Becoming Saint News

Hey Heretics,

Our new dev blog this time will shed some light on the threats we face during this journey! From food management, rebellious followers to other powers in place, fights are made on and off the battlefield.

[h3]Food or foe?[/h3]
There are several threats to your progression in Becoming Saint:

• Losing followers who run away or get converted during confrontations
  
• Not having enough food to feed your followers
  

The more your conquest progresses, the more the game may set you in a dilemma, between choices that keep your policy “pure” and constant (and hence those who follow you will keep doing so) and the need for compromise to facilitate getting resources like food or charisma.

Art made by Vic Macioci for Becoming Saint

Charisma and food are the main resources and needs of your movement. Your actions change them continuously, and they are also resources that you may use to obtain new items, units, and convert one resource into another. You will need to always keep charisma above zero, as that is the basic element that keeps your movement together. Not having food for your units, or pursuing a contradictory policy, will harm your charisma, and hence lead to an early end of your movement and, by extension, of your… life.

However, you are not the only one who has great designs. Other forces already have a claim on Italy, and they will not let go of it easily. The forces that oppose you are of three kinds:

• The Pope
  
• The Emperor
  
• The merchants and banks
  

Each of these may be supported by different segments of the population, and for each town, different and partially generative collectives.
For example, the Pope has bintegralist bachelors, perplex peasants and priests as default available units, plus say special ones like penitent puritan women, or blind superstitious men. The Emperor has cavaliers and town guards, the Merchants have mercenaries and wool workers.

The Pope and the Emperor were the main political powers in 14th-century Italy, together with the emerging power of the communes. These three powers were in constant conflict with each other, sometimes an openly armed one. And they all used different religious orientations to affirm their political aims. Does this mean they will oppose you completely in your movement? Not necessarily.

Depending on who you decide to conquer, your set of rules, and also your reactions in the case of “special events” (like the death of the Pope), you will be seen as friend or enemy, and in all cases, things may change any time depending which towns you are converting. In Becoming Saint, you are creating a new political force, so in the long run, the existing main powers, Church, Empire and Merchant/banks see you as an enemy that must be destroyed, but that does not mean you can't make the most of your brief alliances with some of them.



Your followers may see you as a leader (even as in a cult), or as a (temporary) representative of the ideas that you bring forward. All this depends on the choices you make when building your set of rules (regula), that you may also alter in time. Depending on how much your policy changes, your followers may even end up seeing you as a traitor of the movement, and that will not end well for you…
I tried to avoid setting yourself as necessarily a heroine; you may adopt a policy that is somehow more participative.

Attacks in Becoming Saint are symmetrically aimed at converting and discouraging enemies (nobody gets killed in confrontations), so they are aimed at reducing belief and determination, acting on the three dimensions of energy, faith, and courage. To reduce these, some units curse, some throw books, some sing off-key songs, some juggle to distract, some give “gentle” slaps, and so on, and the player can also directly throw items like money on the battlefield to distract enemy units.



[h3]New playtest starts on Friday[/h3]
Our brand new playtest will start on this Friday, May 2nd, and will grant access to 500 players maximum to have a taste of all the new additions we implemented, thanks to your previous feedback.

To request access to this playtest, click on the button of the game's store page on Steam.


This playtest will only last a week and you can share any feedback either on the gameplay, visuals and new additions on Discord or in the Steam discussions. Thank you for your support and help in making Becoming Saint the best experience possible!

Here is the list of the new features you can expect in this new playtest:

• Cardinals and new victory conditions.
  
• Complete victory conditions are now clearer, as you have to control most of the cardinals to become Popesse in your lifetime and hence a saint while alive
  
• The fact that the cardinal seat locations are mostly generative creates a greater variety of paths in the map, as you “chase” the towns with seats
  
• Units are controlled by hand by default, plus a global switch at start, and the choice is persisted.
  
• New character and feature: the illusionist, which enables new unit types.
  
• There is a slimmed-down and interactive tutorial that introduces some actions in confrontations.
  
• New handling of pauses in confrontation and sync of infos.
  

Thanks @Turtler on Discord for somehow giving us the source of the idea



Want to learn more about the context and design ideas for Becoming Saint? Check out our post on historically inspired games here.

Stay blessed, heretics!

- The Becoming Saint team -

Hello Heretics!

Our second playtest is now fully open until March 31st! The first playtest we had was an amazing experience and your feedback helped us so much improve the game that we decided to host another one, public this time!

To participate, go to the Steam Store Page of the game and click on this button:



From the previous closed playtest's feedback we added:

• Random events triggering during the march and where your choices will influence your charisma and how your followers perceive you as a good leader (or not!)
  
• Improvement of the tutorial and better gameplay explanation through tooltips
  
• More town customized for a complete immersion into medieval Italy
  
• Improvements of units controls that are now more reactive during combat phase
  
• A new icon to let you know how many cities you have converted (next to the food and charisma ressources)
  
• ...And more for you to discover in-game!
  

You can share your feedback in the feedback form and it's also important to complete it as if you want your name to appear in the contributors section of the game, it can only be gathered through this feedback report.

For specific bugs/suggestions, you can share them on our Discord in the #feedback-march-playtest channel (and come chat with us!). All feedback is welcome and will help us shape the game to be the best experience possible!

The playtest is also available on Steamdeck, you can use on Discord the Steamdeck tag to report anything related to the Steamdeck version.

Do not hesitate to ask us anything about the playtest or the game and we can't wait for you to begin your journey towards sanctity!

Stay blessed, heretics!

- The Becoming Saint team -

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 -