Recently, a person called NowOnTest suggested a new inventory layout on the Faith in Despair discord. It was similar to an idea I had, but had an improved layout and sort functions.



In general, the inventory has several problems to solve:

1) It can't be overwhelming to new players when they open it the first time, but it has to scale when your deck and your collection of lacrima grow.

To solve this, I decided to only show the first 6 lacrima slots, and as you collect more, additional satchel cards get displayed. I also hide the next/previous page arrows if you only have one page of cards to display.

2) There are basically two lists: Cards and lacrima. Scrolling two lists can be awkward, so the challenge was to display all lacrima on screen, while making it possible to scroll through the cards as conveniently as possible.

The solution was to increase the displayed cards to ten per page, and display all lacrima at the top in up to 5 satchel cards with their names displayed.

3) Changing cards: This is the main theme of the game, so swapping out lacrima from cards needs to be easy and feel good. By displaying the names of lacrima in the satchels, you no longer have to move your mouse over each individual lacrima, and can basically just have the inventory open to plan your deck.

4) Sorting: Cards and lacrima need to have sort functions. I decided to just add one general sort button for lacrima, which orders them by type, name, and value. For cards, I added several buttons in the lower right.

A special case is the sort option for kills. If you have a modifier lacrima that depends on total kills of a card, you need to see the information. Previously, this was just displayed below each card, which was overwhelming and unnecessary. You only need this information in rare cases. The new "Kills" sort option displays total kills on the cards, until other sort options are chosen.

5) Multiple input options: The inventory needs to work with mouse, keyboard, controller and touch. I always felt that scrollbars don't work that well (especially without a mouse) and are a bit ugly in terms of visuals. That is why you can turn pages with mousewheel, keyboard keys, shoulder buttons on controller, or just touch the arrow buttons. It's quick and you don't have to wrestle with a flimsy scrollbar.

With all these solutions in mind, the inventory currently looks like this:



Apart from inventory changes, the new version of Faith in Despair also includes an improved rarity system. Funnily, the rarity system was already implemented, but overruled by other functions that basically just chose lacrima randomly, without any rarity in mind. After fixing that, I finally got to see the rarity that I set up in a json file in action. Common lacrima like Weak and Shield appeared way more often, and rare ones like Random Buff were much shier. I believe this improves the game a lot, because it also helps with onboarding new players: They will see simple lacrima in the beginning and more complex ones as the run goes on.

Rarity has its own set of issues, though. One problem that came up was that there is currently only one "ultrarare" trigger, namely "On Attack". Which means that, when the game looks for a trigger, decides on ultrarare rarity, then it will always be "On Attack". So, there will have to be more options to choose from in a future update.

As always you can play the free demo on itch.io or Steam.

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...

A new update is live, and you can play the free demo on Steam or directly in your browser on itch.io.

This update introduces Circles of Hell, which are difficulty modifiers. Lots more will be added later (I've got 25 planned), but I wanted to release the first 5 to see how others feel about it.

I've also done the groundwork for adding the second starter deck. I don't know if I will be able to release it with the next patch, but it should be doable. Can't wait to show what I have in mind.

I want each deck to feel different to play, which is a challenge because you don't want to add complexity just for complexity's sake. This is something that I've seen with the different jobs in Final Fantasy 14. You always have to press a certain amount of buttons to do the same amount of damage-per-second as other jobs. But some jobs have to press more or less buttons to end up with basically the same output. You can't really make one job stronger than the other, or the playerbase will not want to have these jobs in their parties.

But I think the new deck will be fun. We'll see how it goes.

Oh hey, this is the first devlog entry on The Farm, since I've closed my Patreon page. At some point in the future I will carry over all previous posts too.

But for now, I'll just keep focusing on Faith in Despair.

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...

The term always feels so ominous: Quality of Life ✨

But that's what I mostly focused on in the past two weeks. I fixed a lot of controller issues, and made sure that playing on Steam Deck is as fun as playing with mouse and keyboard.

I also added 27 new sounds by KAON, which adds a bit more variety to the soundscape.

I ... actually don't have a lot to say! I'm trying to keep my head down and just focus on making the game. The deckbuilder fest on Steam starts on March 25th, so I'll keep focusing on little details, before implementing bigger changes.

You can read the full list of changes here, and play the current version on itch.io or Steam.

Oh and here's a picture of my cat Yuki:

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...

In the past two weeks I mostly tried to answer one question: Will the cards ever get artwork?

This was a regular question that came up when people saw Faith in Despair. And I had a few ideas on how to solve this.

One of the ideas was to add "claws" for creature cards and little ornaments on spell cards. The spell cards looked alright, but... they still didn't look "finished".

