I've been looking for artists for a while and finally Faith in Despair has art now. First artist is Vergvoktre, who was already featured in the Halfquake Trilogy. Second is Marvin Blattert, who has provided art for blessings.

The cello track is also in the game now, and it plays in chapter 3. I worked together with Lou Dunand-Vincent again, who has worked with me previously.

And lastly, there's a new deck called Bloodsucker. I wanted a deck that focuses on "stealing HP" while having low HP. It needed special lacrima for an additional way to save Despair, and I think it works well. Lots of playtesting is still needed, but I think it's fun.

More decks are planned, of course, including a Mirage deck, which I'm very excited about.

It's always cool to see when a small change can lead to a different game feel.

This update represents kind of a milestone for me. It's still not feature or content complete, but I now see a game before me, which is always a special moment. Seeing chapter 3 with the new background and the new cello music feels like something the game has been leading me towards all this time. And I'm excited to see where it wants to go next.

I have one more big feature planned that I won't talk about just yet. It doesn't mean "big" in the sense of adding a completely new game mode, but "big" as in... it will add to the atmosphere of the game, and I think it will be focus of the next update. But we'll see.

Gamescom is coming closer, and I want to make sure the demo is as polished as possible, so I might not want to add anything "experimental" in the next few weeks.

Unless...?

The heat is also getting worse, so I have to carfully pick my battles. High temperatures are my Achilles heel.

Either way, dear reader, play the game and let me know what you think.

I've recently presented Faith in Despair to a feedback round for Content Vienna. The feedback I got was plentiful and helpful. I've already started implementing it with today's update.

The map is a big deal and it needs to be visually different from other views, previously it looked too much like the fight view and inventory. That was a problem, especially for screenshots.

More updates like this need to be made, but the biggest is yet to come.

I've been in talks with artists and I can say that there will be art on the cards, probably in the next update.

I'll also hopefully be able to finish the song for chapter three.

That's it for today. Go play Faith in Despair.

Faith in Despair has a new starter deck now and as you might have guessed from the title, it's called "Gravedigger".

It focuses on exhuming creatures from your graveyard, and creatures also don't automatically revive after fights.

Lots more starter decks are planned, and each one will have a unique rule.

I've been streaming game development on twitch recently and will continue to do so for a while. It helps me focus, even with chat being active. It makes certain tasks more fun as well.

Other than that, I've contacted artists for card art, which I think will help the game a lot.

August is coming up as well, and I'll be at Gamescom in Cologne to show off Faith in Despair. If you're there as well, let me know, maybe we can meet up.

Exciting times ahead!

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...

The new version of Faith in Despair now allows you to look into the past via the battle log.



The battle log was made possible by the "save & resume" feature, because it made it possible to save the state of a card as an in-memory class, so I could easily read it and render it again when hovering over any line in the battle log.

The battle log was suggested to me by multiple people pretty much from the beginning. It is needed to answer certain questions, such as why creatures died, why the player got damaged, or why a run ended. All of these should be possible to figure out now.

It also lets me see how the game operates. I already had a bunch of debug outputs, but the battle log makes things much clearer. So this will probably help with finding and fixing bugs as well.

I've also started working on a new music track, and I might just collaborate with a musician again for this one.

What's next? Something that I've wanted to do for a very long time: Adding a second deck.

You can play the current demo on Steam or in your browser on itch.io.

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...

Recently, a person called NowOnTest suggested a new inventory layout on the Faith in Despair discord. It was similar to an idea I had, but had an improved layout and sort functions.



In general, the inventory has several problems to solve:

1) It can't be overwhelming to new players when they open it the first time, but it has to scale when your deck and your collection of lacrima grow.

To solve this, I decided to only show the first 6 lacrima slots, and as you collect more, additional satchel cards get displayed. I also hide the next/previous page arrows if you only have one page of cards to display.

2) There are basically two lists: Cards and lacrima. Scrolling two lists can be awkward, so the challenge was to display all lacrima on screen, while making it possible to scroll through the cards as conveniently as possible.

The solution was to increase the displayed cards to ten per page, and display all lacrima at the top in up to 5 satchel cards with their names displayed.

3) Changing cards: This is the main theme of the game, so swapping out lacrima from cards needs to be easy and feel good. By displaying the names of lacrima in the satchels, you no longer have to move your mouse over each individual lacrima, and can basically just have the inventory open to plan your deck.

4) Sorting: Cards and lacrima need to have sort functions. I decided to just add one general sort button for lacrima, which orders them by type, name, and value. For cards, I added several buttons in the lower right.

A special case is the sort option for kills. If you have a modifier lacrima that depends on total kills of a card, you need to see the information. Previously, this was just displayed below each card, which was overwhelming and unnecessary. You only need this information in rare cases. The new "Kills" sort option displays total kills on the cards, until other sort options are chosen.

5) Multiple input options: The inventory needs to work with mouse, keyboard, controller and touch. I always felt that scrollbars don't work that well (especially without a mouse) and are a bit ugly in terms of visuals. That is why you can turn pages with mousewheel, keyboard keys, shoulder buttons on controller, or just touch the arrow buttons. It's quick and you don't have to wrestle with a flimsy scrollbar.

With all these solutions in mind, the inventory currently looks like this:



Apart from inventory changes, the new version of Faith in Despair also includes an improved rarity system. Funnily, the rarity system was already implemented, but overruled by other functions that basically just chose lacrima randomly, without any rarity in mind. After fixing that, I finally got to see the rarity that I set up in a json file in action. Common lacrima like Weak and Shield appeared way more often, and rare ones like Random Buff were much shier. I believe this improves the game a lot, because it also helps with onboarding new players: They will see simple lacrima in the beginning and more complex ones as the run goes on.

Rarity has its own set of issues, though. One problem that came up was that there is currently only one "ultrarare" trigger, namely "On Attack". Which means that, when the game looks for a trigger, decides on ultrarare rarity, then it will always be "On Attack". So, there will have to be more options to choose from in a future update.

As always you can play the free demo on itch.io or Steam.

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...