Scramble Quest Devlog #1: Camping
June 6, 2026
I’ve been working on Scramble Quest off and on for a while now, but this is the first week I’m dedicating full-time for it! Yes, my 6 months of prototyping and writing a design document have started! So of course I’m working on something absolutely core and essential to the game, no? Well… sort of. With the prototyping phase I want to answer all fundamental questions that may come up in development, and for that I want to create as much of the framework of the game as I can. Apart from the combat and exploration mechanics, that includes the storytelling as well. Two big tools being passive dialogue and the camp.
So for dialogue I’m using YarnSpinner, which traces its origins all the way back to Night in the Woods! This is not only a completely new tool for me, but also it’s in Alpha only for Unreal Engine. So it’s been a lot of figuring out how it works, and how to tie into what I already have and my intentions. I don’t know if my implementation is ideal, but hey, we figure things out as we try them and move forward.
Btw. all visuals are free placeholders. Characters are the modular characters by Underking. The Lowpoly Handpainted Environment by Yevheniia Yaremko. Stylized House by Agustin Honnun, Stylized Tree by Oleksii Ganzhela, Low Poly Market by atomdev. and probably more that I’m currently forgetting.
Passive Dialogue is something that I had started last week and had been a bit troubling, as it wasn’t the default implementation for YarnSpinner, but you can work around most things, and ultimately I got it working this week. There were just some issues with its very sparse nature and attaching each line to the correct actor in the map.
This scene in particular was important to me, as I want the player to walk up to the quest board, and before selecting anything, see their party members discuss the available quests and share their opinions and preference. And that without having to enter into proper dialogue. I think it really works and will be a great way to make the world feel more alive and less dependent on you.
While looking up reference pictures to describe Scramble Quest I came across this image from the Dungeons & Dragons Player Handbook. It struck me that this isn’t a scene you’d see in a camp in a video game, where your companions have their own bespoke spots of a larger camp. They generally don’t even talk with each other! So I set to making a different kind of camp. Single screen, no walking around, and the characters are in ear-shot of each other, so they can talk with each other.
Looks like a house interior, but it’s meant to represent the back of a caravan, where part of the party is hanging out during travel. It has no character animations or posing at the moment, but in the end I want to evoke the feeling of friends traveling in an RV cross country. Currently the only scene is set inside. If budget permits, it’d be wonderful to be able to have the party occasionally camp outside, and just have plenty to say to each other.
The complicated part in this setup was solely figuring out how I want to control a scene that will be different every time you check in, and allowing for different conversations requiring specific characters present. Just a lot of information to be handing about between the dialogue manager, the UI, and the world. In the end I decided on having scene setup files, and conversation files. The chosen scene setup pulls up a level sequence and plays it, while the game goes through the available conversations and checks which fits for the current state of the game and the current scene.
Well, that’s all for this week! I hope to write weekly, but hey, there’s so much to do for this game, let’s see what I manage.