Hey ya'll,
Sorry about the late progress report this month. It's been a hectic week so I'll try to break things down as concisely as possible.
Due to the Corona Con Cancellation Craze plans had to change for the big multi-thousand dollar BGP summer tour.
Couldn't have predicted all this back in January and crossing my fingers and waiting isn't a very solid strategy so plans are in motion to have a stronger online-focused campaign. (While still crosssing fingers and hop...
2020-03-19 23:24:48 +0000 UTC
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... Aaaand one month full of crunch later, we've got battles! Actual working in-game battles! You can swap forms, use moves, alter stats, drain meters, and everything! Some visual effects are still a bit rough but all that's coming in the polish stage. The most important bit right now is getting the logic behind everything working as intended.
Now, some of the special side-effect calculations have yet to be implemented, but we've thought through all the dirty details and are co...
2020-03-01 20:07:01 +0000 UTC
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Kicking things into overdrive! Get ready for a MEATY post this time around, cuz I wasn't kidding about progress speeding up this year.
We came into the month HAWT with a game jam to get a battle system up and running. Attacking, deciding turn order, calculating damage, lowering health, modifying stats, applying maladies, and determining a winner. We got it down pat.
2020-02-18 04:08:39 +0000 UTC
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Rapid progress continues. We've got menus up and running better than ever, some really polished placeholders, fleshed out design notes, charts and graphs for pony stats, hundreds of character animation files, and most of the math behind the revamped battle system!
You'll need to get more info on the 2020-02-01 20:39:27 +0000 UTC
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It's been an exhausting yet exhilerating few weeks into the year already. Making killer progress with the game's menus and managing data behind the scenes as well as making a whole bunch of pixel art graphics to dazzle you all with once the next demo comes out.
There's been countless discussions about how the game's mechanics work over lunch, weekends have basically become weekly game jams, we'...
2020-01-17 22:51:56 +0000 UTC
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Battle Gem Ponies is shaping up nicely. The fun little details are being added in now and we're seeing how far we can run with the little things being implemented in this prototype.
We've got villain concept art, working data, cutscene scripts, character animations, working menus like the Ponipedia, and calculations for the battle system all done over the holiday break!
2020-01-01 23:07:14 +0000 UTC
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This has been quite a month so far, everything is moving at a nice pace as we gain momentum to CRUSH through into the new year!
For starters, we not only got accepted into BABScon as vendors, but were offered a special position in their Arcade! Here's some screenshots of what went down:
2019-12-17 04:32:07 +0000 UTC
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Despite numerous distractions like travel, coma-inducing Thanksgiving meals, and an intense workout regiment to counteract it all, progress is still being made towards BGP's public prototype launch. There's a lot of little changes being made behind the scenes to turn this into a super smooth operation that can sidestep mistakes of the past and there's still a couple week's worth of problems to solve before we can touch the combat system itself.
State of the Game
2019-11-30 19:35:57 +0000 UTC
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This month's main objective is to get the various interfaces up and running. My task is to lay out, anchor, color, and attach scripts to the sprites [complete]. Then hand them over to the Programmer for data display and management. Then once he has em all nice, dynamic, and functional I add some polish and other effects to make em look beautiful.
Like, imagine this ...
2019-11-16 14:50:06 +0000 UTC
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The initial hurdles of learning to work together and getting a foundation in place for the project are all behind us now. The Yotes Games team is hard at work every day and we're knocking out features one-by-one.
Here's a tiny bit of redecorating for the Battle Gem Ponies Download Page in anticipation for big things to come...
2019-11-03 20:16:42 +0000 UTC
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Earlier this month I said I'd talk more about the new workflow for Battle Gem Ponies now that there's 2 people on it on all hours but 9 to 5. Having a programmer help me tagteam this is such a godsend and we are straight zooming through the to-do list at record pace. We might even have a release window in mind, but more on that at the end of this post...
Anyways, I thought I outta post some examples of our back & fourth chatter over discord to show how we communicate outs...
2019-10-18 02:52:45 +0000 UTC
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I finally did it... I caved in and sought help. You know those plucky prodigy millennials, 25 and under, somehow both fresh out of college AND equipped with 5 years of professional experience with a portfolio stretching across multiple related software / hardware / IT / & database sectors of an industry?
Yeah, well I found one of those. His name is Brandon Deaton. He's the coworker I've basically studied under over the past year, and he's the friend that gave me the desktop I'...
2019-10-04 05:03:10 +0000 UTC
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State of the Game
I converted all of the game's 600+ variables into Playmaker Globals that can be accessed both in scripts and easily within playmaker itself now. It was pretty tedious and took a few days of work to finish what i started but things are ready to be put into action now.
There was even quite a bit of renaming and restructure to make sure that this time...
2019-09-04 17:47:45 +0000 UTC
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Time was in fact wasted cleaning up old code and creating all those Variables in EzDataManager, because Playmaker isn't as compatible with them as I thought. Extra oof because I spent a couple weeks tidying up my old code to find out enough small pieces were still missing to not have it working the way it did 2 years ago.
All the hoops to jump through to get these scripts & plugins to play nice with each other just aren't worth it so I scrapped EzData, and disabled al...
2019-07-31 02:41:09 +0000 UTC
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The biggest win this month has been the successful revival of the lost Tilemaps I spent a week on just a while back covering all the zones to be available in the Alpha demo.
After the tragic loss of the Battle Gem Ponies files during what I call The Great Calamity, one of the losses was the overworld layouts I converted from graph paper doodles to playable micro-worlds.
