Hey folks!
Today we’re 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 they’re ready. If you’ve 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. We’re sure we’ll be receiving feedback for the reworks, as it’s 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 it’s 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 aren’t set in stone since the future is unpredictable, so some shifts may happen, but we have an idea of where we’re going and how we’re getting there. As an example, the Hero passive effects (aka character uniqueness) weren’t 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 can’t write out the dates (because they might change due to unforeseeable circumstances), I can talk about what we have planned and in what order. We’re open to feedback on this.
For the second milestone, we’re planning three new Heroes. They’re partially done: we’re 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 today’s patch).
For the third milestone, we’re 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 I’ve 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. We’re 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). There’s 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, it’s 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 you’re 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/