Another idea was to add art in the background. But what kind of art? If you look at art on Magic: The Gathering cards, it is way too detailed. If I wanted to hire an artist, they'd have to draw way below their abilities, more like concept art. Plus, how can I say which art I want if I can't say if art would have worked at all?

Then one day I stumbled upon an image on rawpixel. I was looking for new icons, and I saw this image of a crude figure with a sword. It caught my attention and I clicked on it.

It was an image drawn by a french artist named Odilon Redon. It looked kind of ... unfinished (?), but also strangely intriguing. There was something about it. I checked out more art by him, and I was absolutely stunned. It was more sketchy art like this, but also beautiful full color artworks that looked like they appeared straight out of a dream. On Wikipedia I learned that "his work is considered a precursor to Surrealism." And I could absolutely see why.

In addition to that, a lot of his art seemed to deal with the devil and religious symbolism. I quickly realized: This was perfect for Faith in Despair. But how do I feel about using art from a dead artist? Here was the perfect art for my game, and I could use it, but would he have agreed to it?

I made a deal with myself: I will use it, since it's in public domain, but I shall treat it with the utmost respect.

In a way, this felt like using art in all my previous projects, like Giger in Halfquake Amen, or all the art in the Steam release of the first Halfquake: I get to show off art that I enjoy and share it with other people.

The beauty of Odilon's art is that he had two phases in his life: the black and white phase, and when he got older he transitioned to the colorful phase, in which he mainly painted with oil paint. I just thought this was so fitting, this couldn't be a coincidence, could it? Am I just trying to convince myself, so that I can stop looking for art? Or is this simply the payoff for searching for art for half a year?

It took me two weeks to get the art into the game. The first week the colors looked off and washed out. Then my wife said, I should just increase the contrast. And that's when it finally clicked.

Gone was the boring blue and the boxy design. And cards without any text still looked "complete".

All the lacrima were remade as well using a painting of gemstones and recoloring it as needed. Instead of white there was now a yellow lacrima, and green and red remained the same.

Steam Deck

Apart from the graphics changes, I was also able to play Faith in Despair on my new (refurbished) Steam Deck, and I quickly fixed a few bugs that appeared. The Steam Deck is perfect for quick playtesting sessions in-between other work, and it feels like I play the game more now than before.

What's next?

I kind of enjoyed the past two weeks, just heading in the directions where the game took me, and I think I will just follow where it leads me for another while. I do have stuff on my todo list, but trying to listen to the game and let it speak for itself feels good right now, so I just enjoy the flow.

At the end of March there will be a Deckbuilder Fest on Steam though, so I plan to have at least one update ready before that happens.

As always, you can play the current version on Steam or on itch.io. If you do, let me know what you think.

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...

Two weeks ago, I attempted to balance the game because I knew that the enemies grew too strong too quickly starting in the second chapter (that's been a problem for a while).

There was also an issue where the map wasn't balanced, the bottom cards were slightly harder than the top cards. But even when that was fixed, things didn't go as smoothly as I hoped.

So, what did I do?

I figured the reason the game was so hard now was because of too few options to win. You absolutely depended on getting certain lacrima, like Exhume, Capture, Charm, etc. If you didn't get them, you'd have basically zero chances. So, I thought, I needed to add more ways to scale up damage.

And I also noticed that starting in chapter 2, the blessings were becoming more useless.

My conclusion: Make blessings scalable.

So, I sat down one Friday and added 12 new blessings with way too much text. They did scale, though. But it was just too much.

With those 12 new blessings came new modifiers, and new triggers, resulting in a whopping 150 total lacrima. Suffice to say, it suffocated the game and made it unplayable. That, in addition to the triggers from the last trigger revamp, were just the final straw.

I had to do what us gamedevs keep talking about: Cut content. Kill your darlings. Because less is more.

So, once again I sat down and totally gutted the game. Everything that was longer than 3-4 words had to go (with VERY few exceptions).

Slowly, but surely the game felt lighter. The combat felt tighter. Enemies had triggers that were short and precise and actually did something.

I reduced HP/ATK of enemies in chapter 2 by half, and it felt great. You could still die, but it wasn't this impossible wall to climb anymore.

Levitation was also cut. It might get reactivated later (or in higher difficulties), but in the end it's just unfair. Flying is still in the game, though. We'll see for how long.

Just Balance

So, is this release just a balance patch? Pretty much. People might say it's still unbalanced. That's okay. It's still a work in progress. But I believe it's more fun again. And that is what I'm going for.

Check out the game and let me know what you think.

Play in your browser: https://muddasheep.itch.io/faith-in-despair

Or play the demo on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2686020/Faith_in_Despair/

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...