youll be presented with a second choice: Regular, or Hardmode+, which DOES feature the Curses and Blessings screen, as seen on our previous blog posts. We hope that clarifies it. Dire Wyverns Ambushes: if you played our game, youll know what Im talking about. Wyvern has this capacity of jumping behind your squishy characters to take a bite out of them. If your encounter started up with the enemies taking the first turn, that means you already have quite a problem on your hands! The issue came when Dire Wyvern did the same thing. The extra damage plus his Opportunist passive meant that he could melt down your characters before you could take a single action! Bad design! The simplest solution (which we also applied to regular Wyvern) was to add a starting cooldown to the skill, so it only comes into play around the second turn. While this helps, we also took a look at the map and made some adjustments for fairness. With so many maps, not all can be winners, eh? Keep an eye out for unfair situations, and let us know! Rewards when Abandoning a Run: This one is a bit fuzzy. As you know, Curses and Blessings require Essence to work, and we are going to reward players for playing Hardmode - the more zones you clear, the more Essence you gain. Now, something happened with one of our Discord players: after beating Behemoth in Albion, he ended up abandoning a run in Marca Hispanica. He was quite surprised to find out that, under our initial rule, youd only gain Essences after you lost a run! Abandoning, we reasoned, shouldnt be rewarded. Well, we talked it through a bit and decided to just let it be, for the sake of avoiding frustration: now, you earn the Essences even if you abandoned the run. Other Tweaks: we still made time to make some tweaks here and there. Rolands Horn is getting another iteration, Wilfred and Safir got some small buffs, Bleeding now has larger stack sizes, that sort of thing. Were also investigating some larger changes to the Supplies system, which well focus on after Hardmode is live. Keep an eye out for blog posts on that! And thats it for now! As were finishing up the biggest systems in the game and approaching a full release, feedback is quite important to polish up abilities and clarify UX. Thank you so much for the support so far. We still want to do another week of testing before we show you the final result, so we appreciate the patience, and if you havent, join our Discord server and watch The Hand of Merlin happen before your very eyes! Mat

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer. Hello again! Quick one today. We have Hardmode and Metaprogression ready for testing! Several modifiers, all the Dire Units, and all baseline changes are in the game, and weve been testing them for a while now. Its coming along nicely, but heres the catch: We built Hardmode with our most proficient players in mind. You know, you guys who were concerned about the game being too easy - and we could use more of your input before we put the game out to the wider public. So, were looking to conduct a small closed-beta of sorts, where well make a special build available for those interested, featuring Hardmode and its modifiers. After playing it for a bit, the playtesters can provide us with some valuable input and suggestions, and we can do a little bit of extra polish before the Hardmode Update hits the (digital) shelves! So, if you are into playing the hardest Hand of Merlin can be, drop us a line on the Discord server and well sort it out! Mat

General fixes: Fixed the wording and counter for the Full Roster achievement to correctly target unlocking 9 heroes from the base game. Fixed a bug with the Exertion achievement where it could track action point usage incorrectly in some cases. Combat maps in Al-Andalus and Jerusalem should now spawn the same enemies even after restarting the match, like most other maps. Fixed a bug where the Keen Aim status effect would not expire properly at turn start. Toad's Bristleback effect no longer triggers Wyvern's Opportune strike, solving some unclear interactions. Stasis should no longer end prematurely based on some character passives. Redcap's passive should no longer allow pylons to act when it triggers. Alain the White's passive should no longer apply after he's killed in battle. Fixed a bug where in the final (Jerusalem) fight, kills that happened in the first turn would not grant mana. Fixed a rare bug where the encounter option fineprint could get garbled. Fixed an issue where the cards on the world map could be obscured by the map legend in Big Picture mode. Optimizations: Loading times on game start should now be faster on some PCs. Quality-of-Life improvements: Replaced the node models in Jerusalem world map to make it more clear what their encounters are. Gameplay balancing: The Mesmerized debuff, associated with Alain the White, now decreases Range and Accuracy, instead of Range and Evasion. Spire, a Tier 3 spell in Morgana's Core, now imparts a higher stack count of the debuffs it applies. Reduced the cooldown of Warrior's Parry skill (and its upgrades) from 3 to 2 turns. Increased the damage dealt by Warrior's Charge skill (and its upgrades). Ranger's Take Aim skill (and its upgrades) no longer cost action points. The Green versions of the Tier 3 upgrades, which were boosted by a reduction of AP cost, now have increased effect strength instead. The Raider enemy should now avoid hitting allies with his bombs a bit more, and has less range now (from 6 to 5 tiles). Changed Mandrake's Quicken skill. Instead of refreshing cooldowns, it now grants evasion - this is to remove the uncounterable "double-shot" it usually did, in exchange increasing its average survivability.

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer. Hello again! As Mia is preparing the modifiers for our extended Hardmode, I had a day or two to focus on some minor balancing. So I wanted to share with you a bit of the telemetry data weve been gathering and how we go about noticing what needs a bump or a nerf. So, one thing I was a bit concerned with was how powerful each enemy was in comparison to each other. Is a Knave as dangerous as a Pillager? Is a Thorntoad comparable to a Basilisk? In the search for that answer, we could look at how much damage each enemy deals overall, but that can be skewed by how many of each unit there is. So, knowing it isnt a perfect data set either, I wanted to ask "how many kills does each enemy have?", starting with the bandits. In the latest 720 kills performed by a human bandit, these were the top 5: Raider: 187 Rascal: 70 Looter: 68 Outlaw: 58 Brigand: 56 Now, besides the subtle prevalence of ranged bandits, I was very surprised to see that the Raider had SO many more kills. Surely, it meant that the Raider enemy was the most powerful of all the bandits! Well, not quite. After noticing nothing immediately wrong, I saw that hes a user of the Prepare Bomb skill, one of those delayed AoE effects. And, as intended, this sometimes ends with a friendly-fire kill, especially if the player has some knockback effects, and those are counted in the telemetry! Following that thread, I eventually discovered that the Raider made no attempts at avoiding his friends. Oh boy. A small tweak to the AI, and well see the results in a few weeks! In the Abomination department, the story was a bit different. In the latest 3490 kills performed by an Abomination, these were the top 5: Mandrake: 1308 Thorntoad: 494 Behemoth: 425 Redcap: 384 Wyvern: 325 A similarly scary jump. Now, in this case, it's not so clear cut - Mandrakes delayed AoE, Barrage, does not do friendly fire, and Mandrake is pretty much as common as a Redcap or Wyvern, even though it has pretty much double their killshots combined. What gives? Well, this is where you gotta do a bit of a leap of faith. You see, Its normal to expect a ranged abomination with a decent power stat to be the top killer, but I felt the numbers to be a bit high compared to its allies. Then I remembered that we did a recent change where its Quicken ability enabled Mandrake to shoot twice in a single turn. A bit of a needed power boost, sure, but I dont think it allowed for much counterplay. So I took the opportunity to remove that capacity and instead add evasion to the same ability! Still a buff from the previous version, but now less murderous. Again, well see the results in a few weeks, eh? That sort of stuff happened all over the place. Charge, Parry and Take Aim were hardly picked (especially in builds that ended up winning the game), so they got a bit of a buff. Sieges in zone 1 are pretty lethal, but I didnt touch them until we have more information on the Mandrake change. And, finally, take a look at the hero picks: In the latest 5325 Hero picks, these are their rankings, rounded: Breunor: 1506 (28% of all parties had him) Merewen: 1427 (26%) Morgan: 1334 (25%) Rana: 241 (5%) Salim: 205 (4%) Isabel: 147 (3%) Wilfred: 114 (2%) Zahra: 94 (2%) Safir: 86 (2%) Tariq: 83 (2%) Rumayla: 70 (1%) Alain: 18 (<1%) Now, the biggest input point is, of course, availability. Breunor, Merewen and Morgan are the default heroes, so its safe to assume most games feature at least one of them, perhaps with a small indication that Breunor is a bit ahead of the rest of the Warriors. Rumayla and Tariq are a bit harder to gauge, but they are also a bit unorthodox, so that (maybe) explains it. Nothing too scary there, but worth keeping an eye out. Now, Alain? I know, hes the hardest character to unlock, requiring you to reach party rank 10. But the size of the jump surprised me a bit. Heres where internal feedback comes in: when we first submitted Alain, even our dev team felt he was cool, but maybe a bit weak, with an odd triggering mechanism for his passive. With that in mind, I decided to buff his passive a bit, and see what happens with those numbers. Not an exact science, and you gotta be careful to keep them feeling different, you see. So, yeah, thats pretty much the process. A lot of parsing numbers, coming up with hypotheses, and testing them. Sometimes it's as easy as reducing the cooldown of a supporting skill or tweaking the AI of a unit, other times you just gotta go with your gut. Hopefully, the more iteration cycles, the better the result! My next stop is spells. Did you know that 47% of all spells cast in the game are Restoration? Oof. Any thoughts on that or any of these changes? Think you noticed something different? Drop us a line on our Discord server and join us in making The Hand of Merlin as good as it can be! Mat

New content: Added all of the remaining alternate combat maps, across all zones. General fixes: Fixed possible crashes when entering or leaving combat if playing with a gamepad. Fixed a possible crash during AI's turn in combat. Fixed a bug with being unable to use multi-target abilities with the gamepad. Fixed a bug where the score view didn't close when clicking on hero icons. The Red version of Doubleshot+ (upgrade of Ranger's Quick Draw) is now called Tripleshot and correctly describes that it indeed shoots 3 times. The Green version of Surging Shot no longer explodes units on kill shots. Basilisk's Lingering Poison now correctly reduces health healing, instead of increasing it. Fixed several typos. Optimizations: Reduced the time AI takes for the Basilisk's turn in combat. Quality-of-Life improvements: Improved the UX on ultra-widescreen monitors of several more combat maps. Improved the UX of Lobby navigation with gamepads. Gamepad X/square can now be used to activate notifications on the world map. The game no longer waits for the camera to settle before giving control over the Journal or Core on the world map. Changed War Horn relic's description, to better describe its self-cast nature. Gameplay balancing: Thunderbolt now deals a flat 15 standard damage, away from reducing all armor OR killing unarmored units. Ranger's Decoy skill (and its upgrades) now have limited charges. Noble Ruser (Merewen's passive) now only reduces cooldowns by 1 instead of resetting all of them. This still allows her to chain basic attacks. Behemoth's Bloodlust passive now increases its speed whenever it takes damage, and Trample is required to be used in its regular turn, costing 2 AP. The intent of this change is to curb non-counterable behavior. Cockatrice's aura has fewer stacks of regeneration now.

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer. Hello there! Quick one today - we just wanted to share some of the alternate maps we recently finished, to spice up your combat scenarios as you go back, run after run. We introduced a few of those in Z1 a few months ago, and now we finally finished the rest of the zones. Now, every single map concept we have should now have 4 versions: Default, Default Corrupted, Alternate, and Alternate Corrupted. Here are some screenshots:





Thats a lot of maps! What do you think? Any favorites? Let us know on our Discord server, and good luck out there! Mat

Hello, everyone! Versus Evil is turning 8! Can you believe it? Well, believe it because to celebrate we're having a sale on our awesome catalog of games! Over these past 8 years, we've had the opportunity to help put out many fun and creative games. This year saw the release of Jumpala, Hitchhiker - A Mystery Game, and Sockventure, as well as Early Access releases for First Class Trouble, Almighty: Kill Your Gods, and The Hand of Merlin. Tomorrow sees the release of our latest addition, UnMetal! UnMetal is a 2D stealth action-adventure that pays homage to the classics with a healthy dose of humor and satire. You play as Jesse Fox, who is definitely NOT an elite commando, under arrest for a crime he didn't commit, and must escape a covert military base using his wits and fists. Sounds like fun, right? Check out UnMetal and the rest of our catalog for anything that may interest you! To close, some thanks are in order... Thank you to our developers who really give it their all to bring these games to life. Thank you to our Heralds who are the best ambassadors we could ever hope for. And, of course, thank you to our players who are the reason we continue to strive to put out the best games we possibly can. This has been one long, crazy journey, and we're glad you're all on it with us. From all of us at Versus Evil, thank you for making these past 8 years great. Now, go score some deals! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1203710/UnMetal/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1206600/Almighty_Kill_Your_Gods/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1222340/Sockventure/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/888530/Yaga/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/904400/Cardpocalypse/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1003120/Hitchhiker__A_Mystery_Game/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1278190/Jumpala/

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer. Hi there! Quick one today: I want to introduce another aspect of Hardmode, Curses and Blessings. We alluded to this before, but we are considering hardmode to be an ascension mode of sorts. As you master its challenges, youll gain more and more essence, and there must be a place to spend it! Heres where the Blessings come in. Whenever you pick Hardmode, you are able to spend Essences to gain temporary benefits to that run. Some examples are Leylines, which increases your maximum mana, and Wealthy Endeavour, which makes your gold rewards larger. We are also preparing some interesting ones about mana or messing with the Grail! Now, when we were first talking about this model, the idea of spending enough essence to make hardmode too easy rubbed us the wrong way. So we doubled down on the Ascension mode theme and added the Curses - negative modifiers that you can pick for the run. All fun things, like No Witnesses making corrupted fights yield less rewards, and Grievous Wounds increasing healing costs. Pretty nasty stuff. Each one of these modifiers has a number associated with it, that we call Doom Value. Heres the thing: if you want to spend, say, 3 essences in Blessings? You gotta pick enough Curses to match the Doom value to the cost, in this case at least 3 Doom. So its always kind of balanced, but you can pick which benefits you want to use to take on an ever increasing challenge.
the current state of the modifier selection segment, not all modifiers are in yet Thats not all. We want to reinforce people moving up in Doom Value as they play, so the higher the Doom Value of a run, the more Essence itll reward you based on how far you went. So we leave it to the player, you see. If you got essence to spend, do you want to give hardmode + doom value 3 a go? Alright, pick 3 points in Blessings, and pay up. Now, every boss battle you defeat, you gain more essences at the end! There you go! Mia, one of our designers, is hard at work creating interesting curses and blessings to change up your gameplay, and offer the more hardcore among you an ever increasing challenge to measure up to! Want to participate in the design of those modifiers? Join our Discord server and let Mia know what youre thinking! Mat

General fixes: Fixed a crash with gamepads when using R1/RB. Fixed an issue with gamepad controls where moving from tile picking back to actionbar didn't reset back to the skill that initiated the tile picking. Fixed an issue where ending gamepad drag in the relic shop to purchase a relic didn't restore the hover target to the destination slot. Fixed a crash on the map state when all heroes are lost. Fixed a few issues with misbehaving tooltips in the relic shop and blacksmith book chapters. Fixed "Feats of Strength" encounter which could lead to a page with no options available, halting progress. Measured Shooter (Salim's passive) should no longer unintentionally increase Damage-Over-Time effects. Fixed an error in the Agile status effect (associated with some relics), so that now it consistently grants action points as described. Fixed an error with Expurger (associated with an upgrade of Mystic's Raise Totem skill), where the heroes could poison themselves if they had the Holy Grail. Fixed several typos. Quality-of-Life improvements: Gamepad Y/triangle button can now be used to show formulas in skirmishes. Gameplay balancing: Redcap's Horror ability now deals just 1 stack of Stunned. Adjusted minion spawning by Pylons to bring them all closer to the same power level.

