You might have heard that Unity released a new pricing plan where they charge people per install of a game. It has led to a huge outrage, with a lot of developers/studios threatening and planning to quit working with Unity forever.
You can read my blog post here for a bit more info.
Faith in Despair runs on Unity, same as Catty & Batty, Turnament, and my interactive albums for Still Leben and A Light Long Gone. It is built on 8 years experience with the engine, building up one project to solve a lot of "problems". Faith in Despair will be my last Unity game. Afterwards, I will likely work with Godot.
Working in Unity just feels a bit strange at the moment. I still hope that Unity reverts their changes, however my trust in the company is 100% gone, and their reputation, which wasn't the best to begin with, has completely tanked. Let's just say, there's a reason people pay for plus/pro subscriptions to remove the splash screen (including myself).
Nevertheless, I still got a lot done the past few days. Here we go.
Now in 3D
That's right, I spent a few hours converting the whole game to completely 3D, so the view can change to a slightly angled view, and all cards can rotate without any weird side-effects.
Every card needed to be its on canvas in WorldSpace, then every SpriteRenderer needed to be an Image, so it can be displayed in the canvas. That's cards, card slots, equipped lacrima, and status effects. All TextMeshPro Texts needed to be converted to TextMeshPro Text UI. And the backside also needed to be its own canvas.
I also needed to readjust some positioning of menus and such. But after a few hours, it was done!
Map Balance
I started balancing the generated map. All acts only have 3 upgrades, 2 shops, 2 treasure chests now. This required me to generate the map events in an array first, balance that, and generate the actual map based on the prepared array. There will be more finetuning later on, but this is a good start.
Mana System
Previously, you had 3 mana to spend every turn, which was just like Slay the Spire. I kept looking for a different solution, and thinking back to my original Final Fantasy 7 inspiration for the materia system, I wanted to try giving the player a set mana pool at the start, just like health, and then let the player manage their mana pool throughout the run.
It instantly resulted in a lot of new strategic thinking. You can either cast all cards in your hand and blow through a portion of your mana, or be more stingy and save it for elite and boss fights. It honestly works very well, and when my wife tested the new system, the run lasted for more than an hour and it was intense.
It also gives Mana sources more meaning in general, just like the health system.
Bug Fixes and Content
Apart from the major changes above, I added new lacrima, new blessings, and fixed a dozen bugs. The game feels very good to play right now, which is very promising, but I know that there's still a long road ahead. I repeat myself in saying this in every devlog entry, but I'm just quite aware of it and want to share my current view of the project.
In the last post I also said I wanted to focus on adding a boss and lacrima rarity/relations. I did make a very detailed plan for the lacrima relations, i.e. for storing data (in json), and retrieving it, so I can say, hey, Mister Shopkeeper, give me a lacrima that is related to the ones I have, so I can build a cool synergy.
And the bosses will be stored the same way (also json files). My hope is that if I can make the json files easily editable, people can just try crazy things with them. But we'll see.
A part of me wants to replay Final Fantasy 7 (the original) for additional inspiration. I did start to replay it when it came out on PS4 but didn't finish it. Maybe I should just get it on Steam and go for it, y'know? I did try to watch some streamers play the game, but it's just not the same as experiencing it myself again from start to finish.
And speaking of which, the FF7 Remake was great, but... I didn't like the combat system. Maybe it's just because of the nostalgia I have for the original, which was my first FF game ever. Nothing will ever be able to beat that.
🧙♂️ To be continued...