Sup!
Things are progressing at a steady pace. Some of the things we’re doing include:
- Updating animations for human units to look better
- Adding particles to all Skills
- Adding more props to our galleries for skirmish map beautification
- Adding more sounds to units
- Improved the camera bounds in maps
- Preparing encounter templates for zone 2
- Discussing encounter questlines
- Adding more relics
- Creating the “Ultimate” Skills for enemies
- Improving enemy AI
- Prototyping the hero unlock system
- Fixing issues that prevented us from having transparent objects
- Fixing all the bugs!
I think the most interesting bug we fixed is that selling the Grail to the relic vendor did not lose you the game. You can’t lose the Grail from having the bearer die, but we’ve intentionally left in the option to sell the Grail, as a temptation thing. Maybe we make it an achievement? Who knows!
Our idea for the Hero Unlock system is to make a flexible content-driven system that can be configured to track a variety of general game events. Once enough of those events fire, the unlock target is granted. For now, we’re only discussing unlocking heroes and achievements. This means that modders that create their own heroes can also make them unlockable by whatever means they want. Achievements will likely not be unlocked by content-driven data but hardcoded data, just to avoid cheesing through them by making a dead easy requirement that unlocks every achievement we make. That would be a crappy experience and destroy their value. Some example requirements we wrote down are “Deal 15 friendly fire damage with a single ability use”, “Kill 20 bandits and acquire 700 gold before reaching Jerusalem” and “Survive 5 battles in Marca Hispanica without losing a hero”. These are not final, mind you, because we don’t yet have the system done, but I’m working on it! If only I weren’t interrupted by other urgent things every day…
One other thing I want to talk about in this post and maybe poll for general feedback is one of unit visibility in maps. As mentioned above in the list, we fixed issues with transparency and now we have the ability to make objects that occlude the battlefield transparent so you can see what’s behind them.
We also added unit outlines and fill when behind occluding objects. Check out Morgan Tud below:
Which one do you prefer the most? Which one should we make the default? Give us some feedback in the comments or on our Discord server, where we’re always active. Especially me, I can be found there almost 66% of the day. The other 33% of the day I’m sleeping.
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/