The new build is live! You can read the full changelog here:

https://muddasheep.itch.io/faith-in-despair/devlog/664651/version-016-added-faith-and-despair

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

What happened?

Short version: I added Faith (instead of Life), and Despair (instead of Mana). I also added Curses!

Curses will allow me to do some fun stuff, and I've been wanting to add them for a while. Only now I had the idea to combine them with the Despair system.

Since playing cards increases Despair, reaching full Despair will trigger the new curse, but in the future, it will also add curses that will alter gameplay.

Still need to play more, but so far it feels good. The mana restrictions are gone now, so you can no longer get softlocked for reaching 0 mana!

Cursed Bug

Funny thing about adding the new curse: It kept replicating! Whenever I played a card, the a new curse of the same kind was added , and it was... definitely cursed. Took me half an hour to figure out what was happening, it even slowed down the game!

Turns out, when checking all blessings and all curses for triggers, I was adding the curses to the reference of the list of blessings. Every time. References, people! Truly a blessing and a curse.

What's Next?

I've updated my roadmap, and I'll show it to you (this is subject to change):

• 20 curses
• Seeded runs: This is important so that you can (theoretically) enter a specific string of numbers and if you play the same cards you will get the same results (same generated map, etc.)
• Meta statistics: This will also tie into achievements later on
• A 2nd starter deck
• 20 run modifiers / difficulty settings
• Daily runs: Based on seeded runs, I want to add daily runs with random difficulty modifiers that you can try only once and then compare results (preferable in an online leaderboard)
• More music and sounds: I've been itching to make more music and actually started the next two already. Only a matter of time!

This is a broad overview, of course I also want to add new lacrima and keep adjusting the existing game based on feedback.

I also slowly want to publish the Steam page to start collecting wishlists. A release is still far away, but an early demo will help attracting new players, which will hopefully result in more feedback, and in return further improve the game.

As always, let me know what you think!

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...