Becoming Saint News

Hey Heretics,

Our fifth dev blog brings to light our intentions in design and gameplay when creating Becoming Saint, and you can find a little summary of the playtests at the end of this dev blog!

[h3]Bloody history, light tone[/h3]

The idea behind Becoming Saint is to merge a strong open-ended narrative representation of 14th century Italy’s political and societal situation with a little strategy funny game of non-bloody confrontations. We want to convey strong messages with a light tone, merging that with “battle” mechanics that are somehow effortless and hard at the same time, absurd and fun.


Just like Bad North, we choose to have short combats that repeat themselves and the reason behind that is very simple: we just love that kind of gameplay! It's a mix of strategic, tactical, and automated action, and it enables both detailed guidance and a “just let them go” attitude in playing; we find it fun and relaxing, and it can be a great experience for very different profiles of gamers while fitting very different styles of gameplay.

Add to this short battles the absurdist and somehow non-violent representation of fights and the auto battler features from TABS as well as the curated narrative content and accessible gameplay-wise of Reigns and you have the recipe of what we were inspired by for our game.



[h3]Write your own story with your followers[/h3]

We want gameplay to be somehow misleadingly simple: the choices are many but always set as simple alternatives, but then the game makes it clear to the player that it is a very hard path to survive.



Everything in the game is in the form of choices, that include the narrative aspects. You decide every aspect of your creed, how to manage, earn, and distribute food, which believers turn into followers, which towns, and which power to challenge.... The world is partially generative, but randomness hardly plays any role in the game; how it will go depends on your choices and your skills in managing “battles”, which we call confrontations.



Choosing which places to try to convert relates to both your food and power needs; so if you have a lot of food and are not strong, you may decide to march to a faraway town that is not very guarded, hence consuming more food but having higher chances of converting it. A smart strategy is that conquering adjacent towns reduces your food needs in marches, so that too is a guiding principle.

[h3]A divine journey that is still ongoing[/h3]

Nothing much changed in the main loop of the game since the first iteration of Becoming Saint, but a lot changed in the design of each step. The game loop is about making choices concerning what is your political and religious program, getting or losing followers, marching toward a town to convert, and finding a way to feed all your followers.

What changed mostly during our different iteration on the game is keeping a fine line between strategy and auto battler, how much control to give the players during “battles”, or how many opportunities to give in managing the balance between food and charisma, there we made many, many changes at each iteration and we are still improving on it thanks to the feedback we received during the playtest.



[h3]A holy thank you to our playtesters![/h3]

Our first semi-public playtest is closed and you were true saints! It was fun to see all of you enjoy the game and listen to your feedback and questions. We will continue to work on improving the game's experience thanks to your help. We hope to have a new playtest in the future if you want to take part in it and discover the new additions, but we'll keep you informed!



Thank you for reading this dev blog! If you're curious about watching someone play the game during the playtests, here is the super cool video of Olexa:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Stay blessed, heretics!

- The Becoming Saint team -

Hey Heretics!

We’re super proud to announce that we will host our first playtest from January 20th until February 3rd during the Real Time Strategy Fest on Steam!


[h3]Watch our new gameplay trailer![/h3]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
We're excited to read your feedback on the game and see you experience it for the first time, the playtests are always an amazing experience after working for so much time on our game!



[h3]You can register here: https://forms.gle/VXKWrjjyNo7Y6Bs89 [/h3]

If selected, you’ll receive a Steam key 🔑 to access the build. You'll need a Steam account to be able to play the prototype.

Please note that:

• Not everyone may be selected for this playtest due to limited spots. If you are chosen, we will send out Steam keys manually, so it may take some time to receive yours. We appreciate your patience and understanding!
  
• You can not share gameplay footage/screenshot elsewhere than in our Discord.
  

You can share your feedback on our Discord (and come chat with us!). All feedback is super valuable and will help us create a game you’ll love to play!

Do not hesitate to ask us anything about the playtest or the game and we can't wait for you to try out the game for the first time!

Stay blessed, heretics!

- The Becoming Saint team -

Heretics,

Our fourth dev blog will be centered around the creation and shaping of your doctrine in the game: after all, how can you imagine becoming a saint without rules to preach to your followers?

