Happy New Year 2024! 🎉

In the last devlog entry, I released the demo for Faith in Despair. You can get the latest version here:

▶ https://muddasheep.itch.io/faith-in-despair

The game is now public, so you can share it with others who might be interested in a roguelike deckbuilder!

Demo Feedback

A bunch of people have joined the new discord (▶ https://discord.gg/nZy3KrCrzr ) and given lots of valuable feedback. Thanks to Auri, Alexis Clay, KAON, Max, Sans Rain, VoidSeeker, and Flint!

Overall I think people agreed that the game is fun, which is a good sign!

In the past two weeks, I was on vacation, but I still managed to work on 24 items from the feedback. These are not in the latest build just yet, because of some changes that I still need to wrap up.

Removing Unfun Triggers

There were triggers in the game that were too specific, such as "On Poison" or "On Muddied". These things rarely happen, and so this leads to two problems:

1) If an enemy has a trigger that never fires, it pretty much has 0 effect and can be ignored. It's just a punching bag at this point.

2) The player gets to pick a trigger from the fallen enemies. If the triggers are worthless, the player isn't faced with an interesting decision on which lacrima to choose. And the player will end up with not enough triggers that do anything.

To fix this, I have removed all of these and I will introduce new triggers that are just a bit weaker than the triggers that fire at a high rate (i.e. "On Attack").

This will result in the enemies getting more interesting in the early stages of a run, and more triggers being a more viable choice for the player's deck.

Or in other words, it'll hopefully be more fun!

Removing Gain Max Life and Gain Max Mana

If you got "Gain Max Life" or "Gain Max Mana", you could theoretically get insanely high values, to the point that you could never lose (if you have 100000 life), or there would be absolutely no limit to playing cards (which can still happen with Gain Mana).

But there still needed to be a way to increase both values in a better, more accessible way. So, I decided to add a function to resting on the map:

Whenever you rest at full life, you gain max life. When you rest at full mana, you gain max mana. This leads to interesting decisions, for example: Do I heal before a fight (because I'm full and would like to have the increased max values), or after a fight to make sure I'm healed for the next part of the map? It also makes it more interesting if there are two rest icons on a map fragment, first to heal up, second to increase max values. And so on.

I totally stole this idea from Max's game Lost for Swords, which you can play here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2638050/Lost_For_Swords/

Of course, this idea was used in other games too, I just forgot where he got the idea from. :D

Too Easy?

At this point, some people already think it's too easy, while others are still struggling to get through chapter 2. The new changes in regards to the triggers will change the game a little bit, so I think we'll have to re-evaluate the current difficulty after the change is available for everyone to play.

Suffice to say, more changes are coming that make the game a bit harder. What I'm looking for is to have a base "normal" difficulty, so I can go in both directions, easier and harder. The devs of Slay the Spire did the same, where Ascension level 10 was the base difficulty, so they climbed both ways for easier and harder difficulties, which to me makes a lot of sense.

Faith

And finally, the first of two drastic upcoming changes: Life will be changed to Faith! I believe this makes a lot of sense for two reasons:

1) The main character is called Faith

2) You lose the game if you have absolutely no faith left

In addition to that, it removes confusion as to what is a creature's health and player's health, something that's been bugging me for a while and pretty much every player has mentioned this. (I.e. "Does life mean creature's life or my own life?") Confusion begone!

Despair

The second upcoming change will finally introduce Despair and it will replace mana. I've talked about this in earlier devlogs (I think), and I also mentioned that I played the Dark Souls board game, which kind of uses Stamina in a similar way.

Basically, every time you cast a spell or play a creature, Despair increases. If Despair hits a certain threshold, something very bad will happen and Despair resets. If you keep hitting the threshold, the bad things will get worse and worse. This is also inspired by the sanity system in Eternal Darkness, so I plan to add some random effects, things like that. I believe this will be very fun to implement. This is also kind of the point where the Inscryption inspiration finally takes effect.

Another side effect: You can never be out of mana again and get softlocked. This has been a source of confusion/frustration for some players. Instead, you will have to face a decision: Is it worth the risk to play another card and hit the despair threshold?

And last but not least:

Nomen Est Omen

With the two changes above, the name of the game... is the game. Faith in Despair has come to fruition!

Faith will likely be in the next update, Despair will arrive at a later time. If you want to stay up-to-date, remember to join the Discord server:

▶ https://discord.gg/nZy3KrCrzr

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...