Like in other roguelikes, the map plays a crucial part in Faith in Despair. It provides an element of exploration, and allows you to choose what you'll check out next, either a fight, elite fight, rest site, shop, study (for upgrading), or treasure chest.

This was the old map that I used up until now:

You'd go from left to right and you'd have to choose a path that contains the things you want.

It was heavily inspired by Slay the Spire's map, which looks like this:

Here you have to go from the bottom to the top, and to figure out the best route, you'd have to scroll up and down for a bit. There is a fascinating article on how these maps are generated, you can check it out here. The point is that this map is very well thought out in its random design.

I tried to remove the need to scroll and put it on a horizontal map. But in this position it was somehow illogical as to why you couldn't just go anywhere on the map.

Taking a look at other roguelike deckbuilders, some have taken a more minimalist approach. Here's the map of Wildfrost:

Basically, you go from fight to fight, and in-between those fights you can choose one of two paths. It's not like you're choosing to fight, but instead you choose whether to get new crew members or go to a shop or check out a treasure cave. There's always a fixed amount of fights you have to go through.

Monster Train was very similar, you'd also go from fight to fight and just chose two paths with different events.

In Inscryption it's a bit more varied, you can often avoid fights if you don't want any, and sometimes the path splits into more than two.

Since I wasn't happy with the map I had made, I thought of something different. I didn't want to force the player to look ahead and figure out the best path. Instead, I wanted to give them a choice, but every choice would have four different events.

Running with the theme that everything is card based, I thought I could build a map using cards.

At first you see two "Map Fragment" cards on the left side. You can choose between the two. When you do, the other card gets discarded.

Then you play through the four events on the card in any order. Once all four events are done, the next two cards on the map are revealed:

Again, you choose which card you prefer to go through. In this case there is a rest site up top, and a treasure below. If you're confident you can go for the three fights and a treasure chest, if you feel like you'll lose HP, you may want to go to the top card.

You then keep working through the map cards until the boss on the rightmost cards.

Once the boss is defeated, you reach the next "act" and you get a new map with 10 new cards.

I think this offers the player a lot of choice. The events still need to be balanced (right now they are truly random), but I believe it's much better than the old map.

Roadmap

Speaking of maps, let's have a look at the roadmap.

Since the last update, I've added a number of new lacrima / materia, such as OnFirstTurnOfCombat (trigger), BestowGlassCannon (triples attack, but halves HP), and TargetLowestHPEnemy (modifier). There are now roughly 70 lacrimae in the game, which already allows for very chaotic and interesting gameplay.

To balance this, I want to add a weighted lacrima distribution, so that when you have a Poison attack, the chances are higher to get "OnPoison" trigger, or "OnEnemyDebuff" trigger, things like that. It's kind of like the "more like this" section in a web shop. :D When that's implemented, synergies will occur more frequently.

Side note: lacrima means "tear" in latin, the story goes that you're fighting with magic tears of fallen angels. But I'll reveal more from the story at a later time.

Once I get the distribution balance done, I want to make the map a bit more curated, and add a few more blessings. After that, I'll add a couple of sounds to make the game feel a bit more alive.

And when that is done, we're one step closer to a public demo that you'll be able to check out. But it will still take a few weeks until then.

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...