We are a week into testing our new update, and we've been overwhelmed by all the positive responses! There is still plenty to fix, but you can expect the Tenets & Traditions update to arrive soon! Until then, let us dive into some of the other changes we made. There are too many to list them, so we'll go over the ones we think deserve some attention!
Crowds
Always thought it was weird when people were cheering when playing Madness? So did we! From next update on, the crowd will react to your style and commandment. Strike fear into their hearts, make them drop down in awe, or DESTROY your opponents with FACTS and LOGIC to make them all nod in agreement.
Stat Ranking
Stat Ranking is a new mechanic that looks small at first, but will give you a much smoother core game experience. The stat of a Disciple now has two parts: Value and Rank. The Value we all know; it's the number on which everything scales. e.g. More Health means more armor and more damage from your Guardian abilities! The Rank of a stat is represented by a letter, going from 'F' all the way up to 'S'. When the value of a stat reaches a certain threshold, your Rank in that stat goes up. A higher rank gives instant big bonuses depending on the stat. For example, raise your "devotion" from 19 to 20, and you'll go up to Rank D. This will give an instant +10 Morale Armor!
When selecting Rituals to boost your stats, keep an eye for the arrow that indicates a Rank Up!
This seemingly small change breaks up the stat part of the game into nice chunks. Previously it could be hard to see the difference between your Disciples before and after a training. With a Rank Up, you'll know for sure that your Disciple has become a lot stronger!
Relic Choice
A neat new feature that hasn't made it to the beta yet, is Relic Choice. Instead of getting a random relic, you can select the Relic as a symbol of your succesful mission! The relics will be a bit common at first. In the future, they'll be more dependent on the islands you convert. This might sound familiar for Renowned Explorer fans out there!
Content: Hermit Pilgrimage
One of the 20+ Traditions you can adopt is the Hermit Pilgrimage. To unlock it, you'll need a chaste and enlightening Tenet. Maybe something like meditation? This tradition lets you send out a Disciple to find themself on a trip to Bali. This action will cost you offerings, and the disciple will be unavailable for a while!
Off to find wisdom!
When the Disciple return, they will be wiser and more experienced. The Pilgrimage will grant them +8 XP and 2 Ability points. This is a great and flexible way to bring boost your Disciples - if you have the offerings to spare.
Elo returns with wisdom (and a beard)!
More to come!
This is just a showcase of a few of our favorite changes! Expect Tenets & Traditions to drop in your downloads soon! if you want to discuss more Godhood, leave your comments in the forums, or join us on our Discord! We hope you're excited for this new update!
- Greetings from the Abbey
Update #6 Sneak-Peek: Temples & Rituals
Hello young gods!
Here we are with some new info on our upcoming update! This time, let's look at Miracles and Rituals! First, the old places like the Farm and Meditation Circle have been replaced by real temples.
For example, the Farm has been replaced by the Temple of Harvest. Around the temple, other buildings will pop up. The harvest temple encourages more farms to be build. The harvest is blessed anyway!
It's still a place to improve your Disciples to become stronger. However, it's effects are a little bit different...
Rituals
One of the things we often see coming back in feedback, is that the Disciples don't do much on their own. Well, not anymore! Disciples will now perform rituals every day to improve themselves and their understanding of your will.
Once these Rituals have been completed a certain amount of time, the Disciple will develop and become stronger! The miracles you give to your disciples will increase the effectiveness of these Rituals. Every Ritual will influence another field, and you can customize your Rituals to fit your strategy better. In a madness religion who is out to end humanity you'll call to Stalk the sick, scream in panic, or dabble in the occult.
This has major implications for the gameplay. All your disciples will develop, even those who you give less attention. Increase in power is also going to be a lot more tangeable, especially in combination with our new stat rank system. It also makes for a smoother and deeper play experience.
Open Beta
We can't believe (ha ha) how far Godhood has come! We're getting really close to our goal; a deep, indirect, game about creating a religion. But we're not there yet! We will need your help just a little bit more to get Godhood to its acension! You can help by taking part of the open beta and provide us with feedback! We're looking for feedback on the new systems, and how you perceive them. Are they understandable? Do you miss or like something about the new Tenets? Are there game breaking bugs?
To play the open beta, you can switch to via the 'Betas' tab in Godhood's properties. It's not exactly stable yet, and you will encounter bugs, but we think you'll find it has improved considerably from the last version in terms of gameplay and theme. If you don't like change, don't try it out! As a bonus we've made steam branches for all previous milestone versions as well, in case anyone wants to revisit the Early Access history of Godhood.
Relax and tell us all about your experience!
Let us know your opinions of the new build! We might be able to improve some more things based on your feedback. We're looking forward to it!
