I recently showed off Faith in Despair in front of 60 other game developers at a meetup here in Vienna. The feedback was great in general, but the one question got asked once again (thankfully): What about art on the cards?

I have taken my own advice, which was to just give things a try and then go from there. I added generic card art for creatures, spells and enemies and the game felt already better to me. Whenever I see screenshots from before, I now see what other people must have seen. It's kind of crazy that I got this much of a tunnel vision on this issue. I mean, I knew I wanted to do something, but now I realize how barren it looked.

So yes, the generic cards have art now and decorations based on equipped lacrima. It's not super dependent on the type of lacrima, but it at least depends on rarity and randomizes scale and builds up a specific shape on the cards.

The roadmap from the last entry was very ambitious and I'm already behind. I have new decks planned, and new difficulty modifiers prepared, but it did not go live in November. It was probably because of the art update that I just mentioned. But hey, it doesn't really matter.

As I keep going, I will probably keep simplifying the roadmap. Especially when I realize that maybe some deck ideas won't work out at all. I'm currently finishing up the new Mercenary deck and it was difficult to get it working to a level that made sense. I will definitely go through all decks before release again and adjust them, but it's also important to me to get them out in their first versions, so they can be tested and refined.

What's next? According to the roadmap, more decks, more circles. But the feedback I got was quite in-depth, and the upcoming update will already address lots of things that people mentioned.

All I can say is, showing off your game continuously is extremely important. I can't even imagine what Faith in Despair would look like if I developed it in secret.