In 2015, I finally decided it was time to learn a new engine. It had been 5 years since Halfquake Sunrise, and even more years since Flash died. I had a dream that I could start selling games on Steam. My options back then were Unreal and Unity.

I chose Unity because it felt more like home. It felt a bit like working in Flash, since every object could have its own little script. And I didn't want to use C++.

So, for 8 years, I built up knowledge in Unity. I released two commercial games, one even made it to consoles and had a physical release.

Now, Unity has dropped the info that on January 1st 2024 they'll start charging per install if you meet certain thresholds.

Per install.

How do they track that? We don't know, and according to people inside Unity, they don't know either. Spyware, probably. Or, just a guesstimate based on, uh, a roll of the dice.

In any case, if you reach $200k in sales and 200k installs, you pay 20 cents per install. OR - you could upgrade to Unity Pro, then those thresholds increase to 1 million in sales and installs.

Cool, but that doesn't even hurt me as a small developer, right? These thresholds are way out of reach. So what's the big deal?

This is a huge breach of trust. Not only do they change their pricing terms completely out of left field with four months until they are active, they also apply these new terms retroactively for already released games.

This hurts developers who currently have been working on games for several years. This hurts devs who have games already released, and are now expected to pay a completely random amount of money to Unity. Remember, tracking installs is complete horseshit. You don't know which install is from a charity bundle, from a pirated copy, or from a legit copy, unless you throw privacy out the door and spy on all users.

And who's to say that this is the last thing they will try? In two years, they'll say, oh damn, we're sorry, but those fees we added recently? Yeah, we're gonna need to "adjust" them. Whoops, now it's 30 cents per install.

And you know what? If Unity can get away with it, other big companies might even take note. Oh heck, subscriptions are great, but hohoho, we can also charge when the media created with our product is consumed? Ooohohoho!

It is absolutely disgusting.

Unity's CEO is probably to blame, who's famous for suggesting that reloading should cost $1 if you've played 6 hours of Call of Duty. We don't know for sure, but what we do know is that a LOT of people internally warned against ever publishing these new terms.

Apparently, prolific Unity users were in a call or in Slack channels with Unity prior to the announcement, where they also warned Unity not to go ahead. And they did it anyway.

Because ultimately - they don't care.

They planned for people to jump ship. They knew that there would be outrage, they expected it. Small fish would probably jump ship. But you know what? Big fish like Genshin Impact, Microsoft (Gamepass), Nintendo (Pokemon), Disney (Marvel Snap) - surely they'll just pay up, right?

Just imagine Unity knocking on Microsoft's door, saying, hey, uh, all those Gamepass titles with millions of downloads? Yeah, you owe us now, sorry!

Apparently, there already is a class-action lawsuit in the making. In the meantime, Unity is doing absolutely nothing in response. They're silent. People who worked for Unity have quit, and more will follow.

And you know who else will quit Unity? Game developers. En masse.

Developers such as Mega Crit (Slay the Spire), Innersloth (Among Us), David Szymanski (DUSK, Iron Lung) - they're all moving away from Unity. And if your developer community leaves, there is no more engine left.

Existing projects? Will probably be finished. Afterwards? Goodbye Unity.

And that counts for me as well. I will finish Faith in Despair in Unity because it is built on several years of existing code from other projects. But I've already looked at Godot. And it's refreshingly fun to work with. And totally free forever.

If you want even more info about this whole disaster, watch this video which is probably the best summary I've seen so far.

One experiment that I keep coming back to is turning the game into 3D, which basically means rotating the camera by -15 on the X, using perspective projection instead of orthographic, and adjusting a few positions and sort orders.

Here's an example, this is before:

This is after:

I think it has something, a certain je ne sais quoi, but I'm not quite ready to commit to it yet. I could make it optional, but it requires some additional work with the order of sprites and such. I might even have to convert all cards to canvases, but that could also overdo it.

Nevertheless, it's almost normal in card games nowadays, such as Cultist Simulator, Stacklands, Inscryption, Magic The Gathering - they all have a 3D view of the board. I don't think I have any excuse not to do it.

Other than that, I fixed a bunch of bugs and focused on balancing again. The shop now offers upgraded cards to make the shop more useful. And enemies only come with lacrima/materia that make sense to have (there are player-specific lacrima like Gain 1 Life that felt weird on enemies).

I also added "Dora the Card Explorer" (I'm sorry :D), which lets you explore cards on the board, such as the stack of blessings in the upper left corner. Still has a weird issue where it's not clickable sometimes, but I'll iron that out in the future. (It's not actually Dora, that was just the name of it on my todo list. :P)

Some lacrima only activate with a certain chance, like Doomed or Capture. I've made it so now when a Capture with 5% success chance fails, it internally adds 5% for the next try. This makes it feel much fairer to the player, and it's openly communicated too. So, you know that the chances are higher the longer you try. It also counts for enemies though, so it goes both ways.

