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...

Before we get into the changes...

Faith in Despair is on Steam! 

You can play the demo on Steam as well. Add it to your wishlist, if this game is to your liking.

Metastatistics and Collection

The game now saves statistics outside of individual runs. Total runs, total wins, etc. I will add more to this over the next updates, right now it was important to add the basics.

It also saves the lacrima, blessings, curses, and bosses you've discovered. For lacrima, there's even a special "mastered" check.

Mastery of Lacrima

You can master lacrima if you have two of the same type in a winning deck. For example, to master "Magic Attack", you need to have 2 equipped in your deck while defeating the last boss.

This idea is from Monster Train, and more specifically, a challenge by Baalorlord, who mastered every card in Slay the Spire. It was such a fun challenge that I had to add it to Faith in Despair as well.

It might not be incredibly difficult, but this will also change over the course of development, so we'll see how it goes.

Other Changes

As usual, bug fixes and small quality-of-life improvements have also been part of the update. You can check out the full changelog here:

https://muddasheep.itch.io/faith-in-despair/devlog/678722/version-0110-metastatistics-collection 

The next update might take a while longer, because... I believe it's time for another starting deck!

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...

Hey! Time for another devlog entry. First, before I forget:

You can now play the game in your browser: 

https://muddasheep.itch.io/faith-in-despair 

Version 0.1.9 is here, which does a few things behind the scenes:

Seeded Runs

I believe I talked about this before: If I want to offer the option to allow entering a seed number, then every random call needs to be deterministic. And that's what I added in the past few days. Players can't actually enter seeds just yet, but behind the scenes, you roll a new seed every time you start a new run, and with that seed, the map will always look the same, and the same enemies spawn, even the drawn cards are the same (if you made the same choices up to that point).

Card rewards, treasure rewards, bosses, curses, blessings - everything is deterministic now and depends on the current seed.

Why? This will allow daily runs, where players can try to figure out how to beat a specific seeded run the fastest (or with the highest score, or something like that). This - along with the ability to enter seed numbers - will follow at a later time.

But it's *really* good that this system is now implemented. In theory, I could even offer an undo function now, but... not sure if I want to do that just yet.

New Music

Chapter II has a new music track now, this time with a focus on ambient guitar instead of my voice. As always, it feels great to work on music, and I'm looking forward to making the track for chapter III. There's not much else I can say here other than... I hope you like it. 🙂

Other Changes

• When you die, the game pauses for a second, so you can (possibly) see how you died
• The "Faith" display shakes a bit and turns red when hit
• The "Despair" display has a better highlight now when closer to full despair
• Nerved "Murder of Crows" to only cast Levitation on one target when any creature died in last turn
• Added trigger "OnDeathLastTurn"

And that's it! What's next? Meta statistics!

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...

Version 0.1.7 is here, bringing with it 15 curses and lots of new lacrimae.

Full changelog:

▶ https://muddasheep.itch.io/faith-in-despair/devlog/669665/version-017-curses-new-lacrimae 

Download latest version:

▶ https://muddasheep.itch.io/faith-in-despair 

I decided to move my release days to Tuesdays, instead of Thursday/Friday. I usually work on Faith in Despair the whole Friday, and instead of releasing a buggy new version, I can test it on the weekend, prepare it on Monday, and comfortably release on Tuesday.

Will I release a new update every Tuesday? We'll find out!

The Curse of Yield Return

Last week, I added the groundwork for the curse system, and I noticed that the game ran a bit slower, especially during attack phases with long combos.

After a bit of digging, I noticed it was because I added new cards to check for triggers. But why was that an issue?

Well, because of... yield return.

Every call of "yield return" starts the IEnumerator in the next frame. So, if you have 40 cards to check, you are essentially skipping 40 frames. In a game that runs at 60 frames per second, that's almost a second!

I did not know this! Turns out, this isn't a C# thing either, it's a Unity thing, which allows the rest of the code to carry on. So, not really a big deal, just something you gotta know.

I basically fixed this by checking certain conditions of cards before jumping into the yield return. I.e. check if a card has a specific trigger, before activating the card's lacrimae.

After fixing this, the game ran much smoother again. And we all like buttery smooth gameplay.

Steam

The Steam page is coming along well! In fact, it's already in review. I will tweak it a bit more before making it public, but it should be up soon.

There's no rush really, but, again, one of my deadlines was the roguelike deckbuilding Steam event in March, which is a great opportunity to hit.

What's Next?

I've had a great discussion with Max (Lost for Swords) about our codebases and even talked a bit about seeded runs and how to structure random calls so that they can be saved and restored. So, next up are seeded runs, which won't change much for players for now, but will allow some other features in the future, such as daily runs.

Other than that... we'll see!

As always, please share your feedback in the comments or in the Discord. Always happy to hear your thoughts.

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...