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer. Hello! Wanted to share a bit more about our hard mode plans. One of the early concepts of the games difficulty curve was to introduce powered-up versions of each abomination. Larger and meaner, these units would serve as the center focus of a match. In fact, the older players among you might notice that we do have such a unit in the game, the current Dire Thorntoad - a 2x2 version of Thorntoad, introduced in Marca Hispanica. It serves an interesting purpose. It takes the place of the Behemoths as a Major abomination, and it's important to have some variation there, especially since we dont introduce Lindworm, another abomination in the same category, until Al-Andalus. But we want to further the concept. Well change the large toads name, and introduce new versions of each abomination in the game, called Dires. Theyll be far stronger versions, having more action points, less cooldowns, and unique passive effects, changing the challenges that each enemy presents. And, just for good measure, a bit more health and armor. These Dires are planned as a Hardmode-only treat. Our current plan is for each corrupted fight in Hardmode to pick one of the enemies and upgrade them to their dire version, offering a somewhat randomized challenge for you to solve. Due to their nature, we are expecting each Dire to be your focus for most of the match, making each skirmish just a tiny bit different, a useful trait for our target audience for hardmode - the player that already mastered the game. The Dires are also retextured, and Kaz has been consistently delivering interesting visual variations so you can know at a glance which of the Mandrakes is about to ruin your day! Were excited to show you what Hardmode (and metaprogression) is shaping up to be, and this is just one of the pieces. What do you think? Any particular ideas for how each Dire should behave? Drop in to our Discord server and let us know! Mat

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer. Hello there! Some spoilers for the end of the campaign below. Beware! Quick one today, as were busy making all the preparations and tech work for the hardmode update, which we iterated a few times over already. While we were working on enemy behavior, we noticed that there was quite a bit of interesting feedback and discussions regarding how the final combat works in The Hand of Merlin. In particular, players were a bit concerned about some of the Pylons, the units that are created to fight your warband in the later stages of the game, which were a bit unbalanced and well, unfun. Few opportunities for counterplay, differences in power, and debuffs a bit too severe were some of the thoughts, and we agreed! Part of the EA experience is to get to pursue the fun live with our players, and we definitely have enough information now for some touch-ups. We just uploaded a patch that addresses this. We took the pylons, considered them against each other, gave them some cleaner abilities and fixed a few bugs. Summons make a bit more sense now, and the maximum unit count in that fight has also been reduced, leading to a more coherent experience. We believe it to be an improvement, and it's all based on your input, specially over in our Discord server. So, hey, thanks for making my life a bit easier, and keep that feedback coming! Mat

New features: Created several new encounter illustrations. General fixes: Fixed an infinite loop with the bookmark mode for gamepads. Fixed a bug where unit tooltips would sometimes erroneously be shown on the world map when using a gamepad. Fixed a bug where skill tooltips from the base ability would remain on the screen when upgrading skills and cover up the cards. Fixed certain issues with the interaction between Opportunist (Wyvern's passive) and The Holy Grail. Vengeful Martyrdom (upgrade of Mystic's Martyrdom skill) should no longer proc on player's turn, as expected and described. Fixed several typos. Quality-of-Life improvements: Fixed issues with several more Al-Andalus skirmish maps on ultra-wide monitors. Fixed an issue where the camera would sometimes make sudden movements during enemy (AI) turns. Gameplay balancing: Revamped the Pylons, changing the base abilities of most variants, with the intent of normalizing their power levels, reducing "chore" mechanics, and providing mechanics with counter-plays instead. In addition, Pylons will no longer summon more units if there are 6 enemies already present. Instead, each Pylon variant now has a unique new ability to use in such a case. "Weak" status effect is now capped at 5 stacks max.

New features: Created several new encounter illustrations. General fixes: Fixed an infinite loop that could happen when using directional aiming via gamepad for cone attacks / abilities. Fixed a rare crash that could happen when spawning enemies. Fixed several UI layout issues when using Big Picture mode. Fixed a bug where the Holy Grail spell couldn't be hotkey activated with the keyboard. Fixed "The Maze" encounter to no longer halt progress if lacking Supplies to proceed. Opportunist, Wyvern's passive, should no longer be triggered at a distance, only when the Wyvern is adjacent to a unit who just took damage. Toxic Buildup, Basilisk's passive, should no longer decay when the creature is hit with ranged attacks. The "Stunned" status effect now interacts correctly with the new 0-AP unit selection feature. Warrior's Stand Ready skill (and its upgrades) now no longer require 1 AP to be used, allowing them to be used as the last action in a round. Warrior's Command skill (upgrade of Warcry), now properly adds the Powerful buff to allies, as stated in the description. The "Expurger" status effect, associated with the Expurging Totem upgrade of Mystic's Raise Totem skill, now properly adds poison to attacks, and carries a combat message for clarification. Fixed a bug where card tooltips would sometimes be set to the wrong position. Clarified several ability tooltips, and fixed several typos across tooltips and hints. Quality-of-Life improvements: Added tooltips to the gameplay legend shown on the world map, which lists the types of map nodes, possible rewards, etc. The "Options" menu now has a new and improved layout, and now also works directly with gamepads, rather than relying on a virtual cursor. Sped up the world map notifications if the player is trying to move to the next node while they are on the screen. When using a gamepad, the default window mouse cursor is now hidden. Renamed Pylons' Ethereal status effect to Immortal, for clarity. Optimizations: Reduced texture sizes for several heroes, without loss in visual quality. Gameplay balancing: The healer in the city of Toledo no longer accepts gold but has the option to reject waiting for free healing.

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer. Now that the Enemy Update has been out for a week, let me tell you about what our next plans are! Even before we entered Early Access, we knew that the game had an upper-bound, that is, a limit of how many things you could do before you mastered all of its challenges. We introduced some side tasks, like the Prowess unlocks and some specific achievements, but we really needed more time and feedback to design a true metaprogression system. Hell, you can note some discussions in the Steam forums or our Discord servers on the topic of now what?, and those did not go unheard. We started working on it! Itll be implemented in a few steps. First of all, we need a Hard Mode. A nastier challenge with more complex resource management and tougher beasties will be a great starting point. Then, well leverage our persistent currency, Essences, into a modifier system, with positive ones that result in a power increase (More gold? More mana? Start with a more powerful grail?) and negative ones that will increase your essence gain, but bring an extra challenge (Harder enemies? More expensive healing?). We hope that the end result is that you have a fine control over the intended difficulty of a run, and can slowly progress your warbands power across multiple runs. Challenging yourself will reward you with more essence, which in turn allows you to purchase more positive modifiers a full-fledged economy for you to participate in, and a final goal. Can you do a full negative modifier run in Hardmode? I hope you are excited about the new additions to the game and the challenges we are going to present you with. Hit us up in our Discord server if you have any questions or feedback to offer in this design stage! Mat

General fixes: Fixed a bug where unrevealed enemies could remain in their turn indefinitely. Added missing entry for the new Basilisk abomination into the Bestiary.

Patch Notes - Early Access Build 674600 New features: Added 3 new enemies: Enchanter and Witch as two new Mystic Bandits, and Basilisk as a new ranged Abomination. Added support for Steam's Big Picture mode. Added first-pass gamepad support; it's functional, but UX improvements are planned. Also, only the standard Xbox controllers are officially supported. Created a new model for Skill Cards, shown when ranking up your party. The new cards are more informative, and now also include effect area in the skill specs. Added some new SFX to Heroes. Added some new illustrations for encounters. Quality-of-Life improvements: Units with no action points can now be manually selected. This makes it possible to use 0 AP skills after having spent all AP. Added a hint on how to recruit a new Hero in case one of them dies in combat - by visiting Heroic nodes, denoted by a helmet icon on the world map. General fixes: Fixed a bug where reaction attacks against large units would sometimes fail. Fixed a bug where trying to end a turn while any unit had a free action wouldn't end the turn until the free action was used. Fixed a rare bug in Isabel de Orreaga's encounter that could sometimes prevent her from being recruited. Warrior's Driven Haste skill and its upgrades now have correct cooldown values, as stated in the ability card. Warrior's Command skill (upgrade of Warcry) should now be usable even if there are no allies nearby. Mystic's Scavenging Singe (upgrade of Singe) can no longer target a tile if there are no units in that tile, making it consistent with other attack skills. Ranger's Volley skill should no longer allow hitting targets behind full cover. The relic Snake Skin can no longer poison the bearer if they receive a debuff. Fixed a bug where the effect of Stasis spell would decay twice as fast as intended. Fixed typos in several encounters and tooltips. Optimizations: Reduced texture sizes for several heroes and enemies, without loss in visual quality. Gameplay balancing: Changed how Wyvern's passive works. Instead of gaining a stacking Evasion buff when attacked, Wyvern now has Opportunist - when an enemy takes damage, the Wyvern will attack a random enemy in melee range. Changed how Mandrake's Quicken ability works, now allowing it to gain an extra action point istead of a Speed increase, making it similar to Warrior's Haste. Changed how Behemoth's AI works during reaction turns, favoring the use of the Trample skill. Behemoth's Heavy Armor passive will no longer affect damage over time effects. The Inspired status effect (gained from various abilities and relics) is now capped at 10 stacks maximum. Warrior's Coordinated Parry skill (upgrade of Parry) is now usable at 0 AP. The relic Strong Drink can no longer miss, and now has 3 charges with effects that stack with itself. The relic Alardin's Shield now grants +2 Evasion (up from +1). The relic Blood Amulet now grants +2 Power (up from +1). The relic Beast Talisman is now Common, and costs 50gp (down from 80gp).

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. [olist]

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer. Hello there! Mat is back to talk design. If you guys ever read our soft roadmap, youll remember that another major content patch that we want to do is the addition of a few new enemies - a chunky new abomination, and some support bandits. It's great to be able to design a whole new enemy set after seeing the game live for a few months. We learned a lot about how players engage with the game, their favorite strategies and skills, etc. We can now create a creature specifically tailored to challenge the meta! So, let me introduce you to the Basilisk, our new abomination!
It serves as a chunky sniper-type. Very high range, likes to take cover, and has some damage-over-time properties, choosing to lay down some poison-type abilities while growing its own power with the Toxin Buildup passive, which increases his damage every turn. Itll be featured on Marca Hispanica onwards, taking the same slot as Thorntoad. (if you didnt like the chunky guy, then rejoice!) However, he is not without limitations. His Toxin Buildup passive can be reduced by melee attacks, giving your Warriors another way to deal with the threat. To accompany that new addition, we are also introducing two Mystic Bandits, the Enchanter and Witch for Albion and Marca Hispanica respectively.
While not particularly resilient, they can heal, empower and even give more AP to the other bandits, requiring your attention at all stages of a match, and offering a bit of a different strategy for your human enemies. But that's not all. As we introduced some power creep when redesigning skills and passives, we gave the players a lot of new toys to play with, but the enemies didnt keep up. Yeah, we made them a bit stronger, but we could do better. Im not going to spoil everything, but we changed how some of the enemy passives work a bit, from the dreaded Wyverns Elusive, to Behemoths Bloodlust, making them more in line with the current direction of the game, and addressing some of the more common feedback we received. Expect the major patch soon, and please let us know what you think in our Discord server. We're excited to give you some new challenges to face! Mat

Hi folks! This week we wont be pushing a patch out because we dont have any notable changes done. Mat is on vacation so there are no balance changes, and Im still busy with gamepad support, tho Im getting into the finishing stages of the core functionality so hopefully soon Ill go back to some gameplay stuffs. Since theres no other topic we could talk about, Ill continue talking about gamepads from last week. The current state of the support is fairly complete. All the main screens are fully usable with the gamepad in a way that, at least to me as a non-console user, feels relatively normal. There are a few places that are janky and weird, most notably selection of spells in the core, node selection in the overworld map and the tile picking in fights. Basically, anything that has to do with 3D elements, which is probably not surprising since 2D UI interaction with gamepads is much more intuitive (and simple!) than anything to do with 3D that requires picking. When I envisioned spell selection in the core, I thought that it would make sense to use the up/down stick or d-pad movement to move between spell tiers, and left/right would move between the individual spells in that tier. After implementing it, Ill say that my vision was entirely wrong, and it feels very unintuitive and crap. So Ill be changing that so it works more like a directional thing where UP selects the first spell thats above the currently selected one, and so on. The world map node selection is a bit better, but still weird. It works by requiring you to push the stick in the direction of the node you want to select relative to the current node, but this has 2 issues. The first is that when two nodes are in a relatively similar direction, its hard to precisely pick which one you want to really go to because the margin for difference is very small. The second is a bit of unintuitiveness stemming from the first issue: you cant push UP to select the top node, but have to push in the, for example, right-and-up-a-bit to select it. This is another thing that will be tweaked once I get some feedback and ideas for a fix. Lastly, the combat tile picking is the weirdest one. Ive tried 3 solutions so far, and neither felt good :( The main problem Ive identified is that our game doesnt use a pure isometric projection (which would keep the vertical lines parallel to the screen), but a very narrow perspective projection. The camera is very far away from the map and is using a small FoV for a sort of telescopic lens effect. The other part is that the camera is looking down at an angle. So the issues I saw were:

• When the hit tile (or the screen point that defines which tile is hit) happens to be on the edge of the screen, pushing the stick UP actually moved the hit world point towards the up-and-left/right (depending on which side of the screen youre on), which is caused by the perspective projection having a vanishing point, towards which all points will move to when going away from the camera.
• The speed of moving the hit world point up or down is not the same as moving it left/right, which is caused by the camera angle: moving 1 meter away from the camera will move a shorter vertical screen distance than moving 1 meter left/right and keeping the same distance from the camera.

New features: Added new sound effects for several abilities and enemies. General fixes: Charm Stones relic no longer triggers Safir's Paladin passive. Warrior's Interdict skill (upgrade of Stunning Blow) no longer removes Ethereal status effect from Pylons. Summoned units (such as Decoys) will no longer be tracked in end-of-run report as casualties. Fixed an issue preventing Blight and Decoy skills from being drawn at rank up. Summoned units will now immediately gain the effects of auras within range, rather than having to move out and back in. Fixed typos in several tooltips. Optimizations: Greatly optimized the terrain system, reducing the game's total memory footprint by about 40% in skirmish scenarios. This change also reduces VRAM and disk space requirements. Optimized texture sizes of certain monsters. Gameplay balancing: Alain The White's Fey passive will now also trigger off Decoys.