The devil is in the details, and in this case, quite literally. Since you fight demons, I made a list of 31 demons with their special abilities, these will be used as bosses and elite fights.

One example is Bael, who teaches the art of invisibility. He'll sometimes cast invisible on his allies, which flips the cards, so they can't be attacked (until end of turn).

Another example: Paimon, who "has a great voice and roars as soon as he arrives", so in this game he casts Warcry on all of his allies on the first turn of combat.

I've come up with new lacrima too, and it will be a lot of fun adding all those in. This will certainly improve the boss and elite encounters, right now it's just a bit too random. It will be good to have named enemies that you grow to detest over time.

I keep researching more and more into roguelikes. My favourite streamers are baalorlord and Retromation, they always offer a glimpse into what they really want from roguelikes and how they work. Baalorlord is currently running a challenge of mastering Slay the Spire cards, which means, every card and one duplicate of it have to be in a winning deck. It's extremely high-level play and you learn a lot about roguelikes this way.

I've also finished reading the book Masters of Doom, definitely one of the best books I've ever read. Not quite roguelike related (for that I read Spelunky by Derek Yu), but still an interesting dive into making games. I think I will read "Ask Iwata" next, but we'll see.

As for Faith in Despair, I will focus on adding the bosses and lacrima rarity next. I definitely want to try to work faster and get a playable demo out as soon as possible, but it is what it is.

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...

I haven't touched the game in three weeks, so it was important to me to slowly ease myself into working on it again with some quick wins.

I changed the font to one called Forum, and that immediately made things look more like a fantasy card game.

Next, I replaced the Turnament cursor with something that fit better to the game. I noticed that the sprite lagged behind the hardware mouse, so I looked into it and managed to reduce the lag, but not completely.

After further looking into it, I learned that... this is normal. Every application has this issue. You can learn more in this thread.

So, I changed it to a hardware cursor, and the visible lag was gone. But I'll never forget that all applications lag behind when you move your mouse, i.e. if you create an FPS game, looking around has a lag (and I'm not talking about the mouse's response time, but time for the mouse coordinates reaching the rendered frame). I don't think the old games had this issue (Quake, Half-Life), but I might be mistaken. I can't imagine Carmack just letting this happen. :D But who knows. It sounds like an inherent "problem".

Next, I updated the map fragment cards, the satchel and all the buttons. The placement of the UI buttons is still not final (I mean, we're far away from anything being final final), but I'll figure this out in the future.

Then I played the game for a little bit and adjusted some numbers to fix an issue that led to Act 2 being much more difficult than it should be. The game currently has 3 acts, which means a boss at the end of each act, and if you defeat all of them, you win. Very "Slay The Spire", and I might change it in the future, but for now this will do.

I fixed a few other issues, and while playing another run, I found a funny endless loop. Basically, a card kept triggering itself. When an ally (including itself) got a buff, then it would cast regeneration on itself, which in turn triggered the trigger again, casting regeneration again and again and again. It looked like fireworks going off.

There actually is a fix for this already in the game: A trigger can get triggered a maximum of five times per round, then it would inflict the "overcharged" debuff, at which point the card can no longer activate any of its triggers. But for some reason, this piece of code didn't have that fallback yet.

After working on the game the whole day, Auri tested it in the evening and we found a few more things. The main issue we discovered was that the game is currently too easy, so a lot of the materia/lacrima and choices don't matter after a while, because you can just play creatures, end turns repeatedly and simply wait for the auto-battle to kill everything.

If you happen to find upgrades for cards or powerful materia/lacrima, the run is way too easy. I think I found a good formula for now to fix this, but fixing it means to walk a delicate line between too easy and too hard. The plan is to have different difficulty levels (such as ascencions in Slay the Spire, or perhaps simpler ones like in Dream Quest), but first I need to figure out the "normal" or "default" difficulty, which every other difficulty is then based on.

A more balanced distribution of lacrima will be necessary as well, such as common, uncommon and rare categories of lacrima and their appearance being dependent on which act you are in. And of course, making sure they are weighted against what you already possess to enable synergies.

This will require lots of playtesting by other people, which I'm trying to get too as soon as possible. Before I can do that, I will need to add some sounds though and balance out map and enemy generation.

For now, I'm happy with where the game is headed. Auri played for 45 minutes (and won), and I kept playing afterwards. During development, I also sometimes forgot I was testing the game, which is usually a good sign.