[h3]Your decisions, your creed[/h3]

The core mechanic is making choices: the game presents you with a theme, like “what your followers can eat?”, “what to do with seized land?”, or “how do we handle money?” and you make your choices for each theme. Themes can be personal, concerning religion, society, and politics, and the ensemble of your choices determines your political stance, from Machiavellian to Pacifist to Guelph or Ghibelline. Then there are several other cases where you make decisions, like when the Pope proclaims a crusade, whether you decide to participate or not, etc... But let's dig further into the political stance in the game.


[h3]Inspirations behind the political stances[/h3]

The political stances are broad characterizations that group sets of choices, and define a spectrum of nine political stances that are not mutually exclusive. The game tells you which is your predominant perspective, but by making new choices and eventually changing the ones already taken, which is always possible, other perspectives may become the main one.

The Reigns series and, in particular, Reigns: Her Majesty is surely an inspiration. There too, you have some space to express a personality, and survival and management give you the boundaries within which you can manoeuvre. The options of political stances are also related to one of the main inspirational sources, The Name Of The Rose, by Umberto Eco, whose text is also a mosaic of medieval sources and hidden quotations. Actually, one helpful book is “The Key to the Name of the Rose” in helping get all the hidden references in that wondrous book!



[h3]Who will follow you?[/h3]

Political stances influence which kind of followers you may get, and which one you won’t. Each choice you make may change a kind of believer (fanatics, monks, lepers, peasants, musicians, barbers…) attitude towards you. There are also cases when a kind of follower needs a specific, special decision from you in order to follow you, like creating a specific order of cavaliers in your name.



Another aspect of your general politics that the game tracks is your relationship with the three main powers of the time: the Pope, the emperor and the banks. Hostility towards one may imply favour from the other, but be careful, as insisting on attacking the Pope may trigger a specific crusade against you, as historically -unfortunately- happened against so-called “heretic” movements.

Political stances - and your coherence in maintaining one - influence your charisma and the respect to your followers, changing personality and political stance may lead to whole groups of followers leaving you. Your personality and charisma also influence how much your followers may be able to convince people to give food to your beggar followers, and the availability of food for your followers is a crucial feature for surviving this punishing game!



[h3]Should I be true to myself or embrace chaos?[/h3]

The game lets you evolve and change personality at any moment, not only by making new choices but also by changing previous given ones. But the game is not centred on a “heroine’s journey” model: you are the leader of the movement as a form of temporary delegation, but this is not unconditional: if you change line too many times, your followers may turn against you… Changing personality damages your charisma, as you must rebuild credibility from a new perspective; on the other hand, it may make you credible for a new set of believers.



This gives another strategy layer outside of combats: is it worth it to loose my first followers that were less powerful than the new ones but they tend to bring more food and are less demanding? Hey don't ask us, you're the one who wants to become a Saint, so the choice is yours!

Thank you for reading this dev blog! Next month there will be no dev blog with the winter holidays but in January, we will be back with new content to share with you! And just before you go, here is a presentation of the wonderful people working on the game!


Stay blessed, heretics!

- The Becoming Saint team -

Heretics,

Our third dev blog will preach the importance of the setting of the game and how it shapes your journey in sanctity as well as the way to achieve it through conquest.

[h3]Medieval Italy as a place of changes and evolution[/h3]

14th century Italy was an interesting place: commerce and investments were flourishing in Italy. It was the time of the birth of international banks Italy-based, but with European (and beyond) wide markets, when, at the same time, there was an emergence of pauperistic movements. These movements conflated social justice and religious issues, the latter part and its contrasts are masterly presented in The Name Of The Rose book.
We wanted to have a setting that triggered reflection on social issues that are actually relevant for everyone today within a historical context.


[h3]Your surroundings during battles[/h3]

At each starting game, patterns are generated for each town; platforms, fountains, and monuments are placed in the town grids accordingly to these patterns. Thanks to this mechanic, each campaign generates a different set of town grids.

• Platforms give the occupying unit an advantage in both defence and attack;
  
• Fountains block a cell so that nobody can cross it;
  
• Monuments both block the cell where they are set and also can block projectiles.
  

So, placing and moving units on platforms and behind fountains or monuments can be a great way to improve your chances of converting a town to your faith.