Hi all! Some members of the team have taken their vacation time this week, some took last week off, and some are taking next week off, so this period might be a bit slower in terms of interesting design blog posts and patches. We do have a patch coming today with some smaller/easier fixes and a memory optimization, but next week will probably go without one. Since my time has mostly been spent on working on gamepad support, I can at least talk about how thats going. A lot of our UI code was written with a mouse and keyboard in mind. Were fairly tooltip heavy and thats presenting an interesting challenge. My mindset for implementing gamepads was always to do it so it feels natural to control the game with it. Obviously this is a bit tricky if most of the code was done with a mouse in mind instead of a gamepad. In particular, we wanted the game to be fully controllable with only the mouse and not require the keyboard, so UX wise, everything is done to respond to a single button press at a specific point on the screen. When talking about being able to control the game with just the mouse, youre expecting only one, maybe two, buttons to exist. UI interactions are usually intuitive for people in this day and age, so relying on just the left mouse button coupled with its point on the screen is enough to drive the entire game. For gamepads, this obviously doesnt work the same. If youre using a gamepad, you can likely expect the player to be able to use all of its buttons. Gamepads also dont really have a screen point they are directly interacting with like the mouse has, and even if they do, moving that point is much harder/different/annoying. Our first temporary implementation (which is currently available if you want to play with it) does exactly that: it moves the virtual mouse position with the left stick, and uses the A(xbox) or X(ps) button to emulate the left mouse button click. This is fine for now, but thats not how a gamepad user expects to control the game. So I went through every screen in the game and looked at it with my gamepad in hand and thought about how Id control that screen with a gamepad. Jumping between UI options, jumping across Spells, toggling between UI mode and book/node/core/fight modes. With that plan in mind, I started looking at the code to see how to split the control into this is when youre using a gamepad and this is when youve got a mouse. The whole process requires a fair bit of refactoring, but is on a good trajectory to be done for the next major patch. Thanks for reading! Join our Discord server! MarkoP

Patch Notes - Early Access Build 674263 New features: Added 3 new Heroes: Tariq al-Ash'ab (Warrior), Alain the White (Ranger), Isabel de Orreaga (Mystic). Each has a unique new passive ability, too! You can recruit these new Heroes on your travels (by visiting Heroic nodes with a non-full party), and you can also unlock them permanently by performing various feats of strength. Added 3 new Skills available at rank-up: Rage (Warrior), Decoy (Ranger) and Blight (Mystic). General fixes: Fixed a very rare issue that could cause wrong font rendering in Book UI, or even a crash. Fixed a bug where mana granted by certain relics would sometimes not be applied. Optimizations: Reduced the memory usage of various particle effects, without any noticeable loss in quality.

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer. Hey! Its time for a new major patch, and with it, some new toys for you to play with! When we were planning on what to do during Early Access, we knew that we had to focus a lot on replayability. New alternate maps, new enemies, new skills and new heroes! With the addition of passives, picking the correct hero for your playstyle is an important part of The Hand of Merlin experience. For that reason, were proud to present our newest addition to the hero roster:
Our new warrior is Tariq al-Ash'ab, a berber mercenary. Tariq embodies fancy footwork, and with his Bladedancer passive, he becomes stronger for each nearby enemy. He carries the Cleave ability for a similar purpose, and even sports decent speed and evasion. With some healing support or access to good armor, he can be one of the heaviest hitters in your warband!
For the new ranger, we bring you Alain the White, a mysterious prince. A decent speed and even some evasion, Alain attempts to be a more utility-oriented ranger, with his Fey passive punishing enemies that miss, and the new Decoy skill, that summons an inanimate target to draw enemy fire.
Finally, Isabel de Orreaga is our new mystic. This tough hermit carries heavier defensive attributes than most of her class, and sports the Campaign Surgeon passive, which makes every healing also come with a few stacks of the Keen status effect, increasing the damage of the next attack. To capitalize on that, she has the new Blight ability, an alternative way of healing. When targeting a foe with this ability, all your allies that damage the target are healed for a bit of armor. Each new hero is an attempt to expand what it means to increase each classs design space and with it, offer new ways to approach character building. Utility rangers, tanky mystics and warriors that dont need to circle the battlefield too much, all with new abilities and passives to play with. And dont worry: even though Tariq is using an old one, we added the Berserkers Rage ability to the Warriors Pool. A single-target version of Warcry that grows as you deal damage, it will do wonders to validate AoE-oriented builds with Cleave, Charge, and Slam. Let us know what you think of the new heroes, and which powerful builds you can come up with in our Discord server! Mat

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer. Hello again! I got some more insights about how we go about balancing the game, if you are into that. Balancing a strategy game is a herculean task, and we from the design department have had a lot of luck, being able to leverage our own dev team as playtesters, but also a lot of feedback from the community. Seeing the numbers go from flowcharts and datasheets into feelings'' is a great joy to a game developer! Heres how the process has been happening in the past few weeks. Our goals havent changed. When we make changes, we are pursuing the highest number of significant choices possible. You know that moment when you look at two skills or two options and cant decide which one to pick? If that paralysis is not due to a lack of information, it means that those two options are balanced. If one option is picked much more often, then it means they're not balanced. Theres a lot of interfering variables, but thats the gist of it. To give you some examples, let me talk about some of the data sets we use for balancing. When we consider abilities, we look at which ones are being picked the most. In particular, I like looking at the ability roster of a party that has defeated the final fight. I call that data set which abilities are the most commonly effective. If an ability is too far from its other versions, it nudges me to the idea that they are not equally attractive, so I try to nerf one a bit, or buff the other versions. As an example, Driven Haste, the version that cleared non-offensive cooldowns, was under-picked. So we made it also clear debuffs, to see what effect it has on the picking rates. Characters are similar. Apart from the obvious fact that most runs involve Breunor, Merewen and Morgan, we keep an eye to see if a specific character is rarely picked. If you take the raw data and then consider how hard each character is to unlock, you can raise some flags - it seems that Safir is considered underpowered, so we changed his passive for this weeks patch, for instance. Resources are a bit more straightforward. Last year, when we were showcasing our initial demos, we started to make assumptions about how many level-ups a run should take, how much gold youd get, and how much should be spent on gear to get to the average gear level we wanted. Huge spreadsheet, lots of theoretical plans. Then, we started implementing it and querying. Sometimes we got it right (people spent around 66% of their gold in gear, from our expected 70%), and sometimes we didnt, like players being able to get to rank 11 in a single run. Some adjustments are still incoming, but we cant be married to the original plans: if its fun, it's working! Relics are a smoother experience. Because of their random nature, they dont need to be very tightly balanced, and its always fun to see how broken a build can get when you get the right relics. They are usually the result of design experiments, like Mias Yonder Charm coming from our attempts to make a stance ability that eventually failed. We usually touch up on their designs and values occasionally, after being constantly under/overwhelmed when encountering them in a match. Thats as fuzzy as it gets! This is really not a science, and theres a lot of playing, feeling, and making adjustments. As our official release approaches and our recent successes, we are looking forward to seeing the results of our changes, and how fun the game ends up being. Join our Discord server! Mat

Quality-of-Life improvements: Slightly increased the size of map node tooltips on the World Map, making them easier to read. Added new scrolling combat text messages for various events and reactions. General fixes: Fixed the damage calculation for Ranger's Preemptive Vigil (upgrade of Archer's Vigil) to be the same as all other skills of the same line. Fixed an issue that made some upgrades of Ranger's Point Blank skill not have their on-hit and on-kill effects apply correctly. Fixed various typos in several tooltips. Gameplay balancing: Safir's passive (Paladin) has a new mechanic. Now, Safir deals (0.5*Power + 1) damage to a random adjacent enemy whenever he uses a defensive or utility skill. Rana's and Zahra's passives now scale with Power, instead of giving a flat 50% armor restore. Reduced the base Speed of all Warrior Heroes by 1. Increased Rumayla's base Power to 6 (up from 5). Warrior's Driven Haste (upgrade of Haste) now also cleanses all debuffs. Warrior's Shield Block skill line is no longer limited by charges, and all versions that apply Resistance have their stack size increased by 1. Warrior's Overpowering Slash (upgrade of Slash) now deals Guard Down instead of Vulnerable, meaning the extra damage taken debuff is for one turn only. Warrior's Parry skill line no longer costs AP to be used. Mystic's Hallow skill and its Dense and Major Upgrades have their duration increased by 1. Resistance status effect now has 6 stacks max (up from 5). Harassed status effect no longer roots, just reduces speed. Quarry status effect is now capped at +1 AP given, no matter the source.

General fixes: Fixed a rare crash that could sometimes happen when launching the game or winning the final battle.

New features / content: Added destruction effects to Heroes. E.g. when a Hero dies by an explosive, they will now explode into chunky bits. Quality-of-Life improvements: Completed ultra-wide support for all skirmish maps in Albion and Marca Hispanica. Removed the timer for shuffling random outcome cards and replaced it with a manual Shuffle button. Added artwork to indicate when an encounter option leads to a card draw and random outcome. Added a quick-and-dirty display of the currently upgrading skill to below the Hide cards button when upgrading skills. Changed how portrait tooltips work - they are now hover persistent, and have their own tooltips for various elements, like attributes and status effects. Added gear icons to portrait tooltips, as well as attribute breakdowns (the components adding up to the values, such as gear, effects, etc). Added a visualization for locations of manual waypoints. Slightly increased font sizes in the Journal and in some tooltips. General fixes: Fixed an incorrect message when the AI passes their turn. Fixed a bug with the legend compass not getting deleted correctly, causing a crash if the dangling compass is clicked. Fixed an error in Zahra's Resourceful passive that sometimes did not proc her armor healing. Fixed an issue where the benefits of Hunter's Spree and Surging Shot (upgrades of Ranger's Shoot skill) could not be correctly applied. Fixed an issue preventing Volley from being offered as a skill choice to Rangers on level up. Turpin's Cross now requires 1 AP to be used, as all free action relics do. This avoids characters becoming stuck with 0 AP. Healing for 0 no longer triggers side-effects by default. Fixed a bug where encounter text could sometimes use the wrong name when referring to a Hero. Fixed various typos in several tooltips and encounters. Gameplay balancing: Revamped all variants of the Holy Grail relic. Instead of an on-use action, they now all have unique passive effects. Roland's Horn now deals Harassed to enemies instead of Rally to allies, serving as a locking mechanic with better scaling. Ranger's Defensive Vigil (upgrade of Archer's Vigil) no longer takes AP away from the target, but adds 3 stacks of the Blinded debuff. Ranger's Far Shot skill (upgrade of Shoot) now only has 1.5x the default range, down from 2x. Ranger's Quickdraw skill line now comes with a 40% accuracy reduction, but scales better with more power. Warrior's Slam skill now deals Staggered instead of Dazed for its base version and all upgrades. It also now allows pushing diagonal enemies. Heavy Armor effect now also reduces damage to health while there is armor left. Higher tier Blacksmith upgrades are now cheaper. Supplies now cost the same in all zones.

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer. Hey! More design stuff! Today, lets keep it simple: Grails. So, if you ever played The Hand of Merlin, one of the first choices you make in a run is to pick a Virtue, granting you the accompanying relic. Bravery, Honor, Piety, and Fortitude. The Grail-picking process is an interesting thing to design for. In a lot of ways, it is part of your loadout for the run: Core with Spells, Heroes, and Grail, and as such, they have to offer gameplay modifiers, enough to spice up your strategies. Now that we have learned more about the meta and the fun aspects of combat, we found the time to redesign the current four grails.
Bravery was the standard grail, giving you a once-per-fight free action point. Worked wonders as a good opener, and was pretty straightforward. Now, the bearer deals extra damage against enemies with larger pools of health/armor and those with more power. Bravery really only shines in the face of adversity! - This Grail now should be a good option for your weaker characters to bump up their damage per turn or to put on your glass cannon.
Honour granted a buff to the bearer whenever they missed an attack, sort of a pick-me-up mechanic. That felt a bit underwhelming, so we wanted to take the opportunity to introduce a new sphere of ability design. Now, it restores cooldowns and grants 1 AP if the bearer kills the last hitter - the unit that last attacked them. A powerful effect, but might take some setting up to do!
Piety was the strongest, by far! On use, it would reset cooldowns to the entire party, once per fight. A great Win now button, and a tad too powerful when compared to the others. Instead, we wanted to offer some incentives to accompany the new healing abilities and passives. The Bearer of Piety will have extra effects when healed (armor OR health, so ready up your combos!). We were interested in also reducing debuff stacks, but we want to see how powerful this current model is.
Last but not least, Fortitude is for your beefy characters. While before it would grant you a 2 point damage reduction IF the bearer was debuffed, we took a page out of what we learned from abilities to change its behavior. Now it is a dynamic damage reduction: Each time you take damage, it increases its effect by 1 but is reduced by 2 each turn. Wonderful if you are taking multiple attacks per turn, but a straight upgrade nevertheless! If you were paying attention, youll note that all Grails are now passives, and thats by design. Not only do we want the first relic a new player sees to be something that reflects the loadout purpose, but we are preparing to tie in the Grails with meta progression (making grails stronger over multiple runs) and with the events of the end of the game - no spoilers, but we got some feedback about the role of the grail that we want to address in the near future. Be sure to play with these updated relics and offer us any feedback you have on them, as well as the other balancing changes in the following patch. Thank you! Join our Discord server! Mat

New features / content: Many house-keeping / internal changes to prepare for the next major patch. Quality-of-Life improvements: Improved the appearance of several skirmish maps on ultra-wide / triple-monitor setups. General fixes: Fixed a crash that could randomly occur during combat. Fixed various typos in several tooltips and encounters.

