A lot happened since the last devlog. Let's quickly go through it.

The freelance gig ended earlier than originally planned. I won't get into the details, but suffice to say, it was a super weird outcome that I didn't expect. I believe I did good work, but apparently not good enough. Instead of going back to my old job full-time, I decided to focus 100% on Faith in Despair until end of March, then create a new demo and a new trailer and see what happens.



I got a few youtubers to play the game and their feedback was invaluable. I changed the game massively, reducing the number of nodes on the map, changed balance, decks, blessings, curses. I also added new music for the shop and for the end credits. Through meeting new friends in the gamedev and audio space, I even got to record a professional opera singer for the song after you win a run. It was an experience I'll likely never forget.

In the same week as my freelance gig ended prematurely, I also had an opportunity to talk to a publisher, who was interested in working with me. In general, I was told the game lacks marketability. I tried to remedy that with the latest update, but in another universe it's probably even more like Inscryption or Buckshot Roulette. Here you just fight Death to stay alive, just like in The Seventh Seal (or you know, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey).

So, the game now has more art, more music, more sounds, tighter balance, more choices, more events, more, more, more. But when is it enough? What will actually make a difference?

I want to add at least one more deck and more music. I'll likely experiment with adding additional effects for lacrima. Maybe more blessings, curses and bosses.

At this point, I'm definitely seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I still have half a year left, but time's running fast.

I'm wondering if all of this will have been for nothing. I can't have another project cost me several years of my life and not result in anything. Well, Faith in Despair has already given me a lot, in terms of opportunities and experiences. It did win me a ticket to Gamescom last year. I was able to show it off to around 80 people at a gamedev meetup and people enjoyed the talk. And people still speak to me about it to this day. But if it won't be a financial success, I will have to reconsider why I'm even trying.

I already know the answer to that though. Because I can't not try. It's all I've been doing for the past 25 years, ever since making maps for Half-Life. I just have to keep going. I have to keep creating.

I guess this is the usual mid-point of any project, where there's this huge uncertainty of the thing you're making. You're never quite sure until the very end. I'm sure as the release gets closer I will also get more clarity. At least I hope so.

First patch of the year 2025 has arrived. Five new atonements await, for a total of fifteen.

After every patch follows a little mini-burnout. Thankfully, I have other projects to work on at the moment too. In fact, since December I'm a freelance gamedesigner/gamedev for a company in Germany. I'll share more about how that's going in the future.

How will it affect the development of Faith in Despair? Honestly, not at all. I still reserve one day in the week for my game, and I'm working on it on the weekend too sometimes, even though that's probably not a good idea in the long run (burnout is always looming around the corner, y'know).

I'm currently in production mode. I think I will now keep focusing on polishing what's already here, and maybe try to get the Android version done as well.

There's one aspect that does influence Faith in Despair though: I simply learn a lot about how other people work on their games, especially larger teams. And I'm learning Godot, which so far feels pretty good to work with.

Suffice to say, 2025 has started pretty amazingly, even though I was sick the past two weeks. I have a bunch more things planned for this year that sound amazing in theory too, but we'll see how it plays out.

And of course, Faith in Despair is going to get released. I think it's time.

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.

The latest update introduces a new starter deck called Invoker, which focuses on playing spells. It took me two weeks to get the deck into a fun state, mostly because originally I did not have any creatures in the deck at all. This caused the game to not have any triggers on your own side, which was surprisingly unfun. Turns out, if you remove the main mechanic from the game it falls apart!

When I added creatures that are just defenders and never attack, the game opened up again and allowed customization, but still with a focus on casting spells. It's funny to me because at one point I almost threw the idea away, but then I got the idea to add "Fog Banks" from Magic: The Gathering. They also can't attack and nullify physical damage. The creatures in the Invoker deck are actually called "Wall of Fog", but the name doesn't get displayed properly, so it's just "Creature" at the moment. Not sure if I want to fix that because it could lead to confusion, but we'll see.

I also added five new difficulty modifiers. It was my goal to add modifiers that don't target the same area of the game twice, i.e. I didn't want another despair modifier or another curse modifier. I think it turned out pretty well, there are easier ones and harder ones, and you can mix together whatever you want to play with.

I talked about a sphere board in the last update, which I'm a bit unsure about right now. But I still want to change the system to give an additional curse slot for each activated modifier, and then remove the "unlimited curses" modifier and change it to something else. That way it's hopefully a bit more balanced, even if you only take five "easiest" difficulties to master a deck.

The road ahead looks a bit murky. Yes, I want to add more starter decks, difficulty modifiers, art, music, sounds, backgrounds. But I'm not sure if I want to keep updating the demo. A friend of mine recently suggested to simply limit the available content in the demo and just add different parts of the available content. For example, the demo always has 3 starter decks, but they could rotate depending on which one I want people to play. Maybe that's the way forward.

A part of me also just wants to stop updating the demo for a while and go full on production mode, but having player feedback is invaluable, so turning that off would be detrimental to the whole project. I need to find a balance that allows me to work on bigger stuff without spoiling everything in the demo. Again, a solution has been presented to me, and I think it's the right one.

So, what does the future hold? Let's talk about it.

Starter Decks: I want to add at least 6 more starter decks. 20 in total would be ideal, but I only have one year before release, so that could be tight. I have "easy" ideas for another 10 at least, and if I sit down for another brainstorming session I could probably come up with more. Whether they're distinct enough and fun to play, that's always a different question, but at least prototyping them is relatively fast.

