Previously we explored the Reus and Renowned Explorers era. It's time to take a look into the most challenging time of the Abbey. What happened between the cloister walls in that period?

Godhood started as an offshoot idea of Reus. What if you could guide generation upon generation? What if you could really guide the people to create their own culture? Not only was this never done before, it was also of a monumental scope! Besides, it also had to be a game, not just a linear story! First it would be a Polynesian setting, with a very unique art style!
It looked great, but we had no game yet!

But things were moving in different directions quickly. The development was hampered by illness and misunderstanding. Wonderful things were made by individuals, but we struggled to put it all together. The art didn't fit the design, the design didn't fit the tech, and the tech didn't fit the art. Were the monks cursed? Had we built our tower of Babylon to close to the face of God?
At some point, Godhood even was a pokemon battle game!

It all came to big explosion at the Abbey. Monks left or were forced to leave the Abbey, even when the game was not finished at all. It was a very sad moment for everyone involved. The remaining monks took a good hard look into the mirror. We overshot our ambitions and needed to give attention to Godhood's core!
An Abbey Games Monk looking for introspection. 2020.

The monks turned the game around with hard work and a great community that helped where it could. With that, the Abbey gained a chance to look at a future again! Still, from Godhood we take our love for culture, history and human development. It will surely pop up in the Abbey's coming project!

Join us tomorrow with the last tale of the Abbey; the present and future! It will be posted on the Abbey Games Developer page, so follow us there to see it!

See you tomorrow, as we peer into our crystal ball...


P.S. If you want to chat with us, feel free to join our Discord[discord.gg]!

Hello young gods!

Two exciting events today; the game is available in simplified Chinese and Update 1.2: Monastery Life is ready for you to play!

We recently got the opportunity to translate Godhood into Simplified Chinese. We gladly took this chance, which we're grateful for. We hope our new Chinese gods will enjoy playing Godhood! We're continuing to look for opportunities to translate the game to other languages.

We already showed some of the new things that would arrive in this new update. I'll quickly highlight 2 other improvements.

With Martial Arts you need to take control over your initiative. Overpower abilities will lower Armor for 1 round, so you want others to capitalize on it. To go even further, you can bless their fists, which is stronger the slower your Disciple is!
The second tradition is the Monastery of Miracles. This tradition makes your Sorceries bedazzle the opponent, lowering their accuracy. More importantly, you can inspire a humbling augury; your weakest Disciple will become unbreakable, and give you extra tributes for the next Sacrament. A great way to boost the growth of your younglings!

The classes you pick for your Disciples will now have extra effects. For example, the Beastmaster will now gain extra Crit Chance, and the weaver will more often than not hit the weakest target! You can check the changes in class selection, or the class window in the right!
With this change we hope to give the classes some extra character!

The full patch notes:

ADDED

• Added the Excommunicate God Action, which allows you to boot Disciples after building the Sun Stone. It costs happiness and permanent faith though.
  
• NEW TRADITION: Monastery of Miracles. Enchant your enemies with miracles, and boost your young prospects!
  
• NEW TRADITION: Martial Arts. Control your initiative and Overpower abilities to perform devastating combos!
  
• NEW TENETS: Reclusion and Pain is Gain.
  
• Classes can now improve and penalize a variety of stats. For example, the Lust Priest will gain extra physical accuracy and target smarter, but will have -1 Fervor.
  
• Full Simplified Chinese translations

FIXED

• Fixed missing Dedication (Aristocrat, Kickstarter)
  
• Fixed missing celebratory buildings for some Traditions
  
• Fixed Dream-exploit where a single dream assignment could be executed any number of times by abusing the button.
  
• No longer need to pick a tenet or tradition when you have enough points, but no available options.
  
• Fixed some content in enemy Sacraments
  
• Fixed a bug in which some characters would get less experience
  
• Fixed the Cultist passive "God of Magic"
  
• Fixed issue where leveling a disciple quickly would skip a passive tier
  
• Fixed some text issues.
  
• Fixed floating freckles and chest-hair in disciple portraits

BALANCE

• Order of Monks gives Monastery of Miracles instead of Hermit Pilgrimage.
  
• Promote Virginity gives Monastery of Miracles instead of Holy Marriage.
  
• Secret Society gives Monastery of Miracles instead of Burial.
  
• School of Philosophy gives Reclusion instead of Order of Monks
  
• Hermit Pilgrimage gives Reclusion instead of Holy Cats
  
• Revelations gives Reclusion
  
• Doom gives reclusion instead of Ritual Cleaning
  
• Madness starts with Reclusion
  
• Order of Paladins gives Martial Arts instead of burial
  
• Blood Sport gives Martial Arts instead of Might Makes Right
  
• The Holy Banana is back my dudes!
  