I was disheartened...
2019-07-02 01:00:03 +0000 UTC
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Was literally minutes away from posting a super long update full of pictures and explanations of whats been going on this month. Then power goes out and I lose all forward momentum... 😑
Oh, the irony... This is so familiar.
No drafts saved. Spent like an hour writing that and gathering screenshots. Its the little hiccups like this stacking up that make me wanna lay on the ground screaming instead of working myself to the bone
Alright, alright. Deep breaths...
Al...
2019-07-01 02:01:24 +0000 UTC
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I spent more time trying to figure out new tools than actually implementing anything, and that hurts. This stuff was meant to make things easier and faster, but I find myself hitting roadblocks and playing stop-n'-go when I've only got a few hours in the day to focus completely on gamedev.
It's maddening and I think I'll need to brute force some stuff just to see anything get done.
I've got CSV Tables working. That's the spreadsheet stuff that lets me spell out what mo...
2019-05-31 03:24:45 +0000 UTC
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Currently still getting everything into place to make sure this works out perfectly. I'm really just taking it one day's mission at a time in order to not get overwhelmed and stumped by paralysis anymore.
I mean, this project gets really scary when I think about how much work there's left to do and how much my life depends on it coming out at the right time with the right quality and shown to the right people in order to ...
2019-05-02 03:55:54 +0000 UTC
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A lot of gamedev went on this past month. Hope to be dishing out some videos on the matter soon enough. See what's cooking so far on this super-wordy special edition devlog!
...
2019-04-01 03:47:53 +0000 UTC
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I'm basically a month behind the 2019 master plan. Cleaning up the multi-hundred page design docs for BGP is taking way longer than I thought, so to celebrate fresh beginnings in March, I'll be switching over to framework development and save polishing out the details for when they become relevant.
So for right now, what I need to have on paper is the final list of mechanics, what assets I still need to make the vision happen, and what interface changes ...
2019-03-02 18:06:30 +0000 UTC
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This past Magfest certainly was an adventure! Supplies were gathered, 2 friends volunteered to help, and we ran the biggest Battle Gem Ponies booth yet. And for 4 days straight! I thought some folks out there would like to see what that adventure was like so catch a write-up on this indie dev experience on the
2019-02-26 04:51:45 +0000 UTC
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Really looking forward to what's to come. To be this pumped up about the project this many years later, and somehow feeling more confident about how it'll turn out has to be a sign of love. This project means everything to me and I have to see it through.
2018-11-30 02:36:03 +0000 UTC
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Serious planning has begun, so far it's only been preemptive measures and bookmarking things to come back to later. Now I'm getting down the fine details of everything I need to know, do, study, and purchase in order to make the most out of this Magfest trip.
2018-11-15 02:35:04 +0000 UTC
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My entire past week revolved around a game that wasn't mine for once. I took the time to play the newly released followup to my favorite indie game of all-time (Undertale, in case you didn't know) and it was time well spent.
I came out the other side of those credits re-energized, inspired to work harder, and pumped up on well-designed RPGs and quirky/interesting fantasy worlds. Overall, a nice reminder of why I love gaming so much.
See what notable new design elements ...
2018-11-08 02:01:22 +0000 UTC
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Happy Halloween, Folks! (Give or Take a Day)
Only thing scarier than the monsters out tonight is the possibility of Battle Gem Ponies getting delayed again. Amirite? Harharrr!
But really.
You know how everybody hates the sound of their own voice in recordings? I've been tackling that uncomfortableness all week. The scripts may be written, but I swear saying all this stuff out loud is more difficult than...
2018-11-02 01:04:42 +0000 UTC
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Like, literally all the posts from the last few months have been depressing #sadboi news and this blog's not about that. Gotta pick up the pace with the videos and breathe some energy back into the hype machine!
January 2019 is when I'll be going full steam ahead, but I definitely want these videos out there holding you over til I have new goodies to share.
For those sticking around through this super rough patch, I thank you. With everything I have.
You patrons still throwin...
2018-10-25 04:45:38 +0000 UTC
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Tiny bits of progress get done week-by-week and right now I'm one step closer to getting those YouTube videos ready to fill in the gaps. With scripts written, it's a matter of recording all of them and splicing a few videos together.nI can hope it takes a weekend, but I'll just take this one day at a time. You know how I am with deadlines.
...
2018-10-19 02:43:36 +0000 UTC
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Here's my attempt to associate with the moth meme. Just wanna make a public PSA, the Battle Gem Ponies project is NOT dead. It's just kinda on life support. It's hospitalized. Yeah. Progress is still going, but at a snail's pace. Which (believe it or not) is a lot w...
2018-10-05 02:13:09 +0000 UTC
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The last few weeks took a lot out of me, the devlogs went up on my site thanks to auto scheduling, but I could never squeeze in the time to repost on all the other sites and social pages until now.
I really have my work cut out for me these next few months, but this is going to be as worse as it gets. Only getting better from here as I squeeze more and more time out of the day to actually get BGP stuff DONE. And you patrons will be the first to know about it and play the darn ...
2018-10-05 02:11:46 +0000 UTC
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Yotes Games is in serious need of financing, so the search is on. With the way things are going, I may have to rely on a mix of day job hourly pay and Patreon support to carry me to the next BGP milestone.
That beautiful Vertical Slice to share with the world. A super polished vision everyone can see.
2018-08-22 20:15:52 +0000 UTC
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