There's a new event called Sacrifice, which lets you sacrifice cards for life/mana/gold. Currently, that's the only option to remove cards from your deck, not sure if there will be more options in the future, as it's usually not that much of a problem to have more cards in this game.

Normally in other games a card is fixed, so you can have bad cards and the need to get rid of them. In Faith in Despair, you can change your cards, so it doesn't really matter.

Charm

Cards can now be charmed, which makes them attack their allies. This adds more importance for clearing debuffs in general. Another new debuff is Parasite, which doubles its growth every turn and deals damage equal to its growth value. I realized there are a lot of debuffs compared to buffs, so I also added Stoneskin.

Stoneskin replaces the spell "Increase Max Health", which originally was a permanent increase. In testing that turned out to be way too powerful though. When I made it temporary (until end of combat), it felt more like a buff, but it wasn't an official status effect, which felt confusing. With Stoneskin, it's a status effect now, it's still stackable, and it's another Final Fantasy reference.

Stoneskin was incredibly important in Final Fantasy 11 (and 14 before they removed it), it was a mandatory buff (alongside Protect and Shell) before entering big fights.

The lacrima "Increase Attack" was removed because it was also temporary and not a status effect. Warcry does the exact same and it's stackable.

Queuing actions

Playing card games (or games in general) should allow the player to play as fast as they want. Slay the Spire does this by allowing spells to be queued while another spell is still being played. Faith in Despair now also allows you to queue ending the turn, creatures and spells. As soon as the current spell chain reaction or the drawing of cards is complete, the queued actions are acted upon. It makes for a much smoother experience.

Bosses & Blessings

New bosses have been added for a total of 10 now. I think my favourite so far is Buné who starts on the board alone, but resurrects six demons once he's at half of his health.

I also added new blessings, resulting in a total of 15. One of them is Blood Pact, which lets you exhume a creature from your graveyard whenever one of your creatures is dealt damage from a friendly source.

Lots of other new lacrima have been added along with the new bosses and blessings, but since we're already talking about Exhume...

Enemy graveyard

Enemies now also have a graveyard, which persists throughout the run. This means that when you encounter a demon that has an Exhume lacrima, they can bring back enemies that you've defeated before. This actually caused some performance issues, because it kept all cards in the graveyard and they piled up pretty quickly.

I fixed those performance issues by turning off cards in the graveyards altogether. In addition to that, I now also turn off the front of all cards when they're facing down, which unlocks even more FPS.

Next Up

This week I'll add a few more blessings, and then I'll make a list of all the sounds I'm going to need. If I'm lucky, I'll even be able to add the first few sounds into the game too.

I also keep playing the game and noticing issues here and there, but overall I'm having fun, and that was the whole point of the project. I still haven't beaten it in its current state, but that means that I get to keep trying.

I'm honestly so excited to work on the game at the moment, it's absolutely clicking with me. I haven't felt this good in quite a while. Hopefully I can keep this up for the next few months because I know it's still going to be a lot of work.

But it can't hurt to be optimistic, right?

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...