Difficulty modifiers: I want to have 20 in total here as well. Adding 10 more should be relatively straight forward. I will then only offer 10 in the demo. The board is still something I can do, but at this point I'm not sure it's necessary. Maybe keep the complexity in the actual gameplay, not the run starter screen.

Music: People suggested that each boss has their own theme, but to me that sounds like way too much work. It would mean that each new boss not only needs art, but also a separate track. I think I want to have three variations for each chapter. They could also be tied to the current deck, for example, the first deck always gets the first variations, the second deck gets the second variation, and so on. It could also just be random for each run. That would probably be best. Heck, it could even vary in the chapter itself if the chapter is taking too long.

Anyway, that's already another 6 tracks. Then I want to have a fourth chapter at some point, so that's another 3 tracks. I want a music piece for winning/losing, and maybe something for the collection screen. In total, that's another 12 tracks, which, in addition to the 4 already in the game, would result in 16 tracks in total. Sounds like a good length for an album to me. But, just like the 20 decks, this sounds a bit too much for one year, so I'm going to reduce it to 12 tracks in total and scratch the music for the fourth chapter and the collection screen for now.

Art: Yes, yes, I want more art. In fact, if I want to add more bosses/blessings/curses, this is inevitable. I also want to add generic creature/spell art. This is something I'll come back to every now and then. It's very important because the visuals are the first thing people see (obviously), so they need to have a certain quality. I'm thinking of getting an artist on board for this specifically.

Backgrounds: At the moment there is one background for each chapter. While that may be alright, I do want to add more to the background, especially to individual screens like inventory, shops, etc. This might require 3D assets, which could help with "immersion" a lot.

FX: I want to make the game have more effects, although I have to be careful not to overdo it. Still, there are some obvious ones, like some kind of coin effect when buying/selling or receiving money, more effects when creatures take damage, different kinds of effects per lacrima (this could lead to way too much work with not enough payoff though), a "winning" effect, a boss card introduction scene, ... the list goes on. There's a lot I can do to spice things up.

Bugs: Systems-based games like this tend to have strange bugs and I have to reserve time for those. The previous update took me two weeks just to fix random issues. It's kind of grueling, but also a necessary evil. On a positive note, so far I've been able to fix even the most elusive bugs, and that's thanks to people already playing the game and sharing their feedback.

Balancing: This is included in the hours of making a new deck and adding modifiers, and I also consider it part of the bugs. Yes, I do have to be mindful of this as a separate category, but I think it's part of adding content, not a completely separate thing. I can't just add something without considering how it affects the rest of the game.

Story: There is a bit of a story, but it's going to be in the background, maybe revealed slowly over the course of each new starter deck. There's not really an ending. This is a game meant to be played as long as you want to. The main stories should be what you encounter in each individual run, i.e. the random enemies and the cards you get to build.

Overall, I have approximately another 500 hours and I need to divide those up into the most effective areas, the highest bang for buck ratio. Let's crunch some numbers, this is going to be ugly.

6 Decks: 120 hours
10 Modifiers: 100 hours
Music: 100 hours
Art and Backgrounds: 100 hours
FX and Bugs: 100 hours

November: 1 deck, 5 modifiers
December: 1 deck, 5 modifiers
January: 1 deck, 1 music track
February: 1 deck, 1 music track
March: 1 deck, 1 music track
April: 1 deck, 1 music track
May: 1 music track, art
June: 1 music track, FX
July: 1 music track, backgrounds
August: 1 music track, bugs
September: art, FX, bugs
October: Release

As you can see, not everything will fit into these next few months. The order will also likely change. Especially with Summer disrupting my usual workflow. But hey, at least it's a plan. Let's see if we can do it.

The biggest news for this entry is that Faith in Despair has a new cover by Marcela Bolívar, who already created the cover for my album Still Leben. I've added the new image to all store pages, the presskit, and the in-game title screen. The old splash screen had its charm, but opening the game feels much better now. I will use the old "black rain" effect for despair effects later on, so it's not entirely gone.

Why is a new cover important? Well, I can show it to people and the new image will make it much more presentable and recognizable. But for me personally, it feels like it informs the game as well. Everything I do from now on has that image in mind, which is exciting. The image was inspired by the game (as general instructions/guidelines), and now it inspires the game right back.

The new update also includes balance changes. Most importantly, all blessings, curses and bosses now come in three variants, depending on the current chapter. This lets me easily fine-tune all the values, and I think it feels a bit better to play now. Especially the offered blessings make more sense in the third chapter.

I've also added more detailed run statistics. Every map node now saves current faith, current despair, gold, total cards, etc. And it also saves the highest damage done per round, which lets me check how the game scales after a while. All these statistics I can now evaluate, and I think this will improve the game even more from now on.

Overall, feedback is good and there are always new players trickling in and finding bugs and suggesting new features. One thing that is missing now is more cohesion between runs, some kind of progression, and more "cutscenes" with Death.

I have a plan that should solve this: The difficulty circles of hell will receive an update that is similar to the Final Fantasy X sphere grid. Basically it will be a disc with sockets, and each socket will contain a difficulty modifier. You need to fight your way through each modifier to unlock adjacent ones. But to reach the outer edge, you need to string together modifiers starting from the center. You can still build your own difficulty by going different paths, for example if one modifier is giving you trouble, maybe you can go around it, something like that.

And of course, more starter decks. I'm still planning to add 20 starter decks in total, as long as they are mechanically different enough.

Since it is finally cooler outside, I'm also planning to stream more and work on the game live. It has brought in a lot of good suggestion previously, so I'm looking forward to getting back into the rhythm again. As long as I'm not occupied with attending gamedev meetings and talks, I should be able to stream every weekday. So, maybe I'll catch you there.