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer. Hello again! Glad to be able to sneak you all another peek of our design tables. Today, I want to talk a bit about how the Skill Overhaul went, and a bit more about what we found out, and how we are planning to move forward. In The Hand of Merlin, the primary operand you have in tactical play is your characters abilities. They define what actions you possess, and drive your strategy. Especially since we wanted to make the game straightforward, without many auxiliary mechanics (such as Zone of Control, Facing), getting abilities right is paramount to our success. Ill talk more about that decision, but first, let me remind you what the Skill Overhaul was. When we developed the player abilities, we approached it with three design pillars in mind: Niche Protection, Thematic Flavour, and Problem Solving. That is to say, an ability had to (a) feel like their class, (b) evoke a specific fantasy associated with our cultural touchstones of that class, and (c) serve a specific need in the map. For instance, consider Hunters Mark - your ranger is a trained hunter, able to focus on specific enemies to give extra damage. It ticked all the boxes, surely: Its a damage buff that only works for the main damage-dealer, it feels very flavourful, and it could help out by bringing down bigger enemies, like Behemoths of Lindworms. Then, we doubled down on themes for the upgrades - Hunters can boast about their kills! turned into Hunters Prize, for instance. And, you know, it all made sense and made the abilities work. If this was closer to a traditional C/JRPG (Baldurs Gate, Final Fantasy) this couldve been enough, but there was a key aspect that slipped a bit: The Cost of a Slot. In those games, you can amass great quantities of skills to use. Even if you dont use them a lot, there might eventually be some specific conditions where the ability would come into place, but in The Hand of Merlin, picking something like Staggering Blow meant that of all of your main actions are dedicated to the problems that Staggering Blow can solve. In those cases, why would you pick something conditional over a direct, reliable damage increase? The data was clear - Quick Draw, Cleave, Concoction, all damage-dealing abilities were far more reliable and attractive. So, we had to make some adjustments. We added the No Roadblock Design and the Slot Worth pillar. I talked a bit more about the first aspect in previous posts, but the second one is quite simple: at the end of the day, abilities are compared in regards to their capacity to provide the opportunity to deal/negate damage, which is the actual end objective and what makes you choose one over the other for your few slots. Debuffs became more violent or simply easier to use, and we discovered some success in adding action points or cooldown reduction to emphasize that even further. With the changes made, we went on to play with it! We do a lot of internal playtesting, having a few very competent players in our dev team. They play a few runs, try to break things, and relate their feelings about specific abilities/strategies over to us in Design. It seems like the game was more varied, had less obvious winning strategies, and felt more fun overall. Some of our community feedback seemed to agree, and we were having a much better time. But we are not done! While pursuing the need to have a small set of 4 abilities to be very versatile and powerful and keeping our current systems, we had to employ a combo-building approach, common to some deckbuilding games. It seems that the game switched a bit more towards trying to create powerful game-breaking builds (10 AP actions! Instant CD reduction! Kill Behemoths by bypassing armor!), as we oriented design towards multiplicative effects, power-scaling, and similar drives. Its fun, engaging, and far better than to be bothered by upgrades you didnt want, but theres still something to solve: Cheese. We call Cheese strategies that are made available by combining separate mechanics in ways that we did not predict, creating an effect so powerful that the enemies cannot keep up with, effectively solving the game. The old version still had these (Kaz, one of our artists, could win the 3rd boss fight in a single turn), but the current model still has quite a few. A marked power creep and the capacity to bypass several systematic difficulties like cooldowns made the game a bit easier and a bit, well, out of control. Hallow + Warcry on Salim with Quick-shot and Take Aim/Far Shot comes to mind. Still, we consider it to be a fun take on the genre, and it fulfills our vision for a tactics game that is status effect and ability-driven, with many ways to create complex builds and strategies, so I dont expect a lot of systematic changes apart from those we introduce with meta progression. What do we want to do now? First, we will normalize the peaks and valleys, such as making cooldown matter a bit more or making the Grail relics a bit more engaging. Then, we will make sure that the enemies gain some cool toys to play with too: More complex abilities and combo potential, but also the new enemies we have planned. In the end, were excited to see how the game is changing and improving based on your feedback, but we are not done yet! We want to make sure our players have decent challenges to face and can have as many meaningful choices as possible. With some effort and more feedback from you, well get there soon! Thanks for reading and playing! Join our Discord server! Mat

New features / content: Improved ambush scenarios by adding an element of danger while the party is not yet revealed to enemies. Instead of standing still, the enemies will now wander about, possibly revealing the party. In addition, there is an auto-reveal timer: the enemies will grow increasingly wary as turns progress. Added several new encounter illustrations. Added sounds to all skills in the Mystic's Elixir line. Quality-of-Life improvements: Added aura information to small unit tooltip. Units spawned in waves will now focus the camera on their position upon spawning. This should help players notice new enemy arrivals. Improved the appearance of several skirmish maps on ultra-wide / triple-monitor setups. Improved the tooltips for Morgana's spells that reference the Hexed status effect, to make it clear what the effect does. General fixes: Morgana's Spire (Tier 3 spell) can no longer be cast underneath units making them unable to move. Warrior's Judicious Cleave skill (upgrade of Cleave) no longer targets allies, as intended and described. Warrior's Stand Fast skill and its upgrades will no longer stack with itself. Ranger's Trail Blaze skill (upgrade of Sprint) is now blocked by low obstructions, like the other Sprint upgrade lines. This avoids units being locked into place. Mystic's Flash Hallow skill (upgrade of Hallow) should now be usable even if there are no immediate targets in the aura's range. Mystic's Thunder Brimstone and Brimstone Shards skills (upgrades from Explosive Brimstone) can now be used even if there are no units in the target area. Quarry status effect no longer describes that it has a decay rule, since it does not. Bad Omen and Expurger status effects should no longer trigger from Damage Over Time effects such as Poisoned. Fixed a bug where Pylon of Rendering would start with no stacks of Ethereal. Now it should start with 5, as usual. Fixed a bug preventing existing profiles from being able to get the Al-Andalus Tourist achievement. Fixed a bug that prevented the blacksmith from generating the shop state in Camelot if the player abandoned the run on that node. Fixed a bug where guardian encounters could not be continued if the player closed the game during the guardian encounter. Fixed a bug where if multiple notifications were created in the map state, they would overlap in the center of the screen while one is animating. Fixed a bug where the card hover tooltip wasn't correctly removed in some cases. Fixed an issue where aura radius got truncated when showed as part of status effect description in ability tooltips. Fixed a bug where moving a unit while undo is happening would spend the AP and not undo the action. Fixed a bug where the action bar indicated the wrong hotkey ([10] instead of [0]) for the Dimensional Restoration spell. Fixed a bug where geometric particles could be targeted by decals (auras could get ground effects stuck to them). Fixed an end of run report bug where abandoning the run before choosing the grail showed an incomplete "You chose the .' sentence. Fixed a bug where the world map could be scrolled while menus are open. Fixed a bug in the lobby when changing the active Core but canceling the run before starting it would cause inconsistent Core model to be shown. Fixed various typos in several tooltips and encounters. Gameplay balancing: Salim's Measuring passive status effect is now capped at 6. Zahra's passive no longer deals its extra damage to allies in the case of friendly fire. Cockatrice's Wail aura now applies Rejuvenation instead of Mending, allowing it to heal Health as well as Armor. Roland's Horn relic no longer has a warm-up period. Francisca relic's damage now scales with attacker's Power (instead of dealing a static 4 damage).

Hey folks! For a while now, Ive been aware that our ambush scenarios have a problem. As a reminder, an ambush scenario is one where either the enemy starts unrevealed and you can sneak up on them or one where the enemies ambush you (based on encounter choices) and start first. Today, Im talking about the former case. A Warband that has no revealed units essentially has every unit skip trying to think about what to do. In other words, we skip the AI calculation for unrevealed units. Until fairly recently (maybe two patches ago), this was happening instantly and was hard for anyone to discern what was going on other than I can press the End Turn button constantly and nothing happens. The first part of the solution was to make the AI units telegraph what was happening. They were skipping their turn because they werent revealed, so I made them raise a combat message (the scrolling text) saying Unrevealed. I still knew there was a bigger issue at hand and last week Ive decided enough is enough, when our designer Mia posted a message in our internal bug tracking channel.
Im happy to report that this is a thing now. In every ambush scenario, you will have 3 turns before the enemies are automatically revealed and start attacking you after your 4th turn. We then also had another idea - have the unrevealed enemies randomly move around, increasing the danger of accidentally revealed them if youre not careful. This is how it looks like in the current version and is going live in the patch today.


The movements are fully random so you wont be able to memorize the patterns in order to prepare a flawless ambush by abusing restarting the fight. Thanks for reading, and if you wanna ask questions or pitch suggestions, join our Discord server or post in the Steam forums. MarkoP

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New features / content: Added new VFX for all aura abilities. Quality-of-Life improvements: Units now show their passive status effects on the map state portraits (as opposed to just during skirmish). Mystic's Explosive Brimstone skill and all its upgrades now explicitly show their effect area in the description. General fixes: "Heal Half Armor" effect, associated with Rana and Zahra's passives, should no longer miss. Warrior's Bash skill now allows you to push away Mandrakes before they trigger their Xenopollen ability, even if the movement was blocked. Meaning, it is now always safe to Bash a Mandrake to avoid its on-death effect. Fixed an issue where Warrior's Bash skill would sometimes not deal full damage to the blocking unit. Fixed an issue that would sometimes prevent Mystic's Caustic Coating skill (and its upgrades) from applying its effect. Fixed an issue where Mystic's Raise Tall Totem skill (upgrade of Raise Totem) would raise a low cover instead of a high cover. Fixed Bayard's Bits relic to not destroy all cover when moving. Redcap's AI should no longer gaze at a target gazed by another Redcap, which was never intended. As a benefit, this also helps avoid confusion. Dire Toad is now immune to knockback, as it is a large unit. The action bar now has space for up to 16 AP; which is the soft cap of attainable AP per turn. Fixed a bug where auras that did not affect any unit did not show their unit tooltip description. Fixed an issue with the epilogue saying Roland always survived, regardless of actual events. Fixed several typos in ability and effect descriptions. Gameplay balancing: Mystic's Delphic Elixir+ skill (upgrade of Aeolic Elixir) no longer targets the caster, just their allies. The aura granted by Mystic's Holy Totem skill (upgrade of Raise Totem) now scales with Aura power properly, making Holy Totem significantly stronger. Restoration spell's strength has been reduced from 8 to 5. Translocation spell cooldown reduced from 3 to 1. Stasis spell now affects all enemies in the map, rather than just a single target. Additionally, the Stasis effect now works similarly to the Stunned effect, where 1 stack equals 1 turn stalled. Thunderbolt spell no longer deals damage. Instead, it now has one of two effects: a) for armored foes, it removes all armor, b) for unarmored foes, it kills them instantly. Warp spell no longer affects speed. Instead, it now changes AP draw per turn: -1 to enemies, +1 to allies. Halo spell is now renamed into Starfall. It deals more damage (20, up from 15), and no longer has a minimum effect range. Black hole damage is increased to 15 (up from 8), and the duration of its Maim effect is increased to 3 turns (up from 2). Hexed, the status effect associated with Morgana, now has healing properties, granting innate healing opportunities to the second core. Wither no longer requires the target to be unarmored to be killed. Wraith now deals 15 Health damage, up from 10. Covenant has a different mechanic. Now, it increases the stacks of Hexed of all enemies with at least 1, by 2. Pylons now always have 25 Health (up from 1), and have their stacks of Ethereal reduced from 8 to 5. Ethereal now makes pylons immortal, and restore +1 to both armor and health per stack. The intent of this change is twofold: a) to make bleed builds effective, b) to reduce downtime between being able to eliminate Pylons.

Hey folks! Today Ill be talking about auras. When we first introduced auras, they had a very simple visual representation that simply highlighted all tiles under its influence with a transparent tile overlay. When I received requests for making the auras have nicer visuals, I added two separate controllers: one for the center tile and another for each affected tile. At that time, all we could do for auras was plonk a particle emitter to these two controllers, which is what you will have seen when using Hallow or seeing Thorntoad's Miasma. During development after that, we added some extra capabilities for general visuals which include something we call geometric particles. This is a fancy name for saying "a static model with a shader on it that animates over time", but it's shorter and more to the point. One of the issues we saw reported during early access so far was that tiles were too hard to see when there were multiple auras in play. Examples are Hallow and Miasma and maybe Rolands Horn auras at the same time in the same area.
image by brubie from our Discord It is impossible to see anything under those tiles because the auras are using per tile particle emitters which are drowning the tiles in too many particles. It was also impossible to see the edges of cast or effect areas when using Abilities in the tiles covered by auras. One of my ideas (that I never really had time to implement) was to add a hotkey that either hides the particles while pressed or makes the waypoint lines and area outlines visible through the particles. Thankfully, Robert proposed a much nicer solution. We're removing particle emitters from all auras and replacing them with geometric particles. This should neatly solve the visibility issues, which makes auras that much less of a pain to look at. It also makes it clear where the auras are originating from.
new Hallow Abominations will have their own separate aura visuals, and there are separate visuals for buffs (like the gif) and debuffs for human auras. Mechanically, auras are in a bit of a weird spot. The way they work is by calculating the tiles they affect, then find all units inside those tiles, then filter out units that they cannot affect. The remaining units get a status effect that is controlled by that aura. One issue we had at launch was that the status effect creation didn't properly account for existing status effects which weren't aura controlled. This could result in the aura "creating" a status effect that was actually merged with an existing status effect on that unit which wasn't aura controlled (due to i.e. content reuse). This didn't update the state of that status effect to being aura controlled, which caused the effect to potentially decay and expire, leaving the aura with an invalid status effect reference. This issue was found soon after release and fixed the following week. The other issue (which makes me say they're in a weird spot) was created only recently when we made auras have power that can scale the stack count of applied status effects. When a unit uses a skill that creates an aura that the unit already has, the second aura gets merged into the first one (otherwise, you'd have two auras of the same type). This means it's possible for the second aura invocation to increase/decrease its power, depending on how the unit attributes affect the power of the aura. Unfortunately, we don't update the status effects applied by the existing aura. If a unit leaves the aura influence and comes back, it would get a new status effect that is updated for the new aura power. I plan to change this in the future so that auras don't actually create unique status effects on each unit in the area, but rather link the unit to being affected by the aura directly. The aura would be a single source of information about what it is doing. This also prevents any possible cases of an accidental merging of status effects from different auras or merging status effect with mismatched "aura controlled" state. This will essentially remove the snapshotting aspect of auras (use this information as you will until I fix it) and prevent issues like the first one ever happening. The visual updates to auras will go out in the patch today. The mechanical fixes will be done as soon as I get to it. Thanks for reading, and join our Discord server if you wanna chat with us. MarkoP

New features / content: Overhauled Hero Skill trees: new skills are added for each class, most old ones made stronger. Added unique passive effects for each Hero. These provide more strategic depth even for level 1 Heroes, and also make individual Heroes more unique. Added alternative skirmish map versions for all regular combat encounters in Albion. Crash fixes: Fixed a possible crash with voiceover textboxes when clicking on them furiously. Quality-of-Life improvements: Difficulty selection screen now has a Back button. Added a notification when an Essence is gained. Redcap's Gaze ability now makes the camera follow a trail towards the target, to make it easier to notice which unit is Gazed. The action bar sidebars now save their opened/closed state. Slightly decreased font sizes for ability and effect tooltips to accommodate for cases of many stacked effects. General fixes: Fixed some compatibility issues when using Windows Mouse Keys to emulate the mouse via keyboard. Fixed a bug where destructible cover could be destroyed around the caster by abilities that destroyed cover in general. Non-default Move abilities such as Sprint and Translocation will now also preview hit chances from the destination tile. Fixed a bug where the portrait hover texture was visible when undoing movement. Fixed several minor glitches on various UI element textures. Added some new VFX for the Core View and Hero Roster in Lobby. Fixed an issue where some sounds would sometimes not be played when switching levels. Fixed a bug where you could press backspace to prematurely end the AI turn. Optimized some FPS drops on a cliff skirmish map in Albion. Gameplay balancing: Abominations now have stronger stats in later zones to account for increased player power via Hero passives. Status effects of the same type granted through encounters now stack. Vulnerable debuff from Cockatrice's Bad Omen will no longer stack. Aura-granted effects (such as from re-casting Mystic's Hallow before it expires) will no longer stack, but instead refresh their duration.