- Greetings from the Abbey
Update #6 Sneak-peek: Tenet Development!
Salute, young gods,
In this Sneak-peak we want to show off one of our most exciting new features: Tenet Development! We had our fair share of feedback on how there is not enough Religion-making in Godhood. We agree. To support this demanding fantasy, we made some big changes to how your religion develops in Godhood.
Tenets
Instead of having a tree that narrows down your path, you will now be able to create your religion much more to your liking. Whenever your community has developed far enough, you will be able to pick a Tenet.
A tenet can be about one of the three categories:
Adoration: How should they adore you? This gives faith to your Disciples
Social: What is acceptable social behavior? These rules will make your people happy
Philosophy: What attitude towards life is righteous? This will make your city more productive (ironically)
Besides their category effect, the Tenets all have their own unique consequences for the culture of your Religion. Picking "Religious Poetry" can trigger a burst of linguistical development, boosting the fame and fortune of your next mission. But it can also boost the Charisma of one of your more poetic Disciples!
These consequences have a nice boosting (or punishing!) effect on your run. The happier your people are, the more likely you will experience the positive consequences of your religion. But let your happiness fall low by overtaxing your followers, and you might experience the downsides of your beliefs, even if that belief is just the beauty of poetry...
You can expect to play with over 40 unique tenets in the coming update, with 100+ consequences that roll out of them! yes, we went a bit overboard. What can I say, they were fun to make!
Traditions
There is one other big effect of picking a Tenet: A tenet might inspire a Disciple to come with new Tradition!
If you like their idea, and you have developed your religion far enough. You'll be able to adopt that tradition. These traditions are rare, and you'll only pick a few of them per run of Godhood. They are of big importance, however! Every tenet gives you a new way to interact with the Disciples and the followers. For example, after picking a violent tenet, you might want pick up the Tradition of Human Sacrifice!
This will allow you to perform Human Sacrifices, which will greatly boost the tributes you'll gain from Sacraments - provided you have Ancestral and Divine Disciples! Human Sacrifice makes your religion more about the glory of death for the divine. Surely the Smiteswords, Zealots and Rage Prophets would agree! Look forward to mix and match more than 20 unique Traditions! Which combinations will help you achieve glorious Godhood?
Thanks for Reading!
As you can see, we're very excited about our next major update! If you like what you see or have ideas, let us know! The age of Early Access is slowly coming to its end, and we're making ourselves ready for ascension! If you want to see more and smaller sneak peeks or have a chat with us, please join our Discord!
Hope to see you soon! - Greetings from the Abbey
Moving towards Ascension: Update #6 Sneak-Peek
Dear religious leaders, I bring you more good news: Godhood is moving full speed towards its ascension out of Early Access! As promised in our roadmap, we still had a few things we wanted to see improved. Today I bring you a little peek into our 3 major features for the upcoming update, aimed in improving those points. let's pray for skill and diligence to make it work!
The 3 major features are:
Tenet Rework: Much more mixing and matching of more thematic religious dogmas.
Consequences: the people of your religion will react to your tenets!
Inspirations & Repeating Rituals: Disciples will have their own ideas of what to do in the Holy City. Guide their choices!
They will be accompanied by more changes, small and big.
These will, again, bring massive changes in the way you play the game. Our goal is to make the game more replayable, more religious, more tactical, more strategical, and bring you more surprises.
Let's dive into one!
Consequences
From now on, your actions will matter more for your followers. Keep them happy, and they will do things that are in harmony with your religious choices. Disappoint them, and they might lose faith or sin...
For example, what happens if you run a secret society, and someone is having loose lips? Well...
We already have dozens of these small consequences, and are planning on making a lot more! Some bring a minor boost or penalty to your religion, but other consequences might make a deep impact on your little religious society. Who knows what crazy ideas the Disciples might have...?
Thanks For Reading!
Like what you see? Have some (crazy) ideas on what consequences could be in the game? Let us know! You can also join our Discord, where we sometimes spoil a few secrets. Hopefully those angry villagers won't come after us...
- Greetings from the Abbey, Adriaan & the Monks
Update #5.1: Righteous Hotfix
Thanks to you playing Godhood and reporting problems, we fixed a few problems! (version 17.5)
(version 17.2 --> 17.3) - Fixed save game compatibility crash for saves from version 16. (version 17.3 --> 17.5) - Fixed the defender's passives of the Guardian, Smitesword and Ascetic. - Fixed some tooltips that weren't correct anymore. - Fixed crash after Sacraments where the Guardian performed his Great Guardian passive (follower conversion through intercept) - Fixed save game compatibility crashes for saves from version 16. - Fixed issue where a disciple would leave your religion twice at the same time, once for being angry, and once for being dead. - Fixed crash when closing the Sacrament tutorial after starting Sacrament preparation from the world map.
