In the past two weeks I mostly tried to answer one question: Will the cards ever get artwork?

This was a regular question that came up when people saw Faith in Despair. And I had a few ideas on how to solve this.

One of the ideas was to add "claws" for creature cards and little ornaments on spell cards. The spell cards looked alright, but... they still didn't look "finished".

Another idea was to add art in the background. But what kind of art? If you look at art on Magic: The Gathering cards, it is way too detailed. If I wanted to hire an artist, they'd have to draw way below their abilities, more like concept art. Plus, how can I say which art I want if I can't say if art would have worked at all?

Then one day I stumbled upon an image on rawpixel. I was looking for new icons, and I saw this image of a crude figure with a sword. It caught my attention and I clicked on it.

It was an image drawn by a french artist named Odilon Redon. It looked kind of ... unfinished (?), but also strangely intriguing. There was something about it. I checked out more art by him, and I was absolutely stunned. It was more sketchy art like this, but also beautiful full color artworks that looked like they appeared straight out of a dream. On Wikipedia I learned that "his work is considered a precursor to Surrealism." And I could absolutely see why.

In addition to that, a lot of his art seemed to deal with the devil and religious symbolism. I quickly realized: This was perfect for Faith in Despair. But how do I feel about using art from a dead artist? Here was the perfect art for my game, and I could use it, but would he have agreed to it?

I made a deal with myself: I will use it, since it's in public domain, but I shall treat it with the utmost respect.

In a way, this felt like using art in all my previous projects, like Giger in Halfquake Amen, or all the art in the Steam release of the first Halfquake: I get to show off art that I enjoy and share it with other people.

The beauty of Odilon's art is that he had two phases in his life: the black and white phase, and when he got older he transitioned to the colorful phase, in which he mainly painted with oil paint. I just thought this was so fitting, this couldn't be a coincidence, could it? Am I just trying to convince myself, so that I can stop looking for art? Or is this simply the payoff for searching for art for half a year?

It took me two weeks to get the art into the game. The first week the colors looked off and washed out. Then my wife said, I should just increase the contrast. And that's when it finally clicked.

Gone was the boring blue and the boxy design. And cards without any text still looked "complete".

All the lacrima were remade as well using a painting of gemstones and recoloring it as needed. Instead of white there was now a yellow lacrima, and green and red remained the same.

Steam Deck

Apart from the graphics changes, I was also able to play Faith in Despair on my new (refurbished) Steam Deck, and I quickly fixed a few bugs that appeared. The Steam Deck is perfect for quick playtesting sessions in-between other work, and it feels like I play the game more now than before.

What's next?

I kind of enjoyed the past two weeks, just heading in the directions where the game took me, and I think I will just follow where it leads me for another while. I do have stuff on my todo list, but trying to listen to the game and let it speak for itself feels good right now, so I just enjoy the flow.

At the end of March there will be a Deckbuilder Fest on Steam though, so I plan to have at least one update ready before that happens.

As always, you can play the current version on Steam or on itch.io. If you do, let me know what you think.

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...