Hey folks! Today were releasing our first major patch. It contains the unique Hero passive status effects for the Heroes and a solid rework of a bunch of Skills. Most of this work is purely on the design side, as most of the tech improvements and QoL get released as soon as theyre ready. If youve got a feature or improvement you want to see, tell me about it in the comments or on our Discord. The patch today marks the first milestone of our internal plan. Were sure well be receiving feedback for the reworks, as its very likely the balance is now very different due to a lot of the Skills being upgrades or sidegrades in terms of power and utility. We fully expect to be fixing a bunch of errors on our end for next week as well, since its not easy for us to track down all niche issues. We also made some small adjustments to enemies to compensate for that power increase, and we hope to hear from players about how they feel about the game now. As far as our future plans, we have a total of 5 milestones planned (the first one being today). These arent set in stone since the future is unpredictable, so some shifts may happen, but we have an idea of where were going and how were getting there. As an example, the Hero passive effects (aka character uniqueness) werent explicitly planned, but due to player feedback, we prioritized them for the first milestone. Things like this might change our future milestones. So while I cant write out the dates (because they might change due to unforeseeable circumstances), I can talk about what we have planned and in what order. Were open to feedback on this. For the second milestone, were planning three new Heroes. Theyre partially done: were currently in the process of animating them, after which Mat would take over and design them as a selectable character. They need to get their base attributes defined, the default starting Skill chosen, and passive effect designed (which would be affected by the feedback we receive for the ones in todays patch). For the third milestone, were planning one new ranged abomination enemy and one new bandit enemy (Mystic equivalent class). The intention is to provide more variety to the early game combat with the bandit and to offset the melee-centric abominations for the later game. On top of that, it would contain gamepad support as well, which Ive already started working on and have the basics working (can click a button to have something trigger and can move the camera). The fourth milestone is all about meta-progression and Hard mode. By that time, we hope the players who consider Normal mode too easy will tell us how they feel the game could be made harder. Were thinking something like run modifiers, where you could pick a set of modifiers that would apply to the game for that run (stuff like faster corruption timers on the world map, or +1 power per turn to enemies). Theres also talk of customizable Hero Prowess as a gateway to even attempt Hard mode, as well as some sort of meta currency (besides Essences since by that point you probably already unlocked all Spells). We have ideas floating, but no hard decisions as of yet. Also, two more Guardian Cores and Dire versions of enemies exclusive to Hard mode. The final (planned!) milestone is more questline encounters that feature legendary relics, and general improvements and polish. Each major patch will also have any alternate maps finished by that point, and any extra relics we make. Since new maps increase the patch size, its likely better to put them all into one patch than trickle them in every week, just so we can keep the weekly patches smaller. This is our plan. Tell us what you think about it, what feature youre waiting for, thoughts on prioritization, etc so we can consider if we have the means to shuffle stuff around. And as usual, join our Discord server to give and get direct/instant feedback. MarkoP https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Hey all! This week we got another design blog post by Mat. It almost seems hes taking over my job of writing these! Heres what Mat wants you to know. --- Got an opportunity here to share with you all what Mia and myself have been working on for the past couple of weeks. The Unit Ability Overhaul is meant to address quite a number of feedback we received, so here is what it is. Simply put, we took data from which abilities were less picked or less effective, and buffed or changed most of them, hopefully making them a bit more interesting to pick, or valid in a larger number of builds. To give you a glimpse of that process, we took a few of the conclusions we made after reading the data and the feedback. In each, Ill put an example of an ability overhaul. [olist]

New features / content: Added several new relics: Bronze Bell, Petrosphere, Viking Beads, Charm Stones, Bayard's Bits. Crash fixes: Fixed a crash when double clicking relics to equip/buy that could sometimes happen with a non-full party. Fixed a crash when starting a new game after wiping the entire progress. Quality-of-Life improvements: Added visualization of knock-back and pull-in destination of units. Added visualization of covers about to be destroyed by the activated ability. Added a toggle to menu options that controls if the game will pause when window loses focus. Pathing curves are now rendered with a red opaque color over tiles where the unit using a movement ability would take damage. The end turn dialog will now appear closer to the action bar, to minimize required mouse movement. In skirmish, the hero and enemy portraits now have nicer and more noticeable selection / hover indicators. Removed a half second delay for executing abilities that don't have an animation on use. Added support for nested status effects on unit portrait tooltips, i.e. if a status effect can trigger another status effect, the additional one is shown on the tooltip as well. Added information about which auras the unit is providing to its portrait tooltip. When starting a new run, the roster UI now indicates Hero classes via column header icons and banners. General fixes: Fixed a bug where the achievement "Al-Andalus Tourist" was not correctly tracked across multiple runs. This only applies to newly created profiles, and a fix for existing profiles will be added soon. Fixed a bug where double clicking allowed for buying relics with insufficient gold. Fixed a bug where the tooltip for a relic shop item could say it's an empty slot even though it's filled, if targeting exactly the slot frame. Fixed a bug where units killed with reaction abilities would die in slow motion. Fixed a bug where abandoning a run while in a skirmish would show incorrect Warband Level in the Epilogue report. Fixed a minor visual glitch where the wobble animation for cards appeared to snap a bit when first starting. The game will now correctly ignore the mouse while the cursor is outside the game window's area (such as when running in windowed mode, or in borderless fullscreen with multiple monitors). Rana now has female pronouns in her Prowess Unlock description. Renamed Notorious Bandit and Dire Thorntoad into Bandit Chief and Dire Toad, respectively. The new names are shorter and fit the UI better. Improved the wound animations of The Endless Dreadnought (the final boss). Added transition animations to action bar side bars. Fixed a few typos in some encounters and ability descriptions. Gameplay balancing: Slight increase to Albion bandits' power to accompany blacksmith buffs. Quarry debuff can no longer miss. Maim Status Effect now decreases Move and Power in equal amounts, where before, Move was decreased 1 point further.

Hey yall! This week we bring you another post from Mat, this time about his direction on designing the passive status effects for heroes. --- As we discussed in the last blog post, our first major attempt to improve the longevity and complexity of combat is the creation of passive status effects for each character. Today, I want to talk a bit about where we stand on that and some of our ideas. We want each passive to address two distinct issues: (1) provide another degree of customization to your loadouts, and (2) modify expected gameplay to a meaningful level. More simply, we want passive effects to make your gameplay a bit different depending on your loadout. We designed and implemented a few, and they are being tested internally to see if they are good enough for us to show you in the following weeks, accompanied by some extra gameplay/balancing changes we mentioned. The design model had a rather simple directive: each class has at least 2 ways it can do its job, and two of the characters spearhead that effort while the other offers an alternate take. Here are some examples For the Warrior characters, they are all about being able to pursue and disrupt enemies and survive multiple heavy blows. To do this job correctly, survivability is key. Safir aims for consistency: The Paladin passive allows him to react when he loses all armor points, and restores the use of his defensive skills, giving him a second wind in a complicated situation. The Rangers are always about damage, but they have many tricks up their sleeves. While some builds for them are oriented towards mobility and good use of cover, Salims passive, Measured Shooter, increases his damage every round that he doesnt move - something that will work well with his base ability, that increases his range. Mystics are varied, but in general, they make sure their allies are doing the best they can, either by healing, increasing power, or making sure enemies arent as effective. Morgan Tudd, ever the dedicated healer, sports the Druid Physician passive, allowing his base attack to heal allies adjacent to his target, making even his damage have a defensive use. Hopefully, you can see what we are going for! Furthermore, we want to entangle the power of each of these passives with the new meta progression cycles we are designing for, but even then, all the numbers are subject to change and balancing. As long as each character feels better suited to a specific gameplay style, or evokes a different feeling, we know we are going in the right path. --- This is all coming in a major patch in a couple of weeks. Join our Discord server! MarkoP https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

General fixes & improvements: It is now possible to wipe your entire progress: unlocked Heroes, Spells, etc, via Gameplay Options menu. But beware - this is permanent and cannot be undone! Fixed a bug where relics could be duplicated. Fixed an issue where players would have to manually reshuffle their Relics to progress in a certain encounter in Al-Andalus. Fixed a bug where selling or discarding the grail would end the game with a victory. If closed, the legend displayed on the world map (to show what various map icons mean) will now remain closed until opened. (Previously, it would auto-reopen each time you enter the world map.) Putting down skill cards without selecting any can now be achieved not just by clicking the Hide Cards button, but also by clicking outside of any card. This makes it consistent with how closing the book itself works. Relic UI now recognizes the double click action as a context-driven shortcut for drag-and-drop. In the warband view, it equips or stashes relics, and in the relic shop, it initiates relic selling or buying. Fixed an issue where Ranger's Archer's Vigil would not have the same attack area as the basic Shoot attack. Fixed a bug with Warrior's Charge skill, where it could deal damage to a single large unit multiple times (once per each tile touched). Fixed an issue where summoning a high cover (such as via Mystic's Expurging/Holy Totem skill) would not affect line of sight for already activated enemy zone of control / overwatch-type abilities. Status effects gained through an encounter will now indicate their duration on their tooltip. Unit tooltips will now also list the Range attribute. Enemy portraits can now be double clicked to focus on that unit. Unit headers for enemies will now expand when their portraits are hovered. This should make it easier to identify individuals on the skirmish map. Fixed a bug where the mini popup dialog for move confirmation was not getting removed when selecting a different ability, selecting a different unit, ending the turn, etc. The confirmation dialog can now be confirmed with the Enter key. Added a button to the action bar that toggles showing the tile grid (hotkey: X). When targeting an enemy with a ranged attack, and the enemy benefits from cover for that attack, there will now be a cover icon displayed along the object (in 3D) that provides the cover. Line of sight for revealing heroes to enemies is now blocked by low cover, making it easier to setup ambushes. Fixed certain situations in skirmishes where terrain would occlude a tile making it hard to click. Improved handling of move areas, to prevent edge cases causing unintended moves due to miss-clicks. Hovered tile tooltip in skirmishes is now smoothly animated. In the Lobby, an unspent Essence no longer shows a prompt to spend it if all Spells of the selected Core have been unlocked. In the Lobby, the tutorial textbox will now linger until dismissed by clicking on it. Fixed typos in some encounters. Gameplay balancing: Merlin's Core passive effect no longer prevents attacks from missing when using any Spell. Instead, it reduces all active cooldowns by 1 when using any Spell, allowing base attacks to be used twice in a turn and favoring combos. The relic Rabbit's Foot no longer makes you ignore cover bonuses, either when attacking or being attacked. Instead, it now increases your Accuracy every time you miss, resetting when you do hit. Removed the AoE aspect of Ranger's Volley skill (upgrade of Quickdraw). Revamped the blacksmith gear upgrades by removing negative stats - all upgrades are now a choice between different positive stats. Abomination base Power is increased by 1. Minor and Medium Abominations also scale better, increasing in both defensive and offensive stats in Marca Hispanica and Al-Andalus by larger amounts. Boosted the base attributes for all Warrior characters. Decreased the base Power of Rangers by 1, as well as shuffle some of their attribute differences.

Hey there folks! Our designer Mat wanted this weeks blog post to feature some of the design stuff going on in the workshed, and who am I to deny him that? Heres what Mat wrote. --- Ive been meaning to discuss some of the reviews and feedback that we got so far, and the blogpost channel feels like a good place to start, so let me tell you guys some of our plans. First of all, gotta say, Im very pleased by how descriptive and (often) polite our feedback has been. Players have been pointing out some flaws in our design, and after parsing through some of them, we identified 4 major points. [olist]

General fixes & improvements: Improved the patching system. Future patch download sizes should be five times smaller on average (starting with this one). Fixed an issue where certain aura effects would stack against intended design, making the final skirmish scenario in Jerusalem unwinnable in some cases. Added move ability confirmation, which can be switched between several modes or disabled entirely via Options menu (disabled by default). Party level up notification now appears with an animation in the center of the screen. Hopefully, this should help players notice they have a level up available. Fixed a bug where the achievement In the Spirit of Venn could be earned with less than the intended 3 auras affecting one Hero in some circumstances. Fixed a bug preventing the Warband achievement from being awarded. In addition, it should also retroactively unlock for players who meet the criteria, but did not have it unlock due to the bug. Salim's prowess unlock is now fixed, allowing it to be unlocked through normal means. Fixed a bug where the codex would not update the state of unlocked items in some cases. Fixed a bug where some skills did not have consistent targeting areas across a character class (such as Ranger's Ensnare versus Shoot). Fixed a bug where damage modifiers were not correctly applied in some edge cases. Fixed another case where skirmish fast-forward mode could persist into the world map. Fixed a few more cases of odd camera placement on ultra-wide screens on some skirmish maps. Fixed bestiary entries disappearing after closing the game. Fixed an issue where mock translations would unintentionally be shown if the game is run without Steam with a non-English Windows system language. Updated Accuracy and Evasion descriptions in the Warband page to better reflect their functionality. Updated the description of Quarry effect, granted by Warrior's Condemn (upgrade of Stagger Blow) and Ranger's Hunter's Prize (upgrade of Hunter's Mark). It should now clearly state that Quarry restores Action Points to the player, not the enemies. Fixed a number of typos in encounters.