Happy Godhooding! - Greetings from the Monks
Update #5: Righteous Rituals is here!
Hey young gods! Hopefully you're all safe and healthy.
Today, we're happy to bring you another update for Godhood! Due to the great postive response to our last update, we've decided to supercharge our update scedule. Today, as a bit of a surprise maybe, we continue our efforts to make Godhood shine!
With this update we're further improving the quality of Godhood on all fronts, while preparing ourselves for our next big update! The key features are: NEW FEATURES: - Ritual Customization: Help developing the rituals your Disciples choose to bring you glory, and them strength! - Fervor: Disciple use Fervor to do missions. Carry-over HP is removed. - Martyrs: You can make your Disciples suffer for extra converts in Sacrament! - All New Passives: A serious rehaul of the passives of ALL classes. More than 30 new passives, and countless new strategic options arise! - Blessings: Gain one-time powers to trigger an event to change your Disciples with small stories. - Flow Improvements: We improved the way some UI changes were handled. - Assignment Faith Bonus: Every time you're in your Holy City, three random disciples will gain faith bonuses if assigned. They need to feel special!
MINOR: - Miracle buildings now scale in cost and required followers to unlock. Choose wisely! - It's now easier to train disciples in stats for which they have talent.. and harder for those who are challenged. - You can now send old Disciples to their last pilgrimage, giving you more control over how aging affects you. - All versions of the first two islands have received a good amount of love. - Changed the damage formulas to scale better with (morale) armor - Nice little connecting lines have been added to the Island Map. - Executioner now scales on Health instead of Cunning. - Cultist now scales on Might instead of Cunning. - The Patron Saint Development's options are now more expensive. - Updated the Tutorial a bit. - Special battles trigger special music! - Disciples' clothes are now colored by their elemental attunement. - You can now inspect disciples during stories where you need to choose among them. - UI in the Sacrament was changed to make it easier to read important information.
FIXED: - Altruism giving the Temple of Peace - Cook's Nurse ability is now actually Divine - Fixed the naming of some abilities - Probably fixed a bug where miracles were not upgraded properly - Fixed "Fasting" description - Fixed issue where you couldn't pick an upgrade even when you had the resources for it. - Fixed some Passives and Totems - Fixed many more UI issues. - You can delete incompatible Save Games again.
We will continue improving Godhood further and work on the roadmap presented before! We always appreciate your feedback, and hopefully have shown to try to work with it. You can help us out improving Godhood even more by playing the game and giving us your feedback!
We hope you'll enjoy playing this new version as much as we did!
Kind Regards, - The monks from the Abbey
Sneak-peek Update #5: Martyrs and Fervor
Hello aspiring gods!
It's been almost 2 weeks since we launched our biggest update yet with "Newfound Shores"! We're now looking forward to our next update: "Righteous Rituals"! The update is planned for this month!
This update will again bring you a set of improvements and features worthy of your religion. Lets take a look at two of the changes we're bringing in:
Martyrs
Think your Disciples can convert any who oppose you? Why not convert more by making your Disciples suffer for the righteous cause! Give the enemy a head-start by jeering and striking your Disciples down, and then impress them with a biblical comeback! This way, you can increase the risk you take. The wise will know exactly when they're asking too much of their disciples, and when their devotion will be rewarded.
Our design goals with Martyrs is to reward player's insight, and allow you to take more risks for greater rewards. It also makes the Sacraments a bit quicker.
Fervor
A problem we found was that some player got stuck in a loop of losing and being broken. To address this, we changed carry-over HP into Fervor. Doing a Mission will cost you Fervor, and being low on Fervor is not good for a Disciple. Fervor automatically regenerates when a Disciple stays home, but old Disciples will have less Fervor! Together with some other smaller changes to the coming of age, we want to give you a more smooth experience. It will make all players think more about their team composition, avoiding new players to be blindsided by high healing costs and aging disciples. It also makes losing physical battles equally jarring for your planning as morale Sacraments.
That wraps this sneak-peek up. We also have more content and some thematical upgrades in the pipeline. We can't wait to show them!
We're happy with the reception for "Newfound Shores", and are looking to bring you more Godhood! - Greetings from the Monks
Newfound Shores hotfixes
Newfound Shores released at game version 16.2. We've pushed some patches to address bugs, suggestions and feedback that we've received in the days after launch. You will find the following changes in the small patches released on February 28, March 1st and today:
NEW - Added some nice clouds to the New Island animation.
CHANGES - Changed HP bar to put up a divider each 50 hp instead of 10.
