Hi folks!
Some people have noticed that our updated store page now has a release date!
It’s 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 didn’t see. :)
We’re making sure that all unlocks work. We’re adding missing illustrations to the encounters. We’re playtesting the whole game from start to end to see if there are any wild balancing issues. We’re 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 we’ve become completely blind to. If you find anything you have issues with, please tell us about it because we can’t 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, we’re 9 full-time people who are trying their best to bring this game to life. We can’t 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. I’ll try to communicate these things via blog posts where possible, and we’re always present on our Discord server and Steam forums. If you want/like immediate communication, Discord is your best bet. If you’re on the other side of the world from Europe or we’re 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/