Last Saturday I spent 6 hours composing the first song for Faith in Despair, which will appear right on the splash screen. I will not share a preview here, because I want you to hear it in the game. Suffice to say, it felt extremely good working on music again, especially singing (no lyrics, just vocals).

It's based on an idea I had for a very long time now, and I'm grateful that I finally got the time to make it real. It also informs the rest of the soundtrack. I've now got some basic sketches recorded on my mobile phone for the track during fights.

I also keep playing FF7, and listening to other awesome music for inspiration, and I believe it's working well! I want to repeat how good making music feels after all this time working on the game. And I can't wait to share it all.

Sound Improvements

After Auri played the game again, and after I sent KAON a video of it, I got feedback for the sound and refined it a bit. The card attack sounds were a bit too aggressive and some sounds were simply too long, like ugprading cards and opening the map. Long sounds get boring/repetitive quicker than short sounds, so it's always a good idea to keep brevity in mind.

The overall sound balancing is already fixed by using the soundmanager that I built for my previous games, especially Turnament. When a sound is already played in the same frame, it doesn't get played again, and when the same sound was played a few frames ago, it quickly fades the old one out and plays the new one, so there's no overlap or clipping happening.

Overall the feedback for sound was very good (thanks also to Void Seeker for their 2 cents).

Sound is still not done, since most status effects still lack sound, and I want to give some lacrima their own sound too, just have to be careful not to overdo it.

Improved UI

Blessings and card/lacrima rewards from treasure chests aren't just put in your inventory anymore. Instead, you get to choose from 3 blessings/cards/lacrima or you have the option to skip. This change also completely removes the ugly green popup that just disrupted the overall flow.

Having more choice is always a good thing, especially in roguelikes. The additional benefit of this is that it digs through more content of the game to give you more of what you need right now to synergize with your current deck. That means, I can also add more stuff without muddying the waters too much.

The shop also looks much cleaner now, and one item is always on sale at 50% off, so even if you're short on cash, there's a small chance you can still get something that you can use. A re-roll option is also on my todo list, to even further dig through the available stuff.

There's a new visual element whenever you gain or lose life, mana and gold. This was also previously displayed in the ugly green popup, which - again - is now gone. You can see the new values in the following screenshot on the left side.

Increased Lacrima Values

There are currently 3 acts that you go through in a run, and up until now, enemies, shops and other rewards always spawned lacrima with the same low values as in the first act. This made new lacrima pretty much pointless in some cases. Nobody needs a "ThunderStrike 1" when enemies start having 60 HP. So, I increased values per act, and things are now much more interesting, especially since enemies also spawn with higher valued lacrima now, which can deal more damage.

This also removes the need to upgrade existing lacrima. I was thinking about adding the leveling system from Final Fantasy 7, where every materia has AP for leveling. Each equipped materia gains AP after every fight, and when they reach the next level, sometimes they unlock new spells to use.

Again, I thought about adding this system to Faith in Despair, but I realized this would make it much too complicated. Simply finding better lacrima solves this problem more elegantly. You can then simply throw out the old ones over time and discard them from your satchel.

Of course, seeing "Level Up" appear for each lacrima would be nice, but probably way too much after a while. And there's already a lot of information on screen anyway.

Next Up

So, what's next? I'm afraid that's it. The game's done!

Just kidding. Of course, I want to continue adding music, now that I've found the style I want the music to be in.  A few more sounds are also needed, and I'll keep tinkering with the UI a bit.

A new feature that I want to add is that you will be able to keep one lacrima or card whenever a run ends, and make it appear in the first treasure chest in the new run. This way it should be motivating to give it one more go after losing (or winning). This might be a bit overpowered, but it might also just regulate itself with higher mana costs, we'll see!

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...