One Year Without Caffeine November 28th 2023
Over the years, we drank coffee while having a “Jause”, it’s an Austrian thing for just putting a lot of things from your fridge onto your plate, like cheese, meat, pepper, tomatoes, bread, and just eating it with your hands. Or with cake and other sweets, like Blattlstock or Sachertorte. Then we started drinking it in the mornings, especially during Winter, because it was a warm start to the day.
Slowly but surely it turned into a habit. One coffee in the morning, one after lunch, and one after dinner. We switched brands to a sweeter one because we noticed stomach issues from the brand we bought at the grocery store, and we slowly put in less and less sugar. I also reduced the amount of milk I put into it, until it was just a spoonful. At this point I drank it basically black.
Then we started noticing our sleep getting worse. There was a lot of anxiety and stress from our jobs too, but something was off. And of course, we knew it was the third coffee before bed. You might say, that’s obvious, but the third one just felt really cozy for some reason (maybe because of the dopamine?).
We found a coffee replacement - a dandelion coffee, which has zero caffeine and you can prepare it just like filter coffee and drink it with milk. So, for the third cup of the day, right before bed, we switched to this one. And I believe we slept a little better, can’t say for sure.
Then, last year, I got covid. I was practically dead for almost two weeks, no appetite, and I couldn’t smell anything for a while, and everything tasted wrong. I couldn’t drink coffee for two weeks. This was basically my rehab.
Normally, you can’t just quit drinking coffee. Usually you get headaches from withdrawal, it’s a very specific kind of headache that feels stingy and particularly annoying. Which is why coffee is such a nasty addiction. The easiest way to get rid of the headache is to just drink another cup.
But now, I accidentally escaped its firm grasp. When I got better, I tried drinking a cup, and it felt like my heart burst. I was still recovering from covid, so my body felt a bit weak overall, and a lot of things like exercising or taking walks would increase my heart rate more than usual (or at least it felt like it).
So, one time, when my taste was more or less normal again, we sat in a café, I just asked if they had decaf coffee. They did! I drank it and to my surprise, it… tasted just fine.
We looked up the brand that we drank at home and discovered that they also offered a decaf option. Auri bought it, thinking we’d never get through the whole package. When it arrived, I tasted it and it was just like the one with caffeine, only without the increased heart rate and anxiety. It was honestly such an awesome feeling! I could have my coffee again, but still sleep well.
One year later, it’s kind of boring how normal it feels to not have the usual coffee anxiety. I feel like I can have moments of calm throughout the day a little bit easier. Work can still be stressful, but I do wonder how much worse it would be with caffeine.
And best of all, I don’t depend on it. I can just not drink it if I don’t feel like it. There’s no more headache looming on the horizon if I don’t get my caffeine hit. And honestly, that is quite freeing.
As with other substances and media, it makes you wonder why this is socially accepted. Everybody does it, right? That’s what people say. I know I’ve gotten looks and questions whenever I order decaf coffee in restaurants. But, it tastes the same. Why wouldn’t I drink it without caffeine?
Parenting - Faith in Despair Devlog #13 November 13th 2023

After Auri had a successful run in Faith in Despair with a deck that was the size of 40+ cards, I noticed a performance hit when shuffling the deck.
I investigated it with the profiler, and the first thing I noticed were some unnecessary FindObjectOfType calls. These are lazy calls that I added and I always pay for them later on. :D I fixed that by caching the objects that I always needed.
The next issue was calling transform.SetParent a few dozen times. In Faith in Despair, I enjoyed setting parents of cards where they would be physically. For example, cards in the deck are parented to the Deck gameObject. Cards in graveyard are parented to Graveyard, discarded cards in DiscardPile, and so on.
Turns out that setting a parent is expensive, because it goes through all children and does some adjusting and redrawing and recalculating and recaching and what not.
So, I got rid of all parenting. Thankfully, I saved all cards in a List anyway, so it wasn't that hard. It did have some weird side effects with menus though, and for some reason they disappeared after being killed.
I'm also sad that it's not correct in the hierarchy anymore, all cards are just hanging around in the same group now.
Was it worth it? Definitely. The performance spikes are gone. And I really don't like seeing performance hits on my PC, because that means it's even worse on older hardware.
End Screen
Another important part of the demo (and the game in general) is the end screen. Whenever your run ends, there will be statistics, and a highlight of the best card. Here's the screen with some missing/incorrect stats and missing card (basically a very early version).
