2024 January 02nd 2024
Faith in Despair will be my next game, and I'm already working on it. It is available as a demo right now, and it's still in its early stages.
My list of things to do grew again in the past two weeks, but it all feels like it will improve the game, nothing feels unnecessary.
So, this is my plan for 2024: To keep focusing on one project. Faith in Despair. Nothing else. All energy will continue to flow into it.
I want this to be the most fun game that I can make. Every decision builds on the question whether it is fun, and I feel like I have seen early signs that I'm on the right path.
I can't wait to see how it all plays out. I believe 2024 will be an exciting year. Let's see how far we can go.
Demo Feedback - Faith in Despair Devlog #16 January 02nd 2024
Happy New Year 2024! š
In the last devlog entry, I released the demo for Faith in Despair. You can get the latest version here:
ā¶ https://muddasheep.itch.io/faith-in-despair
The game is now public, so you can share it with others who might be interested in a roguelike deckbuilder!
Demo Feedback
A bunch of people have joined the new discord (ā¶ https://discord.gg/nZy3KrCrzr ) and given lots of valuable feedback. Thanks to Auri, Alexis Clay, KAON, Max, Sans Rain, VoidSeeker, and Flint!
Overall I think people agreed that the game is fun, which is a good sign!
In the past two weeks, I was on vacation, but I still managed to work on 24 items from the feedback. These are not in the latest build just yet, because of some changes that I still need to wrap up.
Removing Unfun Triggers
There were triggers in the game that were too specific, such as "On Poison" or "On Muddied". These things rarely happen, and so this leads to two problems:
1) If an enemy has a trigger that never fires, it pretty much has 0 effect and can be ignored. It's just a punching bag at this point.
2) The player gets to pick a trigger from the fallen enemies. If the triggers are worthless, the player isn't faced with an interesting decision on which lacrima to choose. And the player will end up with not enough triggers that do anything.
To fix this, I have removed all of these and I will introduce new triggers that are just a bit weaker than the triggers that fire at a high rate (i.e. "On Attack").
This will result in the enemies getting more interesting in the early stages of a run, and more triggers being a more viable choice for the player's deck.
Or in other words, it'll hopefully be more fun!
Removing Gain Max Life and Gain Max Mana
If you got "Gain Max Life" or "Gain Max Mana", you could theoretically get insanely high values, to the point that you could never lose (if you have 100000 life), or there would be absolutely no limit to playing cards (which can still happen with Gain Mana).
But there still needed to be a way to increase both values in a better, more accessible way. So, I decided to add a function to resting on the map:
Whenever you rest at full life, you gain max life. When you rest at full mana, you gain max mana. This leads to interesting decisions, for example: Do I heal before a fight (because I'm full and would like to have the increased max values), or after a fight to make sure I'm healed for the next part of the map? It also makes it more interesting if there are two rest icons on a map fragment, first to heal up, second to increase max values. And so on.
I totally stole this idea from Max's game Lost for Swords, which you can play here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2638050/Lost_For_Swords/
Of course, this idea was used in other games too, I just forgot where he got the idea from. :D
Too Easy?
At this point, some people already think it's too easy, while others are still struggling to get through chapter 2. The new changes in regards to the triggers will change the game a little bit, so I think we'll have to re-evaluate the current difficulty after the change is available for everyone to play.
Suffice to say, more changes are coming that make the game a bit harder. What I'm looking for is to have a base "normal" difficulty, so I can go in both directions, easier and harder. The devs of Slay the Spire did the same, where Ascension level 10 was the base difficulty, so they climbed both ways for easier and harder difficulties, which to me makes a lot of sense.
Faith
And finally, the first of two drastic upcoming changes: Life will be changed to Faith! I believe this makes a lot of sense for two reasons:
1) The main character is called Faith
2) You lose the game if you have absolutely no faith left
In addition to that, it removes confusion as to what is a creature's health and player's health, something that's been bugging me for a while and pretty much every player has mentioned this. (I.e. "Does life mean creature's life or my own life?") Confusion begone!
Despair
The second upcoming change will finally introduce Despair and it will replace mana. I've talked about this in earlier devlogs (I think), and I also mentioned that I played the Dark Souls board game, which kind of uses Stamina in a similar way.
Basically, every time you cast a spell or play a creature, Despair increases. If Despair hits a certain threshold, something very bad will happen and Despair resets. If you keep hitting the threshold, the bad things will get worse and worse. This is also inspired by the sanity system in Eternal Darkness, so I plan to add some random effects, things like that. I believe this will be very fun to implement. This is also kind of the point where the Inscryption inspiration finally takes effect.
Another side effect: You can never be out of mana again and get softlocked. This has been a source of confusion/frustration for some players. Instead, you will have to face a decision: Is it worth the risk to play another card and hit the despair threshold?
And last but not least:
Nomen Est Omen
With the two changes above, the name of the game... is the game. Faith in Despair has come to fruition!
Faith will likely be in the next update, Despair will arrive at a later time. If you want to stay up-to-date, remember to join the Discord server:
ā¶ https://discord.gg/nZy3KrCrzr
š§āāļø To be continued...
