To all Angels and Demons,
First off, I want to thank everyone who played the demo and who shared their feedback in our Discord server.
Special thanks to Dagger, who created an early-tier list of the playable characters in the Demo. It’s great to see you tried all the characters and quickly established which one felt the strongest. While Godly Terrapin was the most OP during the playtest, it seems the Bishop has taken its place for the Demo.
Introducing the Morality System : A Balance of Power and Consequences
In many roguelikes and old-school RPGs, you need to distribute points in various stats such as strength, agility or intelligence to push your character into a specific set of aptitudes. However, often those stats attributions are obvious choices. The Warrior wants high strength for damage and a high constitution to trade hits. The rogue has high agility which is used both for offense and defense. The mage doesn't care about constitution and dumps everything into intelligence to cast all the spells, all the time.
We wanted to make the choice of your stats less straightforward and go for something that fits better the theme of angels and demons. This is why we came up with the Morality system.
The Morality System is centered around 7 Sins and 7 Virtues, each of which positively and negatively affect your character's stats.
The challenge lies in finding the right balance that aligns with your preferred playstyle. If you go too far in one direction you will face serious drawbacks that you’ll need to mitigate elsewhere.
I usually like to go for the Glass Canon road, so I’m fine with lowering my defense. I’m willing to sacrifice it for a better dodge and speed. So investing in Diligence and Pride works for me. Low defense but high dodge and speed to kill enemies faster than they can kill me.
Unlocking Morality Points
Every time you level up, you receive three Morality Points, which can be invested into any of the seven Sins or Virtues.
As I mentioned earlier, I usually go for Glass Canon gameplay. Thanks to the morality system I can adapt my character’s strengths and weaknesses depending on the gear I find. Hence, you can try for your favorite playstyle instead of being locked in with a certain archetype for each character.
If you feel that your distribution of morality points is not working out as well as you need, you can refund them at the cost of one point. We’ll probably refine the refund mechanic sooner than later so it feels like a real cost and choice.
Gear-Based Morality.
Most pieces of equipment are associated with a sin or a virtue, increasing its level by a degree proportional to its rarity. This means that every strong piece of equipment comes with a significant drawback to handle, such as a drop in defense or accuracy
For example, Kindness and Gluttony both enhance your healing capabilities. It might be smart to keep a Gluttony item with you before drinking a health potion. Careful inventory management is crucial as you’ll need to decide when to free up space for new situational gear.
Moreover, the shape of inventory space varies from one creature to another, which might impede your hoarding inclinations.
We know that while the Morality System works, we need to improve our execution. Some Sins or Virtues feel much more appealing than others. While the game is playable in the Demo, it’s the perfect time to let us know what you think about it.
- Are there stats you thought were too strong or too weak?
- Were there specific tradeoffs that would have made a more interesting choice than what we have now?
- Are there Sins & Virtues you always pick? Some than you never pick?
- What feels the most rewarding or the least appealing when you get morality-based gear in your loot?
Before you leave, if you’d like to take an extra step in supporting us you can review our demo.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3138110/Lost_in_Prayer_Demo/
Steam’s algorithms love to suggest games you might like. Leaving a review helps Lost In Prayer be discovered by more players. The more players who try the demo, the better we can see what you think and the more likely we are to benefit from more visibility from Steam.
Thanks a lot for reading the article,
Matthieu