Heyooo!
About two weeks ago we started doing QA with an affiliate team from Versus Evil. They’ve been great and found a bit over 200 issues so far. Only a few of them are by design so far, in which case we’re still treating them as an issue for not being explained well. Honestly, having 200 issues reported in two weeks doesn’t seem that bad to me. We’ve 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 month’s time.
We also started marking encounters as finalized. This means they’re ready for localization and will be bundled up in phases and sent to the localization people. There’s currently a total of 350 encounters spread across 4 zones, tho the last zone has a bit under 20 because it’s special. Translating that number of encounters will take some time. :)
We’ve 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, it’s 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, we’ll 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 won’t 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. We’ve 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 I’m 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/