There also needed to be a way to return to the splash screen and start a new run. A lot of that required me to refactor the code a bit, especially the statistics. I now have a RunStatistics class and a GameState class. This will be very helpful later on when I implement the Save & Continue feature, which is going to let you keep playing at a later time.
I am Loading
I added a new loading animation when you press end turn. Which one do you like best?
A (End Turn is grayed out):
B (End Turn is gone and reappears when you can press again):
Let me know in the comments (A or B)!
Backgrounds
I decided that each "act" is now called a chapter, so you go through Chapter I, Chapter II, and Chapter III, and each chapter now has a different background. So, every time you defeat a boss, the background changes.
It's subtle, but it feels like it's getting darker towards the final boss.
Target Preview
A much needed feature is the targetting preview. Now you see which lacrima targets which card. It's especially cool to see when a card targets all enemies/allies.
This should help alleviating confusion for new players.
More Changes
The descriptions for each keyword are in separate boxes now (in the gif you can see it on the right side). I added descriptions for each trigger, so you know exactly when each trigger hits. And I added new shop and money icons, because the last ones were a bit confusing.
I fixed even more bugs and - after another playtest session - I now have 11 more bugs to fix, 24 must-have features, and around 35 nice-to-haves.
The scope keeps changing, but the must-haves are quite important. It also feels like system-driven games can become black holes of coding. You can just add stuff and lose sight of where you're actually going.
Kind of reminds me of the time I worked on Personal Halfquake. But this time, I have an end in mind from the beginning and a roadmap to guide me.
🧙♂️ To be continued...
Housekeeping - Faith in Despair Devlog #12 November 06th 2023

This week I decided to go through long overdue bugs and small additions to the game. So, here's a list!
- I fixed overlapping status effect inflictions, previously they would cause a quite irritating looking mesh of words, now each card has their own effect list and they get programmatically moved so they're always readable.
- When sacrificing, there's now a preview of how much life/mana/gold you get.
- There's a little animation now when pressing End Turn, so you know when you can press End Turn again.
- While drawing cards for your turn, you could already activate a card and start to drag it, but that selection would get dismissed during the drawing phase - that's now fixed, and it feels a lot smoother.
- Shops have a reroll option now, which costs increasingly more gold, and generates a new set of cards to buy every time.
- Fixed an annoying bug when going from the "right" arrow in inventory to the card right next to it, it was impossible to pick it for upgrading/sacrificing.
- The "Summoned" lacrima is no longer generated for new cards (especially Shop).
- Enemy cards are now revealed starting in the center. If there are more than 3 lanes, it only reveals the 3 lanes in the center, then more in the next turn. The limit of 3 reveals only applies to the first turn, so if you defeat all 5 creatures on all 5 lanes, the next turn all 5 lanes reveal new cards (otherwise it would "feel" like a bug).
- Exhume for enemies now always picks a free lane first before piling up on lanes that have cards.
- Pressing a button moves the button text down a bit for better clicking feedback.
Several smaller things have been fixed that I'm not going to name here.
What else?
Well... I sent the game to a gamedev friend of mine (not sure if he wants to be named here!) and, combined with feedback from another play session from Auri, I now have 26 new items on my list.
It was quite interesting hearing the thoughts of someone who has never played the game before. Of course, I want to playtest a lot more in the future, but it's still a bit too early to open the floodgates. Still, this feedback was quite valuable, as it confirmed some things that I still wanted to add (like a battle log), and highlighted some other things that I thought weren't that that big of a deal (like a preview for targetting).
So yeah, my list has grown quite a bit, but nothing on there is impossible. In fact, I'm confident enough to start talking about...
The Road to Steam
I believe I can finish the new items on my list in time for March. There will be a Roguelike Deckbuilder fest on Steam, and I'd love to submit my game with a demo. It's a pretty cool deadline to have. It's far away enough so I can still get a lot of work done, but close enough to instill a sense of healthy urgency.
I've already made the first steps too:
This process is always so exciting to me. Feels like it's going to be a real game!
Would You Look At The Time
Interesting side note: I recently compared the total hours spent on my projects.
- Halfquake Sunrise: 981 hours (over 390 days)
- Catty & Batty: The Spirit Guide: 753 hours (over 288 days)
- Turnament Remastered: 761 hours (over 224 days)
- Faith in Despair: 301 hours (over 83 days)
And it looks like with Faith in Despair I'm about 1/3 through the project.
It's also apparent that I can spend more time on my projects every time I work on it, because for Faith in Despair and Turnament I have 3.6 hours on average per day, whereas for Halfquake Sunrise and Catty & Batty it was 2.5 hours per day, which is very good to know.
