This week I decided to go through long overdue bugs and small additions to the game. So, here's a list!

• I fixed overlapping status effect inflictions, previously they would cause a quite irritating looking mesh of words, now each card has their own effect list and they get programmatically moved so they're always readable.

• When sacrificing, there's now a preview of how much life/mana/gold you get.
• There's a little animation now when pressing End Turn, so you know when you can press End Turn again.
• While drawing cards for your turn, you could already activate a card and start to drag it, but that selection would get dismissed during the drawing phase - that's now fixed, and it feels a lot smoother.
• Shops have a reroll option now, which costs increasingly more gold, and generates a new set of cards to buy every time.
• Fixed an annoying bug when going from the "right" arrow in inventory to the card right next to it, it was impossible to pick it for upgrading/sacrificing.
• The "Summoned" lacrima is no longer generated for new cards (especially Shop).
• Enemy cards are now revealed starting in the center. If there are more than 3 lanes, it only reveals the 3 lanes in the center, then more in the next turn. The limit of 3 reveals only applies to the first turn, so if you defeat all 5 creatures on all 5 lanes, the next turn all 5 lanes reveal new cards (otherwise it would "feel" like a bug).

• Exhume for enemies now always picks a free lane first before piling up on lanes that have cards.
• Pressing a button moves the button text down a bit for better clicking feedback.

Several smaller things have been fixed that I'm not going to name here.

What else?

Well... I sent the game to a gamedev friend of mine (not sure if he wants to be named here!) and, combined with feedback from another play session from Auri, I now have 26 new items on my list.

It was quite interesting hearing the thoughts of someone who has never played the game before. Of course, I want to playtest a lot more in the future, but it's still a bit too early to open the floodgates. Still, this feedback was quite valuable, as it confirmed some things that I still wanted to add (like a battle log), and highlighted some other things that I thought weren't that that big of a deal (like a preview for targetting).

So yeah, my list has grown quite a bit, but nothing on there is impossible. In fact, I'm confident enough to start talking about...

The Road to Steam

I believe I can finish the new items on my list in time for March. There will be a Roguelike Deckbuilder fest on Steam, and I'd love to submit my game with a demo. It's a pretty cool deadline to have. It's far away enough so I can still get a lot of work done, but close enough to instill a sense of healthy urgency.

I've already made the first steps too:

This process is always so exciting to me. Feels like it's going to be a real game!

Would You Look At The Time

Interesting side note: I recently compared the total hours spent on my projects.

• Halfquake Sunrise: 981 hours (over 390 days)
• Catty & Batty: The Spirit Guide: 753 hours (over 288 days)
• Turnament Remastered: 761 hours (over 224 days)
• Faith in Despair: 301 hours (over 83 days)

And it looks like with Faith in Despair I'm about 1/3 through the project.

It's also apparent that I can spend more time on my projects every time I work on it, because for Faith in Despair and Turnament I have 3.6 hours on average per day, whereas for Halfquake Sunrise and Catty & Batty it was 2.5 hours per day, which is very good to know.

Halfquake Trilogy on Steam took 343 hours over 134 days, that's also 2.5 hours per day. I quite enjoy how conistent that feels. But I don't count that as its own game, since it was really just a re-release with fixes and additional content.

But back to Faith in Despair. Judging by the numbers, I think it's safe to say that overall it will take another year until launch. Still quite a long road ahead! But let's focus on taking one step after another. First, the demo needs to be done.

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...