Joana Costa Cunha e Almeida

Senior Technical Artist

Hey everyone! Phew it’s hot, huh? What a summer this was. Glad it’s over soon. It’s- it’s not? Oh boy, I wish someone had predicted climate change, and done something about it.

So, apart from finding out I can melt, what happened this week?

Outside of the game itself, I made some calls to figure out further funding options, specially since I want to bring people in to help me on the art and programming side of things. I’m spread really thin here, and it’s slowing down development of the prototype a lot. To that effect I also had a call to get some advice on how to find good co-founders. It’s really hard finding the right match, and I hope it doesn’t take too long. I got some good advice I wanted to act on, creating some first pitch decks and more refined “call for founders” posts, but frankly this week’s heat was too much for thinky writey make words happen on the thing with th

MGZsheroes also continued. Always lovely hanging with all the other women of the program. This time was about branding! I’m not at that step yet, but it’s really great to formalize these concepts. It’s also interesting that the recommended way to speak to and catch your audience’s attention is different than what works for me. A good lesson in both that I have to learn what works for others, but also can’t disregard that there’s people out there who are like me, with different communication needs, who feel spoken to in a different way.

No screenshot this time, because it would look exactly the same as last time, despite such deep changes!
One major aspect is that I can now toggle the action phase (when actions are done) to be either at the end of a round or at the end of a turn. End of turn definitely feels a lot better, the immediacy giving you much better feedback on your actions. However I hope to make end of turn actions also work, because I feel there’s some real good tactical thinking to be had there.

More importantly I introduced status effects! Aaaand for that I completely restructured how ability cards are built, which required a lot more restructuring.
Quick primer on my terms: Ability card is the card you select for your unit to act on. Actions are what the units actually do. Ability cards can hold multiple actions (e.g. do damage & apply status effect).
See, originally I had actions on the cards as lists of classes that I couldn’t modify. Eventually I learned about instanced objects. Essentially they’re constructed from the outset, and as such you can already change them in your data asset, instead of waiting for runtime. This was important to me, because I didn’t want to make one action per status effect. This way I can have an “apply status effect” action, where I can pick the desired status effect from a dropdown list. This changed things so much, allowing me to do things like selecting targeting on the action itself, instead of having a list for actions that target self, and a list for actions that target others. Since I was already at it, I decided to introduce “boosted actions”, a second alternate list of actions, which is used if the unit’s class matches the ability card’s class. I haven’t put anything in yet, but I’m imagining damage being doubled, or a secondary effect triggers, or something like that. Damage being doubled is less interesting, since it’s already stronger due to using a unit with more compatible stats anyway.
I haven’t done any visual feedback yet though, since I’m prioritizing functionality. Though it’s getting waaay more pressing. I’ve been putting that on a backburner though, since I know that as a Tech Artist, I’ll have some specific demands and end up wanting to make too robust of a system. We’ll see.

So what status effects did I actually make? I started with a simple one: poison. All it does is do damage in the end phase and leave after a few turns. The next thing that came to mind was… wet. It doesn’t do anything. It however is my first step in attempting elemental reactions, because my final status effect is: Frozen. Like all the ice cream and drinks I currently yearn for.