Hi! Our first week of being live in early access! Were very happy about the reception, which looks to be pretty positive as well! Weve gotten a fair number of suggestions and general feedback on both our Discord and on the steam forums. Weve also received a fairly low amount of technical issues and crash reports, all of which seem to have been fixed, but if youre still having crashes on the latest version (build 669421 as of Saturday), please send those reports in because I dont like seeing crashes at all and these always get the highest priority. In other news, since were getting a bit more time away from doing support for users that cant start the game or are having general issues running it, weve been working on some quicker improvements we could do. Weve mostly had only these past two days to work on stuff, at least on the programmer side, so weve done a couple of requested features, like move confirmation, better level-up notifications, and general fixes to some common and obvious bugs, like some aspects of the damage calculation, some stuff with auras and the like. My fix on Saturday was a bit of a stopgap to prevent crashes related to auras, but it introduced a problem where separate instances of the same aura would stack together. In the case of beneficial auras, the effects were great, but it means that one end game enemy, if left unchecked, would just wreck your run in a most unfair and unsatisfying way, preventing your units from gaining action points at all. This was properly fixed on Monday and is being deployed in the patch today. Weve also been fixing any typos, skill bugs, and balance issues that we know about and have a good idea of what the fix is/should be. We also have a large list of items to check, investigate, fix or improve, and all of them will get their turn in time. Mat came up with some ideas to make the hero characters more unique and has started iterating on that design. The artists proposed a new bandit support enemy and are in general working on new heroes. Weve also got alternate maps in the works, and all this is planned for a larger content patch in the near future. Know that we read all your feedback, and I try to be as present on the forums as I humanly can while also writing code and fixing bugs. Since we arent a large team, some things will take a bit of time to add or fix, but we will get to them eventually. Thank you for your understanding and patience. Come join our Discord server and chat with us and report bugs directly, if thats your jam. MarkoP https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Crash fixes: Fixed a crash with aura effects. General fixes & improvements: Fixed broken text markup for the status effect granted by Warrior's Rebuke (upgrade of Stand Ready). Gameplay balancing: Increased Faerie reputation gains of certain choices in The Black Tree encounter.

Crash fixes: Fixed a memory leak that could cause slowdowns or crashes if playing a single session for several hours continuously. Fixed a bug where cone attacks that miss the terrain entirely would cause the game to freeze up in an infinite loop. Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur with Warrior's Thunderous Lunge (upgrade of Lunge). Fixed a rare crash where an encounter could grant a relic while inventory is already full. Fixed a rare crash when interacting with the in-game Journal. General fixes & improvements: Fixed an issue preventing a certain unlockable Guardian (other than Merlin) from spawning on Arcane Nodes. Fixed an issue preventing the Holy Grail story event in Al-Andalus from happening if inventory was full. Fixed an issue where Dimensional Restoration would not trigger Merlin's Prophecy. Fixed targeting issues with Dimensional Restoration around abyss tiles, making it consistent with other spells. Warrior's Charge (upgrade of Lunge) can no longer let your character run into an object (such as a tree or a stone block) and stay inside it. Mystic's Noxious Concoction (upgrade of Concoction) should now deal health damage directly, as stated by its description. Mystic's Miasmic Desecration (upgrade of Desecration) can now target an area even without any units currently in it. Mystic's Sanguine Elixir (upgrade of Aeolic Elixir): the (+) Green upgrade now correctly offers a higher stack count of Quick (the (+) Red upgrade offers twice the charges, which is unchanged). Fixed several skirmish map issues where large (2x2) units could be stuck with no path available. Fixed missing battle music in certain conditions on the Herbal Shop skirmish map. Fixed a bug which allowed The Archmage achievement to be unlocked by spending mana in an encounter, rather than strictly in a single skirmish. Fixed a bug causing Butter Fingers achievement to unintentionally be awarded at a certain story event. Fixed a bug which allowed Hero Prowess Unlocks to be obtained in Easy mode, rather than Normal only. Removed an unintended accuracy penalty in the Bastard Sword blacksmith upgrade line. Fixed the wrong card odds in a few encounters. Fixed a few cases where special options in encounters would reference the wrong character. Fixed an issue where skill card text could sometimes extend past its borders. In the Options menu, Music and Sound volume sliders now move in consistent increments. Gameplay balancing: Reduced the amount of Mana granted when the second Guardian is unlocked. Slightly reduced the upper difficulty bound of Al-Andalus regular (non-corrupted) skirmishes: maximum enemy count is now 5 (down from 6). Ranger's Heavy Shot (upgrade of Shoot) no longer applies the Weak debuff to the caster, but has a longer cooldown instead. Ranger's Parthian Sprint (upgrade of Sprint) no longer scales with caster's Power. Thorntoad's Bristleback ability now only grants 3 stacks of Thick Skin (down from 5). Increased the base armor for all Pylons to 25 (up from 15). Increased the cooldown of Translocation to 3 turns (up from 1).

Crash fixes: Fixed a crash in case player got Dazed status effect from an encounter and then fought a Thorntoad. Removed the possibility of recruiting the same Hero twice through the same encounter. General fixes & improvements: Fixed some bad spawn positions in Olive Meadow and Corrupted Field Road skirmish maps. Fixed an issue where it was possible to stand in the same location as certain cover objects on some maps. Holy Desecration skill (and its upgrades) will no longer target abyss tiles. Fixed a bug where holding [Space] to fast forward animations in skirmish could persist to the world map even after releasing the button. It is no longer possible to undo a Move if a Spell had been used. (The intention of Undo was always to only undo movement with no side-effects.) Serpent Skin no longer poisons the user when you apply a self buff. Upgrades for the skills Charge+ (Red) and Fencing Lunge+ (Red) now properly function with just 1 Action Point. Fixed several typos and added some missing images to various encounters. Opened book blur effect now starts fading out as soon as the book starts closing. Gameplay balancing: Added a blacksmith to the starting node of Al-Andalus map. Shield Slam skill (and its upgrades) no longer demands a melee target to work. Volley and Reckless Slash skills (and their upgrades) now only reduce accuracy by 20% (down from 30%). Adjusted descriptions to remove ambiguity. Small adjustments to cover positions, removing some diagonal cover placements in Castle Hall and Valley of No Return skirmish maps. Visuals: Visual polish of the Corrupted Stonehenge skirmish map.

Hi! Yesterday we released the game in the late afternoon our time. On behalf of the whole team, Id like to thank everyone for their interest in the game and their kind words. I also appreciate any criticism of the game, because thats the only way we can improve it. The reception so far seems positive, and were keeping an eye out for any issues players have with either the technical side of the game or gameplay issues, and are focused to resolve them as quickly as we humanly can. Please note that our team is not large. We are 9 people doing their all, wearing many hats, and are happy to listen to players to make this game the best it can be. If youre experiencing any startup issues, or crashes, or graphical problems, we encourage you to tell us about them and well try to help you resolve them. We already have one patch planned for today, to fix two crashes and some set of smaller issues we found that we can fix quickly during the day today. General feedback on the forums is very appreciated and useful, and weve got a list of about 30 items to get fixed and/or improved in future patches. On the topic of patches, our aim is to put out at least 1 patch a week. Were still discussing whether they would go out on Fridays or Wednesdays, the former being the end of the week, and the latter being our usual blog post day which also gives us the opportunity to address any issues that may arise after the patches go live. These patches would contain bug fixes, QoL improvements, balance changes, and additional content we make during early access. Theres a patch coming out today for sure either way. Join our Discord server for some direct communication and just hanging out. Thank you. MarkoP https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

The Versus Evil Publisher Sale is now live on Steam! Get up to 90% off!
Check out our most recent additions which include Almighty: Kill Your Gods, a co-op looter shooter, Hitchhiker, a narrative-driven experience, and First Class Trouble, a wacky social deduction game! But that's not all! We're excited to also be launching not one, but two new games just in time for the sale! The Hand of Merlin is a turn-based rogue-lite RPG in which Arthurian legend meets with sci-fi horror. Recruit mortal heroes to explore lands rife with otherworldly evil, make narrative bending choices in unique interactive encounters, and search for the lost fragments of your soul across the multiverse! Sockventure is a story about a kid whose favorite sock gets eaten by a cursed washing machine. The kid needs immediate help, and calls a superhero to the rescue. Then, the adventure begins. Make your way through 200+ intense levels of hardcore platforming to find the missing sock inside the washing machine! Our catalog has never been more diverse, so we hope there's something for everyone here to enjoy! https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1206600/Almighty_Kill_Your_Gods/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/953880/First_Class_Trouble/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1222340/Sockventure/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/888530/Yaga/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/904400/Cardpocalypse/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1003120/Hitchhiker__A_Mystery_Game/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1278190/Jumpala/

Hi folks! Some people have noticed that our updated store page now has a release date! Its May 11th! Last week we had a news site announce our release date. I wanted to make a proper blog post announcement the next day, but some important programming stuff came up, and it slipped my mind. Indie teams and wearing lots of hats does that, unfortunately, so sometimes my lead programmer role comes ahead of my community person role. So, I decided to dedicate an entire blog post to talk about our early access release.
The game will release to early access next week, May 11th, 6 days from the time of this blog post. Our efforts in the days before it goes live are mostly on ironing out the UX stuff we know about and fixing any obvious issues. Funny thing about obvious: when the QA team affiliated with Versus Evil started going over the game, they found a bunch of obvious issues that we just didnt see. :) Were making sure that all unlocks work. Were adding missing illustrations to the encounters. Were playtesting the whole game from start to end to see if there are any wild balancing issues. Were fixing up bugs, adding QoL features, updating UI where needed, etc. The state of the game is, in our opinion, good. That said, there might be obvious issues (see the note above about QA) that weve become completely blind to. If you find anything you have issues with, please tell us about it because we cant fix it unless we know about it. Our current plan is to do weekly patches, most probably on Fridays. The patches would contain any fixes done during that week by our 3 programmers, any balance changes our designers Mat and Mia decide on, and any visual polish and alternate maps and general art improvements our 4 artists do.
Please keep in mind that we are not a large team. As you can count above, were 9 full-time people who are trying their best to bring this game to life. We cant do everything under the sun (like, for example, custom party character creation), but we try our best and prioritize things based on impact, importance, and reality. The more people tell us something is broken or something should change, the more likely those things do get prioritized and done, assuming they're even possible. Some changes might be easy, some not. Ill try to communicate these things via blog posts where possible, and were always present on our Discord server and Steam forums. If you want/like immediate communication, Discord is your best bet. If youre on the other side of the world from Europe or were asleep, Steam forums are good enough as well. I usually make it a point to myself to respond to most questions and topics that benefit from an answer or at least an acknowledgment. So yeah. Holy shit release next week! MarkoP https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Hey folks! Early access is so close we can taste it. As such, Mat is sweating like a madman from what people will tell us about the design of the game. Hes doing his best to balance the thing as much as possible, but without a larger dataset, its not really achievable. So Mat has written a bit about the topic. This is what he has to say. --- Balancing a game is never easy. You want it to be a decent challenge to players of all skill levels, you want it to be easy to pick up but have enough complexity to allow everyone to keep improving, and finally, you want it to be enjoyable. Theres a lot of theory about it. Most game designers can describe a version of the concept of Flow or how to graph a difficulty curve But trying to actually make it work? Its a whole challenge. Right now, The Hand of Merlin is a demanding game. It expects you to understand a lot of minutia on how each Abomination works, learn their AI patterns, and how to create viable builds while not having full control and knowledge (Roguelite, yall.). Its unforgiving and punishes misplays heavily.
The result is seen on our latest playtests with fresh players - only after over a dozen runs could someone progress to the later zones consistently. This means two things: [olist]

Hey folks! Our early access release is looming. As were getting closer, were trying to put small bits of polish here and there. This blog post is basically just a bunch of smaller things we did that were happy about.

Landmarks node improvements

Bestiary

Node links

Outro cutscene

Spell effects

Directional targeting smooooothnes

Achievement icons

Pending mana

Hey folks! As were nearing our early access release, were looking at things we need to improve during it. We have some plans and ideas of additional content to add during EA, but map variations are at the top of that list. As Mat has been testing combat a lot and playing through the game, he agreed that hes getting sick of playing on the exact same maps every time. Each map is tied to an encounter, but the encounter drives the initial combat conditions. Based on your choices during the encounter, you might change the position where your units spawn, or whether the enemies start first, or their numbers, but ultimately, its still on the same map with the same layout and cover placement. The core of the issue could have been solved with procedural generation had we approached our map system differently all those years ago. However, its important to note that even procedural generation has its issues. Maps could be generated with very bad layouts, bad spawn positions, and generally require a lot of tweaking of a black box system to get a good enough map generation algorithm. Of course, this only applies if the map generation runs on the players machines, but theres a good middle ground: generate the maps in the editor and save the good results. Unfortunately, its a bit late to think about that for this project. Next project perhaps. :) For Merlin, were doing it the dumb way, which is luckily also very simple. Duplicate the map, change the layouts, polish the visuals. We did a test run on one map called Meadow, and it took Mat (cover placement) and Lucija (visual polish) less than a day to create the variation. Here you can see the result.