• Smite now has a different effect, since the last one was broken.

That's it for today! We hope you'll enjoy playing the game!
- Greetings from the Abbey

Hello young gods!

We're finishing up on the newest update for Godhood, which has some new content and a new feature! Here's a sneak-peek of what's to come!

Do you know that feeling when you pick a guy named Adarian to be your prophet, but he turns out to be of little faith? Well, now you can get rid of him whenever you want! Just use the "Excommunicate" action to make him look for another god. Excommunicating Disciples that just don't live up to your expectations is a bit of a "jerk god" move, so it will impact how the people see you a bit. Faith and happiness are permentantly lowered by a bit.

If only the people knew how lame Adarian was, they would understand. Alas, the trials of being a god are many.

Talking about trials and pains; there will be two new tenets with their own little effects on your society! They are themed in hardship and pain, and will lead to some new traditions. With "Pain is Gain", you tell your followers that suffering is for the greater good. With "Reclusion" you'll order your disciples to not seek contact with each other. Only by suffering in solitude they can find enlightenment.

Now what traditions will they lead too..?


That's not all! Another community idea also made the cut, but we'll keep that one for the announcement!
Hope to see you soon,
- The Abbey

Hello young gods!

The year is coming to an end, and thus comes the ritual of reflecting on the past. As many of you have been following us loyally, we would like to share our thoughts with you! But first; some Godhood news!

We’ve been working on a new update for Godhood, scheduled somewhere early 2021! We’re not going to give away much here, but it will include some new community ideas to add your religion! One important feature that has often been requested is the “Excommunicate” action. Soon it will be much easier to remove an unwanted Disciple from your roster.

Of course, sending a faithful Disciple away will impact morale a bit. But only the best get to serve you!
Just like most people on this planet, we had a pretty crazy year. In January, we were at the point of calling it quits. Because of the disappointing Early Access track of Godhood and general mismanagement, we were at a total low point with no viable business left. Up to that point, Godhood development had been a true ordeal. We had two separate burn-outs in the team, and the quality of the game only improved at a slow pace. By the start of 2020, we had to let go of all of our employees and friends (You can follow a few of them at Roost Games!) whom we shared so many beautiful memories with. We, Maarten, Manuel and Adriaan, were the only ones left of our original team of over 10 people.

However, we thought Godhood to be in an unacceptable state. It was our duty to deliver you higher quality before we called it quits. So we set on a journey to release 1.0. After that, we would reevaluate our situation.

In that period, we re-learned a lot about making games. We had some critical moments where we compared the production of Godhood with that of Renowned Explorers and Reus. In the process, we found our joy back, and the ability to increase quality at a much higher pace. We couldn’t have done it without the support of the community - it was at one point literally the only thing that motivated us to move forward! We’re very grateful for all your kind words, constructive criticism, and all round fun interaction! In particular, we would like to thank the good folks on the Abbey Discord. It has been a joy. We’re proud of the results!

Lucky for us, this increase in joy and quality also changed our fortunes on Godhood! The game welcomed a lot of new players, and we’re happy to see many more people having fun with it. Because of that, we’re now in the position to look at the future!

This newfound joy has motivated us to take a look into the future of the Abbey. We’ve started with cutting down some of our ambitions to focus on bringing better quality games. In the past 5 years, Abbey Games was very busy trying to manage a democratic and safe work environment. However, it seems we went too far. Too many of us were more busy managing and doing HR work instead of bringing you quality gameplay. With the 3 of us, we’re going back to our times during Reus and Renowned Explorers. That means more time developing, less time managing. We’re also saying goodbye to our engine AbbeyCore. It was a fun and enriching project, but we want to focus on our game quality. We hope to use more industry standards to make it easier to deliver our games faster and to more people.

This means we will fully devote ourselves to deep and thematic strategy-likes. We’ve received quite some requests for a sequel to Renowned Explorers and Reus. We have a lot of love for these games, and are exchanging interesting ideas about them! We are also very excited to try new themes, too!

So what does the future bring? We’re going to keep you guys in the dark a bit longer! But know that we’re working on deep and thematic strategy-likes, in the spirit of Reus and Renowned Explorers! We hope to use some of Steam’s new features to bring our new prototype to you as quickly as possible. We believe that together, we can make a really high quality game!

