June 2023 Progress Report (Sprites, Camera... ACTION! 📽️🦄)

Strutting straight into Summertime. 😎 Now that the vacations are over and Zelda is finally out of our system (now transferred into powerful inspiration to make the best game possible) we're diving right back into workhorse mode to meet our 2023 goals!

With the biggest accomplishments this past month being an improved animation pipeline and a functioning cutscene system.

Animation Progress:

We've got lively ponies coming in HOT!

TexturePacker has been purchased and it's a huge help for automatically slicing up the Sheets exported from Aseprite into individual (properly named) frame files Unity can read and display. And it's been super easy to palette swap them too for Chroma variants. An all-around super smooth process to get 1 to 3 ponies fully done and fine-tuned per day (based on complexity of moving parts).

We've been making sure each pony has a range of emotions to ensure something is likeable about each design. Always going into each pony's sprite rig thinking "This pony is going to be someone's favorite."

There's quite a bit left to be done, and these are the most complex artworks in the game by far, so it'll be nice to have these cleared off the To-Do list well before the next Progress Report.

Cutscene System:

One of the final enormous undertakings on Psyaryu's plate was making an efficient cutscene system we can animate the story with. Took tons of tinkering and scrapping convoluted ideas, but he's landed on a pretty elegant solution combining his Non-Playable Entities prefabs with Unity's built-in timeline features.

To put it simply (ands leave all the boring technicals out), We have something we're calling a Stage with a bunch of Actor objects placed on it that we can plop down anywhere and even test in isolation for bug hunting. The stage can tell the Actors what to do based on a sequence lined up on a Timeline that progresses forward by having Actors complete their given tasks.

And all the tasks are simple behaviors we already have NPCs set to do. Like walk, talk, hide, animate, emote, etc.

[ You can check the attachment below, our Discord, or the Kickstarter Version of this post to see a quick video of a test cutscene playing out! ] 

What you'll see there is a simple proof of concept. Getting all the basic pieces working in the way we'd expect. This system can make puppeteer multiple Actors at once, change the music, play sound effects on cue, and manipulate the camera for effects like panning shots, fading in or out, and shaking all about.

We can even stop the flow from proceeding until a dialogue prompt is dismissed, show different events or text based on player's choice in a question prompt, change the map you're on mid-cutscene, affect the state of maps based on event triggers, and animate things not related to any of the visible actors (spawning in special effects and stuff as needed).

It's beautiful! 🥹 And powerful enough to start crafting the game's planned out story beats with. So we're super excited to get started on that.

Conventions Coming Up:

We've got a TrotCon booth showcase all set for July, scored a last minute Everfree Northwest vendor table for August, and we've got Ponyville Ciderfest in our sights for November, all before starting the cycle over with Magfest in January. After those, the game ought to finally be out and we'll be pulling out all the stops to get it into people's hands.

Looking forward to showing off all the new ponies and see which newcomers become crowd favorites. We're making sure to put love and care into each one (and having the results peer reviewed for critique) so they turn out almost as expressive as they are in my head.

And after all that fuss with the Cutscene System, the scariest thing on the programming horizon is probably the Battle AI. And once that, the localization system (text replacer), and some Ponipedia Sub-Menus are complete, it's all bug hunting and edge case testing on the programming side of things.

It's gonna be such a breath of fresh air finally having all the hardest stuff behind us. And all the focus will be on polishing this game like crazy! Can't wait to share it with you all. 😌

Thanks for following the development of Battle Gem Ponies throughout Spring!