I also had to add some tech to support map variations. Since encounters define the combat map to load, they would have to be in control of the map variations. To keep encounter changes to a minimum, they can now reference a Skirmish Map Set resource file that just has a list of maps to randomly pick from. Once an encounter links to this resource, only that resource needs to change to add a new variation, instead of potentially multiple encounters that might use the same [set of] maps. Our plan for early access is to create variations for the most important maps. The maps that get seen most often will be prioritized over maps that get seen less often. Ultimately wed like to add variations for all maps, but this really depends. Some maps might not need variations because theyre so rarely seen it would make little difference. Were also still thinking whether boss fights need variations, since theyre kind of set pieces and intended to be tougher than other fights - maybe they would benefit from not having variations so they can be optimized? Hopefully, the players will tell us about it during EA. In the end, map variations are here to solve the issue of replayability, so each run feels fresh in as many aspects as possible. Tell us what you think about it on our Discord server. Were happy to receive feedback even now before EA. MarkoP https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Heyooo! About two weeks ago we started doing QA with an affiliate team from Versus Evil. Theyve been great and found a bit over 200 issues so far. Only a few of them are by design so far, in which case were still treating them as an issue for not being explained well. Honestly, having 200 issues reported in two weeks doesnt seem that bad to me. Weve already fixed more than half of the reported issues and will continue doing so all the up until we release in Early Access in about a months time. We also started marking encounters as finalized. This means theyre ready for localization and will be bundled up in phases and sent to the localization people. Theres currently a total of 350 encounters spread across 4 zones, tho the last zone has a bit under 20 because its special. Translating that number of encounters will take some time. :) Weve been also working on our gameplay telemetry events. These will come in handy when balancing the game. Mat and Mia have a not-so-easy task to get the game to a semblance of balance. Due to the rogue-lite nature of the game, its a tough nut to crack, especially when taking into account there are two difficulties in the game. The initial release will feature Easy mode and Normal mode, and at a later point, should the player base want it, well add a Super-Mega-Difficult mode.
Totally a thing we could do. Hope you like my third difficulty mockup! One thing to keep in mind when we release in EA: the game probably wont be perfectly balanced. This is very much where you come in. I think the game cannot be balanced well with a sample of only about 5-10 players. We need a large dataset to be able to fine-tune the game. Reporting issues in our Discord or on the Steam forums will go a long way to helping us iron out the game. Of course, any crashes you might experience will be shot dead as soon as possible, since those are my mortal enemies, and I vanquish my enemies with ruthless determination. Art-wise, stuff is starting to get polished. Improving levels, filling in missing animations, sounds, visual effects for abilities, the works. Weve also added inter-zone cutscenes, which is just an image that gives a bit of context for what happens to the hero party between the zones. A lot of the work done by us programmers has been enabling other people to create content without putting too many limitations and structure on how the game works. Mostly it comes down to allowing the content to drive the game. As such, our plan is to ship the editor with the game at some point down the line, which means anyone will be able to add new stuff in. I know Mat is hoping somebody adds a Kermit unit to the game, and Im hoping to see the Power Rangers as player characters. During Early Access, the players will have a lot of influence on where the game goes. I hope to see you there! If you wanna join before then, we have a Discord server and are happy to chat. MarkoP https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Hey! It's me, Robert, again. Last week I talked about porting The Hand of Merlin to Linux. Today, let's continue the story with macOS. Mac certainly turned out to be a tougher challenge than Linux, but hey, I love roguelikes and challenges, so that's not a complaint! Remember how I said SeriousEngine 4.0 dropped support for OpenGL entirely? You know, the nice, cozy old graphics API that worked on pretty much any platform? Well, that leaves us with Metal, the new and modern API developed by Apple specifically for iOS and macOS. Now, SeriousEngine did have native support for Metal, back in version 3.5, when we made The Talos Principle run on iOS. But that was 3-5 years ago, and our Metal code wasn't maintained since then. You can imagine my dismay! Half the graphics functions had changed signatures. A quarter were never even implemented. It took me pretty much a whole week just to refactor the old code in order to make it even compile. That was the easy part. The tougher part was writing out missing code. Luckily, we do have a working Vulkan renderer, so I was able to examine how Vulkan code works, and then scan through Apple's documentation to figure out how to remap things. Since both APIs are pretty low level, they do have fairly similar concepts. Oh, and by the way, Apple uses Objective-C instead of standard C++... so that's an extra hard mode there. :) Finally, a week-and-a-half later, I had a Metal renderer with all the holes plugged. It compiled, I ran it, and... Black screen. Sigh. Just like with Linux, the problem now was missing shaders. Metal can only work with shaders written in MSL, the Metal Shading Language. Rewriting the entire shader code base from HLSL to MSL was not an option I wanted to think about. I knew I could get DirectX Shader Compiler to work on macOS, since that library is cross-platform. That can get me SPIR-V (Vulkan bytecode) on macOS, but then what? After some research, I found an answer: SPIRV-Cross, a cross-platform library that can decompile SPIR-V into a number of other human-readable languages, including - yes! - MSL. So let me paint you the full picture. We start with shaders written by a programmer in HLSL. Then we compile those into SPIR-V bytecode, decompile them into MSL, then re-compile MSL into Metal's bytecode. Phew! Talk about making sausages, right? But hey, at least none of this happens on players' machines. That distributed build system I briefly mentioned in the last post, that handles the entire shader creation process. So, when you download the game on Steam, the game data package already contains all of the shaders precreated into the final bytecode form that's directly loadable by your local operating system. So after all that, I ran the game again, and... Black screen. Again. Sigh. Back to the drawing board! I stripped down the first scene in the game to a bare minimum, a colored 3D cube. The simplest shader, the simplest possible rendering state. Once I could get that running, I'd add more complexity. -- Xcode --
At this point, let me introduce you to my new friend - Xcode. That's Apple's main dev tool suite, and the features I was most interested in are: Metal API call validation, and GPU tracing. The API validation thing is super useful since it tells you as soon as you call a function if you messed something up with the parameters. I caught a solid number of bugs just by examining the validation errors. The second feature is the real winner, though. By recording a single frame of rendering, Xcode can trace all of the GPU calls you did, along with the entire pipeline state, allowing you to inspect everything. A pixel is black when it should be colored? Just click it, and hit the Debug button. You get a listing of all the textures you're using, the exact shader code that's running, heck you can even step through the shader code. With this power tool, I was able to really get to the bottom of all the issues I saw, and finally, I could see my beautiful cube. :) From that point on, it was like climbing a staircase. Add a bit of complexity to the scene, run a GPU trace, figure out what's wrong, fix it. Rinse and repeat. Slowly but surely I got all the way to dynamic geometry (fonts, particles), post-processing (tone mapping, bloom, ambient occlusion), shadow mapping, antialiasing (MSAA), all the jazz. To round it all off, I also made sure we have proper detection of high-DPI / 4K displays on Mac, too. -- Performance --
Oh - did I mention the game not only runs on Mac, but also runs pretty darn well? This is where the native Metal implementation really pays off! On my M1 Mac mini, which has an integrated GPU, I'm able to get a solid 60 FPS at 1080p resolution. And that's using Balanced quality presets - so no sacrificing visual quality. So, there you have it. All in all, several weeks of work, and a satisfying feeling of a port done right. If you have any questions, stop by the forums or our Discord server. We're pretty much always there. Robert https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Hi! This week, it's my turn to write a blog post. The topic: ports! But not the kind with pirates and ships. No, the kind where you make your game run on a new platform. (Come to think of it, we'll probably have pirates too, on all our ports. Eh.) Since I've never written here before, let me introduce myself. I'm Robert, the founder and CEO of Room-C Games. I do a whole bunch of stuff: project management, recruitment and hiring, team coordination, programming, playtesting... That's indie game dev for you, everyone has to wear many hats. :) Since I'm originally a programmer, and have been coding at Croteam for the past 10 years, I know SeriousEngine quite well. That's why I did most of the engine features for The Hand of Merlin, like our custom grid-aware terrain system, outline/fill shaders to help notice occluded units, etc. And yes - now also porting to other platforms. I'm happy to say that as of right now, we have fully functional, state-of-the-art Linux (Vulkan) and macOS (Metal) builds! That, and the supporting automatic distributed build system to compile & finalize all those binaries and shaders and content for all the different platforms and upload it all to Steam. Rather than diving into the nitty-gritty technical details, I wanted to talk about my experience as a primarily Windows programmer trying to work on Linux and macOS. -- Linux IDE --
Let me start by saying this: thank you Microsoft, for making Visual Studio Code, and making it run on Linux. That software is a boon. :) Being able to run and debug the game directly on a Linux machine and to harness the awesome power of GDB (GNU Debugger), all from a familiar, friendly IDE, is such a huge time saver. As for the game itself, porting to Linux was not a huge amount of work. Luckily, SeriousEngine 4.0 already had legacy Unix support from previous versions and titles, and it natively supports Vulkan. Basically, it boiled down to getting our game code to compile on Clang (rather than just MSVC - Microsoft's compiler). So after a day of fixing compilation issues, thinking how easy this was, I started the game and... black screen. Sigh. As it happens, SeriousEngine 4.0 dropped support for OpenGL and its shading language (GLSL) altogether. So, all of our shaders are written in HLSL now (Microsoft's shading language). That's important because Vulkan only supports GLSL out-of-the-box. On Windows, there's Microsoft's DirectX Shader Compiler which can translate HLSL into Vulkan shader bytecode (called SPIR-V), but that's just for Windows - right? Wrong! :) Thank you, community, for the awesome work of porting DirectX Shader Compiler to Linux and macOS. That's right, Microsoft's HLSL shader compiler runs on Linux - and we're using it to power our Linux Vulkan renderer. After this major hurdle was resolved, there were just a few Linux specifics left, like detection of high-DPI displays i.e. getting the true native resolution regardless of scaling. Since I use a 4K monitor myself, I couldn't have The Hand of Merlin not handle this properly. ;) This blog post is getting a bit lengthy now, so I'll save my macOS adventures for next time. As a small teaser, I'll just leave you with this: macOS was definitely a bigger challenge and made me really hone my Port-Fu skills. If you have any questions or want to chat, stop by the forums or our Discord server. We're pretty much always there. Stay tuned! Robert https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Heyaa! Yes, were going into early access! :O This blog post explains why and what to expect. When? May. I don't have more info than that. When I do, I'll let you know. Weve been asked a few times whether we would do early access, and my answer every time was dunno. If it was ever to be on the table, it would be for a relatively short time, and its primary purpose would be balancing, QoL features, accessibility aspects, crash fixes, and similar. This hasnt changed, and the primary purpose for our early access is exactly that. Since our publishing deal with Versus Evil was signed, some other options opened up, like porting to other operating systems and localization. As of this moment, we have the game running on Linux, macOS, and Windows. I know some people are already happy with just this :) Since theres a ton of text in the game (and this is not an understatement, we have over 800 pages of text!), localization is going to take a while. We want the full release to be fully localized (don't have a complete list of languages yet, when I know, you'll know), so early access will likely last for as long as localization needs, which Ive been told will be a minimum of 3 months. While waiting for localization to complete, we want to polish the game up as much as we can. Mats been playtesting the game, but he can only get the game balanced up to a point. We plan to have at least two difficulties by EA release and add a harder one during. Feedback on how hard or easy they are would be much appreciated, and if youre an expert player, which aspects should be tweaked for the hardest difficulty. In general, were at a point where we just need some feedback. We want a large number of people to play the game, and tell us what they think. Tell us whats confusing, whats not explained, which abilities suck, which spells are just so OP you never want to go into battle without them, which encounters have typos, which encounter choices feel bad, etc. So if youre interested in the game, and want to help us make it the best version it can be, we encourage you to join our Discord for a direct communication channel, or post on the Steam forums for a bit delayed communication channel. I do read all of these, it just takes me a bit to see steam posts. For some other news, heres a screenshot of some achievements in the game. The icon is brought to you by the magnificence of my doppelganger programmer MarkoZ. Dont worry, theyll be replaced with proper ones.
We've also updated some art on the store page. Mad props to my main boi Shiv. So yeah. Big news. Give us your thoughts! Were all on our Discord server and happy to talk. I also monitor the Steam forums, but not as quickly as the Discord. MarkoP https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Good news, everyone! The MIX selected The Hand of Merlin for its official Game Dev Direct Showcase! A fresh gameplay trailer should premiere on Sunday, around 10:30 AM PST, offering a glimpse of the new zone and some brand new content we haven't shown before. Want more than a glimpse? Mat, our game designer, has you covered! Not to keep you waiting, he'll be playing through the latest build here on Steam. When's the game coming out? Join our Discord server, ask, and watch us smile awkwardly while beating around the bush! Remember to follow us here on Steam and wishlist the game. https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Hello! Lately, weve been discussing difficulty modes and how they affect the game. We decided a while back to add a lower difficulty mode to allow a wider group of people to experience the game. Hand of Merlin effectively has two different games in it. One is the tactical layer where you fight against enemies in a turn-based fashion on a grid, and where the chances are high that youd lose Heroes. The other is the strategic layer where you move between a network of nodes and carve your path from start to end of the area, picking which locations and reward types youd like to go for. Theres also a lot of reading here since all encounters are small short stories influenced by your choices. You can also lose Heroes on this layer, but its much more difficult to do so because that requires you to travel without supplies while your Heroes are low on health. Each jump to a new location without supplies does 1 point of health damage to all Heroes, and health does not regenerate without explicit healing actions. So our primary method of game difficulty stems from the combat itself. We want the game to be a bit on the harder side, because we want the loop of dying and trying again, having learned something new about the enemies and their skills. That said, some people might find the default difficulty too hard, and would otherwise put the game down. To that end, we talked about adding a Story mode of sorts, where the difficulty of combat is reduced to some degree. Were calling it Story mode because its purpose is to allow people to focus more on the story of the game rather than the combat aspect (some people just want to read what Jonas&Verena wrote). In this mode, more resources would be granted, your Heroes would have more life and enemies would have less life. This introduces a slight issue for us: unlocking Heroes, new Guardian cores, achievements, etc. Without a Story mode, wed just have everything unlock normally as you play the game, and youd go through the loop of dying and restarting with new knowledge. If Story mode would make the combat aspect much easier, then a lot of the balancing for the intended experience goes out the window. Additionally, if you could unlock everything in the game by playing the lower difficulty, then theres no real incentive to play the harder mode at all.
(descriptions are temporary and made by me, so don't worry :P) We still haven't made a decision about this. We've been fighting about it for a couple of days now. If you have a suggestion about this, do tell us! A short summary of our unlock mechanisms: Unlocking a Hero means youre able to start with that Hero from the beginning of the game, having him in your default roster. Unlocking a Heros Prowess gives you another version of that hero with an alternate model texture and some bonuses to health and armor, and can only be unlocked by having the Hero survive from start to end. Achievements should be self-explanatory. Guardian cores are an alternate set of Spells you can play with. Each core has a selection of 9 Spells (with a default passive one), from which you can pick 3 to use in combat. These are unlocked by encountering other Guardians during your encounters and talking them into giving you their support. Thanks for reading. If you've got ideas, do share! Let us know what you think about the whole concept on our Discord server. Were very open to feedback and scrutiny. MarkoP https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Hey folks! Its been a while since weve shown how the world progresses as you go through the game. Once you finish the snowy mountainous zone of Marca Hispanica, youll land (not literally because you werent flying) in the sandy region of Al-Andalus. Unlike some other zones, Al-Andalus doesnt have an overarching story outside of just getting to the end. This is explained upon entering the zone, as Al-Andalus is almost overrun with the Corruption. (The map visuals aren't final yet, we're still working on making it prettier!)
The atmosphere in Al-Andalus is bleak, filled with encounters that convey struggle against the forces of Corruption and attempts to survive the onslaught. Most of the nodes in the zone will be corrupted, and the rare uncorrupted node will be a welcome respite with no inherent danger. The progression from Albion to Al-Andalus should be clear: Albion has the occasional corrupted node which almost guarantees a fight against the abominations, while Al-Andalus has the occasional uncorrupted node, guaranteeing no fights. That doesnt mean all corrupted nodes have fights, its just that the roles and their implications on having to fight are reversed. Al-Andalus doesn't feature human enemies, as all humans are focused on fighting the Corruption.
We also played a bit with some encounter constructs in this zone. Theres one short stretch of the journey where you can go to an island city. Its a set of several handmade encounters that only appear there, with two of them being over water. These will have custom encounters with internal variations so every visit feels different across sessions.
The way Mat has setup the combat progression is also interesting. Each zone adds a new mechanic (so to speak). At the end of zone 1, you fight the first large unit. During zone 2, you see large units during standard combat encounters, and at the end, youre introduced to waves of units that appear during combat. During zone 3, wave spawning is used in most combat encounters, and at the end of the zone, we introduce a mechanic youll need to defeat the boss in the last zone. Im not going to talk about this mechanic, as I want to keep at least some unknowns for all the people who read these blog posts. If youve been reading them all so far, youd have seen a lot of things the game has to offer, along with their evolution during the last year of development. Id like to keep at least some things untold via blog posts, doesnt make sense to spoil it all, eh? :) Thanks for reading! If youve got any questions or want to comment on anything really, join our Discord server and ask/suggest/complain/praise/hang out. The whole team is there. MarkoP https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Hello there! With our change to the UI, we took the opportunity to also consolidate some information into one screen. Last week we talked about achievements, and in blog post 43 we talked about unlocking heroes. We mentioned that well need a way to show the progress for unlocks, and the Codex is our solution to this. When we initially created the hint popup dialog, we knew we wanted a way to also see all previous hints. Our first idea was to put this information into the book as an extra chapter on the right side. As time went on, our understanding of what we want with it changed, and so now weve put all meta information into the Codex, while all in-world information is viewed through the book. The book shows the information about your warband and has controls for ranking them up, as well as the interaction with encounters. The codex has 4 tabs. The first one shows hints for the overworld map or the fights, depending on whether youre on the map or in a fight. We intend to update this so all hints always show up there regardless of your current location.
The other tabs track information about unlockables. The first and most obvious ones are the achievements. We dont yet have them in the game, but its on our plate for next month. We just need to make a set of icons for them and link them all up with a set of hardcoded requirements. Excuse the temporary text here :)
The heroes tab lists the unlocking progress of all your heroes. Our first implementation of this was a dead button that just showed a tooltip with all this information in it, which was not particularly good :D Knowing wed have to add an achievement tab anyway, and they both use the same underlying system for unlocking rewards, it was a simple thing to just use the same layout for the heroes. Note here that while Morgan is unlocked (by default), his Prowess is still locked. It has a temporary description here, but the idea is you have to start and finish the game with a hero in order to unlock his Prowess.
Finally, a tab that we never even talked about having, but once I had the idea, everyone was on board with it. The relic tab tracks all relics youve found on your journey and owned at least briefly. Here you can see the characteristics of all relics, which might help you find interesting combinations of relics on specific character builds, and maybe something to chase for the collectors out there.
Do let us know what you think about the whole concept on our Discord server. Were very open to feedback and scrutiny. MarkoP https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Hey folks! Todays post was written by Mat again, as we recently started looking into adding achievements. We needed a preliminary design for these, and since Mat has done some of it, we pressured him into writing a bit about it. Just note that the achievement icons and requirements below are all WIP and mockups, nothing surrounding them is final yet. --- Achievements have become expected in most modern games and platforms, as a way to celebrate a victory or to let your player know that they did something noteworthy or rare. To some players, its a neat surprise. To others, its sort of an objective to pursue in itself! Each game has its own design philosophy though. Heres a bit on ours: We believe that achievements work best as little breadcrumbs that you offer the players to let them know what sort of level of play can be expected if they want to become true masters of the game. Sometimes this is letting them know that a battle can be won without losing health, or that you can reach a certain level Or hey, sometimes is just playing the game a lot, and in different ways! In that space, we created 5 different categories for Achievements. 1) Tactical Skills These represent complex combos or actions that take some effort to pull, but if you can do them consistently, you will have an easier time in the Tactical layer. We also add particularly impressive feats, here, like surviving a tough battle without losing a hero. Heres an example:
A player that wins that achievement learned something neat: some of the abominations can be weaponized against their allies, and knowing how to do it consistently will help you out! 2) Strategy Challenge With these, we want to celebrate unusual luck or resource management during your travels. These achievements will direct you to some expectations, but also let you know that you are having a noteworthy run.
Getting the fairies to cooperate is rough, but will pay off! 3) Grind Sometimes, youve played the game so much and did things for so long, that we want to give you a bit of a thank you, its all - we hope you had fun!
4) Progress Roguelikes can be a bit daunting, but part of the game is inching your way into a new zone or finishing an unlock. These achievements celebrate that!
5) Oddities Finally, there are some events or actions that are just plain unusual? Rare, hard to do, or just dumb! But hey, at least you got an achievement out of it.
But yeah! We have around 50 entries for launch being prepared, with their technology being implemented as we speak. Got any ideas? Any suggestions? Let us know! --- Working on achievements must mean were closing in on release, right? :) Thanks for reading! Join our Discord server if you wanna make any suggestions. Were all there and happy to chat. Mat & MarkoP https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Hiya peeps! One of the things we wanted to add to the game for a long time were quest-like encounters that span multiple zones. Lately, we finally implemented all the pieces to make this work, and we have a couple of questlines added to the game. The main reason we wanted these in the game is to create an opportunity cost to get some cool things. Some of the questlines will be fairly basic, like getting a bunch of supplies and taking them to a castle in the next zone. Some will potentially span three zones, and grant you a really cool relic. We want to reward players that pursue longer questlines with something important, like relics that cannot be obtained in any other way. We also want the longer questlines to actually be rewarding, because of the way theyre positioned in the world.
(note that we added the current party portraits to the world map!) Our world generation is fairly simple and straightforward. There are several manually created layouts of the node network you see on the map. We opted out of generating these positions because of landscape restrictions like preventing nodes from spawning on mountains or on the sea. It is also relatively difficult to generate connections between nodes that create interesting choices. Doing them manually is also not too much work, and gives us nice control over how the nodes are positioned and connected. First, we pick a random layout out of several we have per zone, then we do a content generation pass over all nodes. Nodes are grouped into lanes, and each lane has its own set of controls for allowing nodes to become special, how many of them may do so, how far apart they must be, etc. The questlines are part of that pass as well, which means if you manage to start a quest (which is random right now), you will have a guaranteed node in a future zone be a quest continuation node. It will likely be positioned in such a way that youll have to choose what you want to pursue in that zone. You might want to ignore the questline because you want to hunt for an Arcane node or a City node, its your choice. For example, you might want to not finish the questline that grants you 15 supplies to take to a zone 2 location. Maybe you're greedy and want to keep all those supplies! It's one thing less you have to worry about, but you lose any reward you might get by completing the quest. It's all about tradeoffs!
(screenshot is with Alt pressed down which shows info for all nodes, not just hovered ones) If you enter a zone that has a quest encounter spawned, there will be a special indicator on that node telling you about it. You might want to scour and look over the map before you decide which way through the zone you want to go down. Sometimes they might be a ways off. :) Thanks for reading! If you want to ask us stuff or suggest stuff, you can do so on our Discord server, were all there! MarkoP https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Hi folks! Todays blog post was fully written by Mat, our system designer, which let me spent just that bit more time programming the game, so thanks Mat! All text below is from his perspective. --- Have you ever felt that weird sensation when playing an MMO or a long-term RPG where you feel like the battles are too similar and you are just going through the same rotations, doing the same things? Well, when you have to play every map multiple times in order to test new abilities, new AI, or just get a better bead on balancing, youll feel the extreme version of that. And thats a bad thing for a roguelike, man! Our original intention when designing maps and skirmishes was to create interesting scenarios around cover placement, types and quantities of enemies, and waves. Then, we let players loose to play around with their load-outs and approach the battle anyway they see fit. That worked out pretty well, and the curated nature of some of our maps, like Ruined Basilica or Hilltop leads to some interesting combat scenarios. They just, you know, can get old quick. So heres how Im trying to fix that feeling. I divided all enemies into Categories, representing sort of their Power Level, or the way I like to describe it, Level of Disruption, referring to how likely the unit is to require specific maneuvers to play around, or how much it disrupts a plan. People interested in game design might associate this with Birkheads Enemy Types, but its a common approach in the design of enemies.
Then, for each map, Mia and the writers come up with the Skirmish Conditions, or how an encounter itself changes the combat. A choice might lead to better cover, or you might get ambushed. I script these conditions, place spawn points and all that, and then define how many of each enemy category to put in and at which positions. This is where most of the balancing lies. The final step then is to allow some of these enemies to be randomly picked inside their categories! What that means is that instead of two Mandrakes and a Thorntoad (2x Minor Abominations + 1 Medium Abomination), you might get a Wyvern, a Redcap, and a Cockatrice, which, by virtue of their skillsets, changes your expectations for that fight and forces you to reconfigure your plan instead of learning the map by memorization.
A lot of exceptions, of course. Some encounters mention enemies by name, and some maps work better with a specific enemy roster. Thatll all be respected, but this low-amplitude randomness will definitely make the game a bit more resilient to that awful feeling of getting old. And thats a good thing for a roguelike, man! --- Very interesting, Mat! If you want to ask him questions about any of this stuff, you can join our Discord server, where youll find all of us happily working on the game. Thanks for reading! MarkoP & Mat https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Hi! If youve played the demo on one of the several opportunities last year, you might have noticed that when you start the game it immediately loads up to the main menu. This means that youd start the game without much context into what was going on, and what your main goal is. We intended to solve this issue with the intro cutscene, a small image stream with voiceover narration to explain who you are, whats happening, and why youre doing what youre doing. We didnt have the time to make the cutscene for any of the demos before, although we did get close to having it around November. Ultimately, it was pushed back when we decided there werent going to be any demos, so we focused on the more immediate features. Shiv has done his side of most of those things, so he went back to making the cinematic.
Our writers have written the text that would be narrated over the cinematic, and Shiv has already drawn most of the images we are putting into it, so the only thing that remains is to make the actual cinematic. The Serious Engine has capabilities to make cinematics, so were leveraging those to have everything be in-engine, and also because the engine doesnt handle video playback with consistent framerates. The intro cinematic will play the first time you start the game and would be viewable through the options menu or something, were not yet 100% sure on that because we were missing the actual cinematic in order to implement playing it back on demand. One possibility we might consider is also just playing it every time you start the game and having it be skippable after the first time its played. Im not sure what the best way is, so if you have any opinions on that, tell us! The general context the cinematic sets up is that there are many worlds (dimensions) that are all threatened by the all-consuming Cataclysm. Merlin has hope it can be stopped tho, and to that end, in each of those dimensions, he has created Arthur and the Grail, which would have the ability to heal the wounds in reality. However, Morgana lost faith in him and trapped him for many years. After a long while, he awoke weakened and saw that Arthur had failed and was replaced with lesser men. Being so weak, he cannot exert much control over the mortal realm except some dream-state suggestions to the heroes, telling them to get the Grail, go to Jerusalem and save the world.
This is the gist of it, the full text is somewhat longer and has more flavor to it, and youll be able to hear it during the cinematic when you start the game. Because we didnt have the cinematic in the previous demos, we tried to replicate the context in the very first encounter you see in Albion when you reach Camelot. We dont yet know if well cut that encounter down a bit for the full game since it wont be absolutely necessary to explain everything over again every time you start a new game, but no plans for that yet. Thanks for reading! You can find us on our Discord server if you wanna chat with us! MarkoP https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Hello there! Here are some updates on what were doing and where we are.

