Hey folks!
Our early access release is looming. As we’re getting closer, we’re trying to put small bits of polish here and there. This blog post is basically just a bunch of smaller things we did that we’re happy about.
Landmarks node improvements
The Landmarks are special nodes that revolve around a specific world location. These are always around the same position in the world and have a unique name. Up until now, only cities had unique names, so we’ve expanded this to special locations as well. Landmarks are usually also accompanied by a unique model in the world.
Bestiary
We’re finally doing the content for the bestiary chapter in the book. We plan on having entries for all Abominations in there, with some flavor text to accompany them. This one here is a mockup prototype because somebody who was supposed to make it forgot I'd need this image today. *smh*
Node links
A small improvement we made to the node links is adding a soft fade to them when highlighting is turning on and off.
Outro cutscene
We finished the outro cutscene, so now finishing the game will have some visual and narrative sense!
Spell effects
We’re adding some good oomph to Spells to make them visually distinct from Skills.
Directional targeting smooooothnes
Recently we made directional targeting use a different way of calculating the effect area, which makes it feel much smoother when the mouse is near the character, as it behaves similar to when it’s farther away.
Achievement icons
We made all icons for achievements, so now MarkoZ is very sad that his custom-made icon will no longer be featured in the game.
Pending mana
One small pet peeve of mine was that mana didn’t behave the same as AP on the action bar. Now it does!
As you can see, we’re doing some strides to making the whole thing be as polished as we can make it. That said, I absolutely know there are things that could be done better, but as we’ve been working on this so long, we’ve become blind to some inefficiencies and UX issues.
We’re very much hoping to have a bunch of players point these issues out to us and together we’d work out how to best improve things. The best ways to tell us about these issues are going to be the Steam forums and our Discord server for some instantaneous communication.
Next week we’ll drop the early access release date, so stay tuned!
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/