![\"A](\"https:\/\/joanaalmeida.eu\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/image-1-1024x843.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nMost of the time I spent in Figma, trying to figure out three things: cards, arenas, and story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the picture above you can see my current result for cards. Green are cards, orange are status conditions. There are a couple of named columns of cards, which represent potential decks. One of the decks is only halfway done, since it’s for a rival party in the story, which will at first not be relevant for development. Each deck has a theme and a couple of rules on what the deck focuses on. One focuses on elemental interactions, another on pushing units around, while another messes with the player’s gameplay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I spent a lot of time looking at other games (tactics RPGs, card games) to learn the specifics of how they vary their abilities and cards. Ultimately almost everything comes down to damage, healing, and status conditions, so the trick is in how each of them is calculated and mixed. A lot is possible, and what I’ve got so far is definitely just the start. What I’m noticing is that I’m making the game very strongly status condition reliant, meaning that’s something that has to be clearly displayed, understandable, and that ideally I build in some fun Status Condition interactions. You can already see a small chart in the image of how such interactions could look like.
One thing I struggled with though, was figuring out cards that interact with the environments. That’s simply because I don’t really have much to speak of environment-wise. So, really, what I need next is to focus on figuring out what there is in battle arenas!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I spent some time detailing things that I know a battle arena can have, specially based on the one I already made. I noted that I want both terrain and environmental objects to have elements that can be drawn on, while some trigger effects that can hinder or harm a unit. I also want elemental weather that can apply and interact with specific status conditions. And then there’s one little extra that fits into the world: Magic anomalies. Randomized areas which can affect your unit negatively, but can also boost the card you use in some way. For each of those categories I wrote down everything that came to mind!
Yet ultimately, the results felt rather generic and unspecific. No bad ideas, sure, but at some point I’m just putting any random thing in, and with no rules, like I had made for the decks, it becomes utterly generic. What I need is of course to work on the story and setting!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the story I wrote down literally everything that I know about the setting on separate post-its as well as any new ideas. I made post-its detailing events that track the larger story progression. I made tables for the characters and post-its for individual traits, spreading them around as it felt right. And I made a chart for the various adventure parties that you could potentially encounter, what those groups tend to be like, and what kind of conflicts they could cause with the player party.
It was all good work, but frankly, I work best having someone to ping-pong ideas back and forth with. This was apparent when my partner jumped in and helped me brainstorm traits for the first rival adventuring party. Ideas IMHO only become real once they encounter another person, and you can only build on a foundation that is real. Again, it shows how important it is for me to find my perfect team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even after all of this though, I have no idea if the ability cards even work and if the decks make any sense at all. What became clear is that I need to paper prototype them. Implementing them as is, will be a lot of work that delays making decisions for far too long. However, the battle arena is just as important to the gameplay, and as such, I can finally, after 12 years in the business, use my Lego for my job. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I wasn’t sure about scale, but ultimately the only reasonable size was 1 stud = 1 tile = 1m2<\/sup>. The next option would’ve been double the scale and that would’ve been unworkable. Though that means I can’t use minifigs, nor D&D miniatures for gameplay. Instead I have little cylinders standing in for characters. But as I said, designing the cards brought up new considerations for the gameplay, which I ultimately did build into the prototype. Originally I had used cards go back into the deck. I didn’t want the player’s deck to exhaust. This is at its heart a tactics RPG after all, and abilities don’t just disappear forever! That means there can’t be any fun interactions with a discard pile, and that’s just unfortunate. So now I’m testing out what it’s like if your cards get used up. That, of course, now means that decks can be finite! That has a terrible interaction with a feature I had implemented: Card decay. I wanted drawn cards to decay and go back into the deck, so that the available abilities would cycle through more often. But if they now decay and go into the discard pile instead… that’s a quick game over. To avoid that I added an option to disable decay. I focused on doing solely design work these last weeks, and holy heck is this not the type of workflow I’m used to. Don’t get me wrong, I think it went pretty well. It’s just that in my past work, as a Technical Artist, feedback if something works or not was more immediate and clear.<\/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-176","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\/176","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=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/joanaalmeida.eu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180,"href":"https:\/\/joanaalmeida.eu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions\/180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joanaalmeida.eu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joanaalmeida.eu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joanaalmeida.eu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/joanaalmeida.eu\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/image-1024x768.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
I previously had been thinking about level designing by drawing things out, but the issue is how it’s hard to convey the third dimension in a way where you can see everything. Lego doesn’t have that issue! I think this could be pretty fun to figure out some arenas with more verticality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This of course still needs a lot of testing. I still don’t want the game to end too early just because there’s not enough cards. On the other hand, I’m excited about the idea that a player can choose to focus on their own deck’s strategy, or opt to use only the opponent’s cards to interfere with them and try to empty their deck to force them to lose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"