• The programmers are implementing the new UI concepts Shiv made before the break. Were mostly focusing on doing the code implementation and exposing all the knobs to the editor so an artist can come in and play with them and make the UI just right.
• Shiv is finishing up with the book UI concept so we programmers have everything we need to do the implementation. Once thats done, hell be doing the opening cinematic and making sure the in-game UI looks like all the concepts he made.
• Aleluja and sanduk were working on maps, and while sanduk is still working on them, Aleluja started working on improving some older models and making better animations for the last abomination unit for zone 3.
• Kaz was churning out icons for ability upgrades, blacksmith upgrades and is working on adding new relic icons along with new ground materials.
• Mat was working on a prototype of the final final boss fight, which hes completed, and were soon having a meeting to talk about how the boss fight will look like (models, aesthetics, mood, etc). Hes also made some new relics.
• Mia is working on making template encounters for zone 3 so the writers can make them story rich.
• AlenHR is a beast, making destructions for most of our obstacles so they can be split apart by explosive abilities. Hes also done a neat new feature you can see below.

Hey peeps! Were back from our 2-week winter break. Were settling back into the workflows, and everyone has their stuff to work on. Programmers are programming, designers are designing and artists are arting. So I asked the team what they were doing over the winter break. I'll use the names we have on our Discord. Here are some stories. Mat, a Brazillian lost in Croatia, was not prepared for the harsh cold weather of Croatia in December (its summer in Brazil). So after a few attempts of enduring the near-zero temperatures (celsius), he and the missus gave up and focused on making food and playing DnD. Sanduk, a cool weirdo, got inspired by the earthquakes that hit Croatia to draw something related. The stronger quake hit when she was returning from a walk with the dog, and she briefly thought she was causing the shaking, but figured what was going on when plaster started falling down off the walls. Other than that, she made some cookies and cakes, and after 2 years of wanting it, she bought the toaster. Aleluja, the cat wrangler, said her break was boring, but I beg to differ. She cleaned up the chaos in her apartment, finished Red Dead Redemption 2, worked on an EU stop motion project, and spent time learning Swedish! Mycket bra! AlenHR, the effect wizard, is a big drone aficionado and has spent time working on a prototype drone that mixes two types of drone rotor configurations (push and pull for the front and back rotors). It has some benefits for drone size and flight characteristics, but hes not sure if the thing will fly at all. He started kitbashing one up, so I guess well see! MarkoZ, the guy who walks his cat like a dog, learned to make french macarons, and he says he was very successful. Cant wait for the pandemic to end and we start working in a shared office to try them. Kaz, the cowboygirl, spent time working on illustrating a school book and an encyclopedia, drawing dinosaurs and fungi, while listening to Arabic language lessons. She also had fun with her pet slugs and pigeons doing unspeakable things. Not with each other, mind you, individually. Shiv, the bear, is traditionally the one who messes up everything, and he managed to mess up being a blood donor. The needle pierced his vein in a bad way, and now his left arm has a nice rainbow pattern that will last for around 3 months, according to his doctors. Hes still alive but has some trouble sleeping due to the bad arm. We all wish him a speedy recovery. Thankfully it was his left arm, so he can still work (the one thing he did right). <3 Mia, the LARPing dungeon master, spoke of having some gender role reversal in her household, where the gals played Zelda almost every day, while the men were horrified by the fact theyre playing games. Apparently, the men in her house dont know what fun is. MarkoP, yours truly, spent time programming (what a shocker) with the focus on learning OpenGL and having it work alongside a D3D11 renderer, playing board games with friends, and waiting for the next Path of Exile expansion. He also got a vegetable chopper for Christmas, which hes pretty happy about. (weird writing about myself in the third person) Sorry for not having some interesting game news this week. Returning from a 2-week work break does that. All of us have gone back to doing interesting things, so next week should have some stuff to share. If you want to inquire more about any of the things you read here, the whole team is on our Discord server, available for questioning. Im guessing some people might want to ask Kaz some stuff. Sheesh. MarkoP https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/

Hey folks. A very different blog post this time around. The team is currently on a two week collective vacation for Christmas and year number rollover. As such we don't really have a lot of interesting things to show, so i thought i'd show the animals the team owns. I'll use the names people use on our Discord. Aleluja (artist)

Jakov (our IT admin)
Kaz (artist)

Jonas and Verena (writers)

MarkoP (programmer)
MarkoZ (programmer)
Mat (designer)
Mia (designer)
Sanduk (artist)
Shiv (artist)
Regular (game related) blog posts will continue on January 13th. Come join our Discord server for more animal pics. MarkoP https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/