FIXES - Fixed save game issue with previous hotfix. - Fixed tooltip of "Cannibalism" buff. - Fixed the Marauder's Blade and its event - Fixed HP showing wrongly when at 1 hp. - Fixed a crash when you wanted to do a Madness Miracle but didn't have the required offerings. - Fixed the Thorny Rose relic. - Fixed the Food Kitchen "Community Elder" passive. - Fixed the "Forbid Sorcery" special enemy passive (was working as intended, but the text was wrong.) - Removed the option to switch to the city while selecting a new island, preventing crashes. - Fixed that autosaves were created in between sacraments of the same mission, resulting in unusable/crashing autosaves. - Fixed a crash when triggering Honor Duel or Fierce Duel from the War commandment developments. - Fixed a crash when using the Sacrificial Temple.
Update #4: Newfound Shores is here!
Gods and Goddesses, our new update is finally here!
The "Newfound Shores" Milestone update is ready for you Early Access gods to play with! We're proud and excited to present this big step forward to you!
In short; we made huge improvements to the game and how it plays. Previously, we were not meeting the bar we set ourselves out to achieve. Thanks to you, both supporters and critics, we found ways to make steps forwards. For this update, we focused on the core playability of the game to lay a strong and fun foundation. We're happy with the result you can play now!
We're not done with Godhood yet, either! This update will be the base for our future work. If you'd like, you can inspect our Roadmap and give us some feedback.
Without further ado, here are the release notes!
NEW FEATURES: - Islands: Go to differently themed island to convert the unenlightened. Each island has different challenges and rewards. Collect the sunstones to become the one Truth! - Generosity: A new commandment for you to spread! - Human Sacrifice: A new tenet to play with!
BIG CHANGES: - Time & Turns: Pressure is removed from the game to make place for God Actions. You will now have a fixed (upgradeable) number of actions between Missions. Rituals either complete immediately or take a Mission to complete. - Dreams: Appear in the dreams of your Disciples to prepare them for coming challenges! - Rituals: You can now permanently improve your disciples with Rituals. They're not as effective as Miracles though. - City Management: There is now one, central, convenient place to build structures, upgrade them, or unlock classes. - Classes: Every commandment starts with 4 unlocked classes. You can unlock more with Materials. - Developments & Followers: Followers unlock some buildings, and will be important for the end game and your high score. Developments slowly unlock as you complete Missions or when you collect Development Sparks. - Crystal Skulls: You have much more Crystal Skulls, and more chances to upgrade and replenish them. The more crystal skulls you have when you complete a mission, the more rewards you can choose from! - Sacrament Conversion: Instead of depleting an Awe bar, there are now two other ways of victory: - converting half or more of the crowd with your glory. - breaking all opponents. Violence works best here. - When a Disciple is broken, that faction loses 30% of it's converts in the Sacrament. - Broken: A broken character loses a bond. Once a characters loses all 3 bonds, they leave your religion. - Ability Styles: Abilities now have a style of conversion, like Fear or Grace. Disciples have a preferred conversion style, and are more likely to learn these abilities. Some passives already work with it, but it will become more important in the future... - Offerings: You can spend offerings to improve the effect of your actions!
CHANGES: - Tutorial: Game comes with an improved tutorial. - Development Trees: Development trees are more balanced, and have more options. - Big Miracles: The commandment miracles have special effects. - Music: Some new music has been added. - Adoption: Converting a whole island will give you the chance to adopt one of their tenets. - Upgrades: There are many, many more and better upgrades. e.g. upgrade the amount of XP you get from a Sacrament, or what kind of dreams you can give to your Disciples. - Many More: Many more smaller changes!
FIXES - So much that I don't know where to begin. The Mac/ blocked text bug is still there though, unfortunately. :(
Have criticism or ideas for the game going forward? Please leave them in one of our forums! Enjoying where the game is going? You can help us out with a review or a kind word. :)
We hope you'll enjoy the update, and are looking forward with us to the future of Godhood!
- The Monks from the Abbey
Newfound Shores Beta Take-Aways
The beta for "Newfound Shores" came to an end, and we're happy with both the help we received and the result! First, we want to thank all the testers that helped us both here and on our own forums! May your blessings be many.
In this beta we tested many of our new features and new content. The overall response to it was very positive, but we do have a few things to work through! Here's a take from our to-do list before we release the new update!
Increase the stability of the game.
Some relics, passives and ability tags have become less useful. We're trying to solve this with a new "Conversion Style" mechanic!
The tutorial needs a bit more attention, although we're not going to finalize it yet.
There are some balance and content issues the testing gods have found. We'll need to solve those.
We're very excited for the coming update! Stay tuned, as the "Newfound Shores" update will release before the end of the month!
