I recently visited San Francisco to be part of GDC. My game Faith in Despair was at the Austrian Arcard booth, part of a selection of Austrian games that attendees could choose to play.



Over the course of three days, people played my game almost back to back. Usually, when they sat down to play it, they stuck to it for 15 to 30 minutes. There usually were no questions, the game introduced itself well enough.

There were still some things I noted down that I wanted to fix later on, but overall the feedback was positive.

I had industry experts play my game, vfx artists, sound engineers, musicians, even gamedev teachers. I filled up my notes pretty quickly. And at the end of the event all of my Faith in Despair cards were replaced with business cards from other people that I got to meet.



San Francisco itself was great too, I was walking around and even streamed a few times. Part of what made it great was that my friend Alexis (and his wife as well as his dog Cuddlepup) was there to show me the best parts of the city.

Once I got home, it took me a week to recover from jetlag and just the general rush of being in a completely different environment.

I guess to sum it all up... It definitely left an impression on me. The organizer of the Austrian GDC booth told me to come again next year, but I'm not so sure about that yet. Maybe once is enough.



So, what now?

I'm currently working on an update for Faith in Despair, which involves more bosses, voice acting (by Patrick Lamb), and it will get new VFX (by Jack the Generalist) throughout the next few weeks.

I believe a game like this can be worked on forever, but I do feel the end of my motivation is on the horizon. This has been one of the most exciting games to work on and to launch, and I'm still committed to update this game throughout the rest of the year. But I'm getting to a point where I feel like my updates are diluting the original intent of the game a little bit.

At this point, nothing will make this game much better than it already is, aside from completely changing core mechanics. Which means, it will be turned into a completely different game. And that probably means, well, maybe it's just time to make a new one.



And speaking of which, I am already slowly working on a new game with Alexis (yes, that very same person I met in San Francisco). I still stream gamedev on twitch three times a week, and I will not show the new game yet, which I suppose also slows down development on the new one a little bit. But my hope is that we get a demo out soon-ish, so that I can also work on the new game on streams.

The streams on Twitch and YouTube have proven to work for me. I get to focus, and talk to like-minded people. I will continue doing them three times a week for the entire year as well. I reckon that it will stick as something that I want to keep doing in 2027, but it was at least my goal for this year. Just stream three times a week, updating Faith in Despair, and the occasional IRL.

We'll see where this takes me.