Demo (Early Access) - Faith in Despair Devlog #15 December 21st 2023

It's Christmas soon, so here's a little present š
ā¶ Play the demo!
Download here:
https://muddasheep.itch.io/faith-in-despair
Access the site with password: earlyaccess
ā¶ New Faith in Despair Discord
Join the new Faith in Despair Discord to share feedback/bugs/suggestions:
ā¶ Changelog
In the past few weeks, the game has improved significantly! Here's a summary:
- Added new blessings
- Show percentage for lacrima that activate by chance
- Added music for chapter 1 (currently in all chapters)
- Avoid generating map fragments with 4 of the same symbols
- Always display title of lacrima rewards (thanks to Flint)
- Added preview for upgrading cards
- All sounds have a slight pitch variation for reduced audio fatigue
- Added page display for inventory
- Reworked pause and options menu
- Added convenient pre-selections when selecting cards with keyboard/controller
- New cards are now marked as NEW
- Faster combo time when chaining lots of activations
- Bosses now never appear twice in a run šø
- Added status effect icons
- Added functionality for "Save & quit" and "Abandoning run"
Hope you check out the game! Let me know what you think.
š§āāļø To be continued...
Road to Demo - Faith in Despair Devlog #14 November 29th 2023

Wow, two weeks just flew by. I got sick with fever, so there was a time period where I couldn't do much. But in total, I still managed to do quite a lot, mostly quality-of-life stuff.
Probably the biggest change was that you can now drag and drop lacrima in your inventory. Just feels so much better to be able to grab items manually like that. It already worked for the cards, so it needed to work for lacrima as well.
To be perfectly honest, this is officially a Hackā¢. The sprite is part of a UIButton, and it simply moves along with the cursor after a mouse-down event. But to map the cursor coordinates to a 3D space, I had to add an invisible 2D plane mesh, so that I can raycast the mouse cursor position down to where the sprite should appear.
But hey, it works!
I also added a new socket effect, which was inspired by the UI of God of War: Ragnarok. They added a little highlight when equipping enchantments, and I just had to steal that. I did add a particle effect as well, since the highlight alone wasn't cool enough.
Another notable change was that you can redraw the first time you draw five cards in a fight. It can happen that you have bad luck and not draw enough creatures to block all incoming damage. The redraw button costs money and the cost increases with each use, but it still allows for another option to mitigate bad luck. In Magic: The Gathering you're actually allowed to discard your first hand if you're not happy with it (mulligan). But I didn't want it to be free.
I also added new lacrima, namely Gust (Wind), Quake (Earth), Ray (Light) and Void (Dark), so now I have all elements that I wanted to add. The other ones are Incinerate (Fire), Water Cannon (... Water), and Thunder Strike (Lightning). They all have secondary effects, which makes them quite useful in certain situations.
The stats screen is also finished for now, meaning that the best card is shown alongside a handful of statistics:
(I fixed the wrapped text at "88 kills" already, don't worry :D)
This still needs better layouting, but for now it works as intended. Adding those kind of stats is always fun too, because it sort of also adds a bit of info here and there that's useful to know for me as the developer.
In total, I went through 32 items on my todo list, lots of bug fixes and, as I said earlier, QoL changes. Ā The game only gets better from here on out!
I also started working on the Save & Continue feature, which is very important. Basically, the whole game board gets "summarized" as a giant JSON file, which then can be rebuilt.
Apart from the obvious value for the player, this will also allow me to reconstruct debug situation with certain card combinations. For example, if an enemy has a specific lacrima and a status effect, and I hit it with a spell that has another specific lacrima, I can just edit the json file, load it, and very quickly debug the scene.
Where's The Demo, Sir?
It's coming! I'm happy with the UI for now (more work for later), but I still need to reskin the Turnament/CattyBatty pause/options menu. Shouldn't be too much work though.
Then maybe one or two more songs.
Then I'll upload it on itch.io, and continue building the game out in the open.
Oh by the way, I also added Yuki to the game! Just kidding. I mean, it would probably sell 100000 copies, right? :D
š§āāļø To be continued...
One Year Without Caffeine November 28th 2023
Over the years, we drank coffee while having a āJauseā, itās 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, thatās 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, canāt say for sure.
Then, last year, I got covid. I was practically dead for almost two weeks, no appetite, and I couldnāt smell anything for a while, and everything tasted wrong. I couldnāt drink coffee for two weeks. This was basically my rehab.
Normally, you canāt just quit drinking coffee. Usually you get headaches from withdrawal, itās 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 cafĆ©, I just asked if they had decaf coffee. They did! I drank it and to my surprise, itā¦ 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 weād 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, itās 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 donāt depend on it. I can just not drink it if I donāt feel like it. Thereās no more headache looming on the horizon if I donāt 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? Thatās what people say. I know Iāve gotten looks and questions whenever I order decaf coffee in restaurants. But, it tastes the same. Why wouldnāt I drink it without caffeine?