Religion creation auto-battler Godhood has launched after a rough time for Abbey Games

After going through funding and development troubles, Abbey Games have now launched the 1.0 release of their religion creation auto-battler Godhood.

Quite a relaxing and laid-back experience that blends together a little bit of many things. You construct a religion, build up a little town and engage in hands-off turn-based battles that do everything for you so you get to sit back and watch how it all unfolds. Quite a different take on the auto-battling seen in the likes of Dota Underlords that's for sure.

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Major new features in the 1.0 release:

• 3 new Islands added! This makes for an exciting finish of the game, where the 6th island will face you against Quetzalcoatl's chosen!
• You can now Finish a run! Every commandment has a unique World Religion and a Truth ending!
• Greed is now playable with the Charlatan class!
• Added 3 Greed Traditions: Bribery, God of Thieves, and Trade Missions!
• At the start of the game, you will be asked to pick Major Relic fitting your commandment. There are 2 relics per commandment. They give religion wide bonuses for all generations.
• Animals are back! Cats, dogs and llamas can now be spotted throughout your city, if you adopt the appropriate tenets.
• Achievements! Time for you to see if you can rise up to all the challenges Godhood offers!

The sad thing about this release, is that as they previously announced back in 2019 they had to downscope the whole game and let multiple staff go to survive as a studio. It seems after the successful Kickstarter, they just didn't have enough funding to continue as they were with Godhood not seeing a great reception when it entered Early Access. An issue not many games can recover from.

Over time they continued updating it to the full release we have now but it came at a cost. The Linux and macOS versions are no longer fully supported, although the builds still exist and will still be updated. In a clarification post on the GOG forum, Abbey Games mentioned that since they use their own tech with the "AbbeyCore" engine, they need certain expertise for different platforms compared to an off-the-shelf game engine and they no longer have the developers available for that in-house. The result is that for Linux specifically, any distribution/dependency issues won't get fixed but the game itself will continue working and be updated. In a further post clarifying it even more, they mentioned that one of their co-founders was actually responsible for the engine tech who "decided to leave after Godhood went into In Development" so they didn't have much choice there. Nice to see them being so open about it all.

Overall Feature Highlight:

• Create your Own Religion: From peaceful meditative monks to savage warrior-priests drenched in the blood of human sacrifice, mix and match religious Tenets & Traditions to shape your worshippers’ morality! What culture will your religion shape in the future?
• Auto-Battler Ritual Combat: Face other religions in turn-based auto-battler combat called sacraments. Use persuasion, brute force or even flirtation to defeat the false prophets and convert their worshippers in this unique system!
• Guide Your Roster of Disciples: Disciples are the heroes of your religion. Choose their class and level up their abilities to create your perfect team of mighty missionaries.
• Plan your years as a God: Collect tribute to expand your holy site with new temples and buildings. Use them to create Rituals that improve your disciples or upgrade your income and options.

For the GOG release, if you're on a distribution other than Ubuntu and you find it doesn't launch it's likely due to incompatibilities with libcurl. If you do also have Steam installed, a quick fix is to remove the included libcurl file from Godhood and do this command to link to the library Steam supplies with its Linux runtime which fixes it:

ln -s ~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcurl.so.4.2.0 /installed-folder/Godhood/game/libcurl.so.4

You can pick up Godhood from GOG and Steam.