Hey, everyone! VS Dave here.
RPGs, by their very nature, are incredibly deep. From detailed lore to item descriptions and everything in-between, there’s a lot to keep track of! The Hand of Merlin is no different.
To help consolidate some of that information and improve the player experience, the team added the Codex. But what exactly does it keep track of? We checked in with Marko Pipal, Lead Programmer at Room-C Games, to find out!
The Hand of Merlin: Dev Blog
The Codex
With our change to the UI, we took the opportunity to also consolidate some information into one screen. In the past, we’ve talked about achievements, and about unlocking heroes. We knew we needed a way to show the progress for unlocks, and the Codex is our solution to this.
When we initially created the hint popup dialog, we wanted a way to also see all previous hints. Our first idea was to put this information into the book as an extra chapter on the right side.
As time went on, our understanding of what we wanted with it changed, and so now we’ve put all meta information into the Codex, while all in-world information is viewed through the book. The book shows the information about your warband and has controls for ranking them up, as well as the interaction with encounters.
The codex has four tabs. The first one shows hints for the overworld map or the fights, depending on whether you’re on the map or in a fight. We intend to update this so all hints always show up there regardless of your current “location.”
The other tabs track information about unlockables. The first and most obvious ones are the achievements. We recently added them into the game, so this screenshot is a little outdated, but you get the general idea. Excuse the temporary text here 🙂
The heroes tab lists the unlocking progress of all your heroes. Our first implementation of this was a dead button that just showed a tooltip with all this information in it, which was… not particularly good 😀
Knowing we’d have to add an achievement tab anyway, and they both use the same underlying system for unlocking rewards, it was a simple thing to just use the same layout for the heroes.
Note here that while Morgan is unlocked (by default), his Prowess is still locked. It has a temporary description here, but the idea is that you have to start and finish the game with a hero in order to unlock their Prowess.
Finally, a tab that we never even talked about having, but once I had the idea, everyone was on board with it. The relic tab tracks all relics you’ve found on your journey and owned at least briefly.
Here you can see the characteristics of all relics, which might help you find interesting combinations of relics on specific character builds, and maybe something to chase for the collectors out there.
Do let us know what you think about the whole concept on our Discord server. We’re very open to feedback and scrutiny.
MarkoP
As always, if you have any content to share or questions for the team, please feel free to reach out via our socials. You can stay in touch with me and the rest of the Versus Evil team by joining our Discord and following us on Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook.
~ VS Dave