There's still a long way to go though, but I'm excited for the journey ahead.

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...

Ten years after the last update, I've decided to rebuild this website again. The backend still looks mostly the same, but the frontend is a lot more reduced, using barely any javascript (which is a fun programming language, but the website felt too noisy). I missed having a place where I can just talk about whatever I want. Social media was an interesting experiment, but it has grown far too toxic and addicting for me.

This is the reason why "news" has now changed to "blog". I'd like to have my own corner again. Not on Patreon, where it always has this weird feeling of trying to turn the reader into a subscriber. Not on any other blog website that will die again in a few years because the company can't turn a profit with increasingly aggressive ads.

No, this time it's just a simple website where I can be whoever I want to be. And you can just... read. No comments. No likes, no reactions. No algorithm suggesting what you'd enjoy next.

You can still contact me, of course. I'm always looking forward to getting a new email or message. But this place is now tranquil.

All news entries and projects have their own pages again, just like they used to before 2013. You can even link to fan art directly. There is a news/blog search again at the bottom. And there's no wait time anymore when switching between categories/pages, because nothing is being loaded in the background while the foreground is animating through parallaxed grass.

What's going to happen next? Well, I'm currently working on Faith in Despair, and I'll still post devlog entries over at Patreon. But more personal insights and updates will be written here.

You can sign up for the newsletter, I won't send you a notification for every piece of news, but certainly for the important ones.

If you notice anything missing in this new version, or have any other feedback, just let me know.

Like in other roguelikes, the map plays a crucial part in Faith in Despair. It provides an element of exploration, and allows you to choose what you'll check out next, either a fight, elite fight, rest site, shop, study (for upgrading), or treasure chest.

This was the old map that I used up until now:

You'd go from left to right and you'd have to choose a path that contains the things you want.

It was heavily inspired by Slay the Spire's map, which looks like this:

Here you have to go from the bottom to the top, and to figure out the best route, you'd have to scroll up and down for a bit. There is a fascinating article on how these maps are generated, you can check it out here. The point is that this map is very well thought out in its random design.

I tried to remove the need to scroll and put it on a horizontal map. But in this position it was somehow illogical as to why you couldn't just go anywhere on the map.

Taking a look at other roguelike deckbuilders, some have taken a more minimalist approach. Here's the map of Wildfrost:

Basically, you go from fight to fight, and in-between those fights you can choose one of two paths. It's not like you're choosing to fight, but instead you choose whether to get new crew members or go to a shop or check out a treasure cave. There's always a fixed amount of fights you have to go through.

Monster Train was very similar, you'd also go from fight to fight and just chose two paths with different events.

In Inscryption it's a bit more varied, you can often avoid fights if you don't want any, and sometimes the path splits into more than two.

Since I wasn't happy with the map I had made, I thought of something different. I didn't want to force the player to look ahead and figure out the best path. Instead, I wanted to give them a choice, but every choice would have four different events.

Running with the theme that everything is card based, I thought I could build a map using cards.

At first you see two "Map Fragment" cards on the left side. You can choose between the two. When you do, the other card gets discarded.

Then you play through the four events on the card in any order. Once all four events are done, the next two cards on the map are revealed:

Again, you choose which card you prefer to go through. In this case there is a rest site up top, and a treasure below. If you're confident you can go for the three fights and a treasure chest, if you feel like you'll lose HP, you may want to go to the top card.

You then keep working through the map cards until the boss on the rightmost cards.

Once the boss is defeated, you reach the next "act" and you get a new map with 10 new cards.

I think this offers the player a lot of choice. The events still need to be balanced (right now they are truly random), but I believe it's much better than the old map.

Roadmap

Speaking of maps, let's have a look at the roadmap.

Since the last update, I've added a number of new lacrima / materia, such as OnFirstTurnOfCombat (trigger), BestowGlassCannon (triples attack, but halves HP), and TargetLowestHPEnemy (modifier). There are now roughly 70 lacrimae in the game, which already allows for very chaotic and interesting gameplay.

To balance this, I want to add a weighted lacrima distribution, so that when you have a Poison attack, the chances are higher to get "OnPoison" trigger, or "OnEnemyDebuff" trigger, things like that. It's kind of like the "more like this" section in a web shop. :D When that's implemented, synergies will occur more frequently.

Side note: lacrima means "tear" in latin, the story goes that you're fighting with magic tears of fallen angels. But I'll reveal more from the story at a later time.

Once I get the distribution balance done, I want to make the map a bit more curated, and add a few more blessings. After that, I'll add a couple of sounds to make the game feel a bit more alive.

And when that is done, we're one step closer to a public demo that you'll be able to check out. But it will still take a few weeks until then.

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...