[h3]Giving birth to an environment[/h3]

The artistic style is directly inspired by the preference for simplicity and lyricism found in the paintings of Giotto and his school and by the austere and minimalist style characteristic of medieval miniatures. Consequently, the emphasis is on symbolic and expressionistic value rather than on realistic and verisimilar representation.

Source: Sailko, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons & Codex Manesse, UB Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. germ. 848, fol. 14v, Markgraf Heinrich von Meißen

For the scenarios and architectural elements, let's consider for example the "2D" representations that we find in ancient manuscripts and in Giotto's paintings where architecture is predominant.

Source: Cacciata dei diavoli da Arezzo, https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cacciata_dei_diavoli_da_Arezzo (2024, October 4), Wikipedia

We chose cities and regions that had somehow evolved at the time as independent entities, which is, of course, a new historical feature that emerged at the time. So the map of Italy is “distorted” if compared to modern projections because most “free towns” were around central Italy, so that part of Italy is wider, and as the south of Italy at the time had very few independent towns, it is shrunk. Also, in several maps of the time, the upper part of the map is not north but East, and that fit the user interface orientation of the game, so we adopted it

Source: Sailko, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

To you, which Italian towns are the most iconic and should have their own battle map and buildings? Feel free to comment your suggestions on Steam or share it on our Discord!

The next dev blog will dive deeper into the gameplay mechanics and is planned for next month!

Stay blessed, heretics!

- The Becoming Saint team -

Heretics,

Our second dev blog is centered on the humorous aspects of the game and how units are part of the narrative as representation of society but also part of the gameplay with their unique synergies.

[h3]Humour in tragedy[/h3]

The player’s situation in Becoming Saint is overall tragic, given how easily you die one of the possible horrible death: hanged, burned, beheaded, or thrown off a cliff. This harsh reality actually creates an ideal context for humorous details and content, very much like the Black Knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
While Becoming Saint has the appearance of a game of conquest, your “army” is composed of the poorest and persecuted elements of society, in line with the principle of the last shall be first, and the first last. In the unit’s design and animation, even the most pompous types, like cavaliers, have been given a cardboard-like representation of their might.



And even more absurdly, your true career, of becoming a saint, starts with your death.
With these contrasts, we hope to have achieved a form of ludo-comedic consonance between tragic destiny and the paradoxical human condition.

[h3]Medieval setting, contemporary issues[/h3]

Becoming Saint is not a satire of medieval Italy; we don’t intend to tease medieval society and beliefs; the absurdity of the life and events that you lead in the game is perfectly contemporary; it concerns just as much our way of living as it does theirs; it's more at an existential level. There is quite as much paradox in contemporary life as there is in medieval times.



The main goal of the game is to live a life so impressive that you will climb the career ladder to become a saint in the shortest time possible -after, sadly, your passing-, but mainly for the kind of game it is, you should focus on survival, and you can't survive without your devoted Followers.

[h3]Tell me who you go with...[/h3]

There are 16 units that may follow you and 14 units that you may find protecting towns, each of which may have 3 to 4 different levels. Some can be female or male. Each unit attacks one of three possible features of other units (energy, faith, or courage), they can have a special form of persuasive attack against other units and may convert in synergy with different units. For example, naked fanatics and naked-foot beggars clearly should have some synergy in their conversion efforts, as you probably guessed!



What inspired us in creating these Units was our study of the lives of St. Francis and St. Chiara, which mix fanaticism with humbleness, and they consistently focus their efforts and message on the most destitute elements of society. As for the cities, Italy in the 14th century had towns exploding in a rampant and expanding new form of capitalistic and even financial production, and this too is represented by the units in the game.

[h3]...and I'll tell you who you are[/h3]

Without spoiling too much, let’s say that the units that follow you are compatible with certain political choices that you make. So for example, your relationship with property and money will determine if naked feet fanatics will follow you or not. Deciding whether to convert towns controlled by the Pope’s bishops may determine whether you are the objective of the next crusade or an ally of it.
In gameplay, your political choices influence even how effective your cursing and blessing are in the heat of the confrontation in town.



Stay tuned believers, we will soon come to you with news and holy content!

- The Becoming Saint Team -