{"id":142,"date":"2026-06-27T11:56:53","date_gmt":"2026-06-27T11:56:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/joanaalmeida.eu\/blog\/?p=142"},"modified":"2026-06-27T11:56:53","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T11:56:53","slug":"scramble-quest-devlog-4-taking-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joanaalmeida.eu\/blog\/scramble-quest\/scramble-quest-devlog-4-taking-action\/","title":{"rendered":"Scramble Quest Devlog #4: Taking action"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Hey everyone! Phew it&#8217;s hot, huh? What a summer this was. Glad it&#8217;s over soon. It&#8217;s- it&#8217;s not? Oh boy, I wish someone had predicted climate change, and done something about it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, apart from finding out I can melt, what happened this week?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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&#8217;m spread really thin here, and it&#8217;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&#8217;s really hard finding the right match, and I hope it doesn&#8217;t take too long. I got some good advice I wanted to act on, creating some first pitch decks and more refined &#8220;call for founders&#8221; posts, but frankly this week&#8217;s heat was too much for thinky writey make words happen on the thing with th<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">MGZsheroes also continued. Always lovely hanging with all the other women of the program. This time was about branding! I&#8217;m not at that step yet, but it&#8217;s really great to formalize these concepts. It&#8217;s also interesting that the recommended way to speak to and catch your audience&#8217;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&#8217;t disregard that there&#8217;s people out there who are like me, with different communication needs, who feel spoken to in a different way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">No screenshot this time, because it would look exactly the same as last time, despite such deep changes!<br>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&#8217;s some real good tactical thinking to be had there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">More importantly I introduced status effects! Aaaand for that I completely restructured how ability cards are built, which required a lot more restructuring.<br>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 &amp; apply status effect).<br>See, originally I had actions on the cards as lists of classes that I couldn&#8217;t modify. Eventually I learned about instanced objects. Essentially they&#8217;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&#8217;t want to make one action per status effect. This way I can have an &#8220;apply status effect&#8221; 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 &#8220;boosted actions&#8221;, a second alternate list of actions, which is used if the unit&#8217;s class matches the ability card&#8217;s class. I haven&#8217;t put anything in yet, but I&#8217;m imagining damage being doubled, or a secondary effect triggers, or something like that. Damage being doubled is less interesting, since it&#8217;s already stronger due to using a unit with more compatible stats anyway.<br>I haven&#8217;t done any visual feedback yet though, since I&#8217;m prioritizing functionality. Though it&#8217;s getting waaay more pressing. I&#8217;ve been putting that on a backburner though, since I know that as a Tech Artist, I&#8217;ll have some specific demands and end up wanting to make too robust of a system. We&#8217;ll see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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&#8230; wet. It doesn&#8217;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hey everyone! Phew it&#8217;s hot, huh? What a summer this was. Glad it&#8217;s over soon. It&#8217;s- it&#8217;s not? Oh boy, I wish someone had predicted climate change, and done something about it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-devlog","category-scramble-quest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joanaalmeida.eu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joanaalmeida.eu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joanaalmeida.eu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joanaalmeida.eu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joanaalmeida.eu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/joanaalmeida.eu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":148,"href":"https:\/\/joanaalmeida.eu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions\/148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joanaalmeida.eu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joanaalmeida.eu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joanaalmeida.eu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}