Halfquake Trilogy on Steam took 343 hours over 134 days, that's also 2.5 hours per day. I quite enjoy how conistent that feels. But I don't count that as its own game, since it was really just a re-release with fixes and additional content.
But back to Faith in Despair. Judging by the numbers, I think it's safe to say that overall it will take another year until launch. Still quite a long road ahead! But let's focus on taking one step after another. First, the demo needs to be done.
🧙♂️ To be continued...
The Sound of Music - Faith in Despair Devlog #11 October 31st 2023

Last Saturday I spent 6 hours composing the first song for Faith in Despair, which will appear right on the splash screen. I will not share a preview here, because I want you to hear it in the game. Suffice to say, it felt extremely good working on music again, especially singing (no lyrics, just vocals).
It's based on an idea I had for a very long time now, and I'm grateful that I finally got the time to make it real. It also informs the rest of the soundtrack. I've now got some basic sketches recorded on my mobile phone for the track during fights.
I also keep playing FF7, and listening to other awesome music for inspiration, and I believe it's working well! I want to repeat how good making music feels after all this time working on the game. And I can't wait to share it all.
Sound Improvements
After Auri played the game again, and after I sent KAON a video of it, I got feedback for the sound and refined it a bit. The card attack sounds were a bit too aggressive and some sounds were simply too long, like ugprading cards and opening the map. Long sounds get boring/repetitive quicker than short sounds, so it's always a good idea to keep brevity in mind.
The overall sound balancing is already fixed by using the soundmanager that I built for my previous games, especially Turnament. When a sound is already played in the same frame, it doesn't get played again, and when the same sound was played a few frames ago, it quickly fades the old one out and plays the new one, so there's no overlap or clipping happening.
Overall the feedback for sound was very good (thanks also to Void Seeker for their 2 cents).
Sound is still not done, since most status effects still lack sound, and I want to give some lacrima their own sound too, just have to be careful not to overdo it.
Improved UI
Blessings and card/lacrima rewards from treasure chests aren't just put in your inventory anymore. Instead, you get to choose from 3 blessings/cards/lacrima or you have the option to skip. This change also completely removes the ugly green popup that just disrupted the overall flow.
Having more choice is always a good thing, especially in roguelikes. The additional benefit of this is that it digs through more content of the game to give you more of what you need right now to synergize with your current deck. That means, I can also add more stuff without muddying the waters too much.
The shop also looks much cleaner now, and one item is always on sale at 50% off, so even if you're short on cash, there's a small chance you can still get something that you can use. A re-roll option is also on my todo list, to even further dig through the available stuff.
There's a new visual element whenever you gain or lose life, mana and gold. This was also previously displayed in the ugly green popup, which - again - is now gone. You can see the new values in the following screenshot on the left side.
Increased Lacrima Values
There are currently 3 acts that you go through in a run, and up until now, enemies, shops and other rewards always spawned lacrima with the same low values as in the first act. This made new lacrima pretty much pointless in some cases. Nobody needs a "ThunderStrike 1" when enemies start having 60 HP. So, I increased values per act, and things are now much more interesting, especially since enemies also spawn with higher valued lacrima now, which can deal more damage.
This also removes the need to upgrade existing lacrima. I was thinking about adding the leveling system from Final Fantasy 7, where every materia has AP for leveling. Each equipped materia gains AP after every fight, and when they reach the next level, sometimes they unlock new spells to use.
Again, I thought about adding this system to Faith in Despair, but I realized this would make it much too complicated. Simply finding better lacrima solves this problem more elegantly. You can then simply throw out the old ones over time and discard them from your satchel.
Of course, seeing "Level Up" appear for each lacrima would be nice, but probably way too much after a while. And there's already a lot of information on screen anyway.
Next Up
So, what's next? I'm afraid that's it. The game's done!
Just kidding. Of course, I want to continue adding music, now that I've found the style I want the music to be in. A few more sounds are also needed, and I'll keep tinkering with the UI a bit.
A new feature that I want to add is that you will be able to keep one lacrima or card whenever a run ends, and make it appear in the first treasure chest in the new run. This way it should be motivating to give it one more go after losing (or winning). This might be a bit overpowered, but it might also just regulate itself with higher mana costs, we'll see!
🧙♂️ To be continued...
9 Cam by Alexis Clay October 30th 2023



Alexis just released a new game called "9 Cam", and it's inspired by Halfquake, as you can probably tell! It has evil smilies, black and white textures, and even music by me.
It still needs ratings to not get blammed on Newgrounds, so please check it out and rate it.
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