I'm making a roguelike deckbuilder, a card game that lets you build your own cards, with lots of synergies and surprising outcomes.

That's the plan.

But...

What's a synergy?

I'm a huge fan of these games, so I've played my fair share of roguelikes and roguelites, such as Slay the Spire, Monster Train, Peglin, Inscryption, Spelunky (1 + 2), and lots more. A synergy is basically when you get a card, then you get an item and they play together really well. People have said that Brotato and Binding of Isaac are quite good at this.

As an example (not for any particular game): You shoot bullets, an item turns all bullets into bombs, another item turns exploding bombs into more bombs, another item stuns all enemies that get damaged by bombs, etc. This is a synergy.

In my game, you can customize your own cards, so you have synergies within each card. You can have a trigger "On Spell Played", and then connect it to "Magic Attack", and add another "Target All Enemies". You can basically program it like a visual coding language.

To add to that, other cards can then synergize with that card as well. You have a trigger "On Hit", and then you can retaliate with Poison or whatever. Any card can more or less start a chain reaction if the right triggers align.

How did I get here?

Final Fantasy 7 was one of the games that changed the way I looked at games. It still inspires me today, and one of the things I liked so much about FF7 was the materia system.

Almost every piece of equipment would have slots, and you could equip materia into them. Materia are magic gems that unlock certain powers for you to use in battle. These can be simple healing or attack spells, but also incredibly powerful summons. Additionally, there would be modifiers, such as increasing the magic potency of an adjacent materia, things like that.

The other game that inspired me was Magic: The Gathering. I used to play this game a lot as a teenager, and I still buy cards today.

I recently tried to analyze why I enjoyed it so much and it mostly came down to synergies and reactions. For example: When an opponent plays a card, you get 1 life. When this creature comes into play, destroy target creature. Whenever you play a spell, tap any card. And so on and so forth.

This resulted in me one day getting the idea of combining a card game with the materia system from Final Fantasy 7. I wrote down the basic categories of materia, namely triggers, actions and modifiers. And I drew a few sketches of how the cards could look like with slots.

And over the course of three months, that idea turned into what is now called Faith in Despair.

(The game is based on Turnament (which is based on Catty & Batty), so you might see some stray Turnament sprites here and there.)

Current Status

It has taken me quite a while to come to a point where I'm comfortable sharing it, and even though it's still quite early, I think this is a good time to start talking about it openly.

Here's the current content of the game:

• You can play runs that spawn a random map with various events.
• Events can be: Normal fight, elite fight, boss fight, treasure, shop, study (upgrade cards)
• There are 45 lacrima (the "magic gems" / materia), that's 18 triggers, 19 actions, 8 modifiers
• Supports status effects, such as poison, weak, sleep, etc.
• Fight system that lets you place creatures to block incoming damage, replace creatures, move creatures, and target creatures with spells.
• Enemies get spawned randomly with random lacrima, and there's a level scaling applied that will be refined later. Elite and boss fights are harder and have way more lacrima to try and counter your deck.
• Fights give you a choice of 3 chosen lacrima from the enemies you encountered to choose as your own.
• Inventory system that lets you customize your cards.

I'm currently implementing blessings, these are permanent cards on the side that can react to anything you do (like relics in Slay the Spire). They use the basic card system with triggers/actions/spells, but I don't think they will be customizable, rather handcrafted to guide the player in a specific playstyle (if they choose to follow).

What's next?

Apart from blessings, I want to add more lacrima to the game and see how the game feels. I want to create a new map system, which I'll talk about in another entry.

Balancing is a huge part on my list, which I'll also go into more detail later on.

And I hope I can share a playable version very soon as well, but we'll see.

Even after 3 months, I feel like this is still just the beginning. There are many ways this game can go, and I have a lot of plans and ideas. All of which I'll slowly reveal and explain further down the line.

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...