Finally, we want to give you all our best wishes for your (a)religious festivities! We hope you can leave the chaos behind you for a while, and focus on the things that are truly important to you. Be it family, friends, health, or just some really good games! Thank you for reading, and we hope to see you in 2021!

Best wishes,
The Abbey

Update 1.1 - Hotfix (game version 1.1.8)

- Fixed Reincarnation not having the correct effect.
- Fixed some text issues.
- Made the "Third Wheel" a little bit less tanky on the first Lust island.
- Fixed Massive Block from the Whale Totem
- Fixed Leviathan and Great Owl Totem
- Maximum Tenet cost is now 10 instead of 12
- Dev Sparks choice on first island up to 4 from 2
- Fixed Merciless to have unique passive
- Fixed slowdown for some Legendary talents in the late game

Update 1.1 - Hotfix (game version 1.1.5)

FIXED
- Fixed Greed miracles that gave wrong pictures
- Fixed issues with higher level Alchemy and Revelations
- Fixed multiple Holy War miracles being possible
- Fixed issue with Free mode not properly unlocking chosen Traditions, and not all Traditions being registered for your collection
- Fixed Communicative Joy
- Fixed a crash with the Shark Totem
- brainwash tribute thresholds up to 3/8 instead of 2/6
- Fixed missing texts for some Traditions at end game.
- Fixed some missing texts for miracles

Hello young gods!

Today we bring you a new update packed with some requested features, fixes and some community ideas! Let's dive right into it!

When you select the difficulty for your run of Godhood, you can now also enable Free Mode. This will unlock all Tenets and Traditions without meeting their prerequisites! This will allow you to create truly incoherent religions easily, or finally try out that killer combo you had in mind. If you wish, you can even mix-up starting commandments like Pleasure and Madness to gain access to an extra starting relic and their class! Go crazy!

With Freedom of Religion, we introduce 4 new Traditions! They are all Community Ideas!

• Revelations: Age your Disciples quicker, and give them one final revelation before their death. This will give you more Development Sparks and control over your roster!
  
• Brain Washing: Warn coming generations about the dangers of knowledge. This tradition focuses on Overpower abilities, and trades future Knowledge for Faith.
  
• Reincarnation: Your first Prophet doesn't die, but simply reincarnates in a new body! A powerful tradition that focuses on one Disciple to do the heavy lifting.
  
• Alchemy: Use the wonders of your science to turn Offerings into Materials, and assign an Alchemist that can give random buffs to your allies. A flexible and physical tradition!

To complete the patch notes, here is a list of other changes, both big and small, made to Godhood!

ADDED

• Added a feature for Kickstarter backers to select their preferred holy site.
  
• Added a way to inspect traditions while picking tenets. Community Idea
  
• Added a small happening to celebrate the adoption of a new Tradition! Community Idea
  
• Extra information in the Sacrament Log about crits, interception, breaking and victory type.

BALANCE

• XP requirements down to 6/12/20/28/30 Community Idea
  
• Made easy easier.
  
• Removed "Any" style from the game. You now always will have some degree of control over the abilities someone learns. Community Idea
  
• Lowered HP of final boss encounter.
  
• You now get better totems faster for your Disciple.
  
• Divine Recipe now stacks "only" up to +100 faith.
  
• Holy Judge now gives a base of +1 tribute, and no longer has a faith penalty. However, it doesn't develop Devotion anymore.
  
• Made numerous balance changes to some sacraments.
  
• Medium difficulty no longer gives enemies a 10% penalty. This was a remnant of an old system.

FIXED

• Fixed some spelling/naming errors
  
• Fixed cooldowns of certain Rituals resetting on game load or other actions. (e.g. XP Gain Ritual).
  
• The city turn timer is now placed above the Destined Trial preview when the latter contains multiple Sacraments to make more space for ritual and action buttons.
  
• Fixed rare crash when developing Rituals in the late-game.
  
• Fixed 'Perfectionist' achievement never triggering. Should also work for existing sessions.
  
• Fixed 'Explorer' achievement never triggering. Requires defeating all bosses with patch 1.1 or higher. Sorry :\
  
• Fixed a missing text for some higher level miracles.

The Artbook with juicy development secrets and charming concept art is now also available! Those who got the Supporter edition should have it already. Interested in behind the scenes look into the world of Godhood? Give it a look!For you who have been following us for a long time - thank you immensely for your support! With the increase in quality of Godhood, we've seen a good increase in the number of players! We're happy to say Abbey Games has survived with your help, and we're preparing ourselves for the next challenge!

That doesn't mean we're done with Godhood at all! There are still some cool community ideas we would love to implement. So expect more from Godhood in the future!

Greetings from the Abbey