End of 2022 Progress Report (Approaching the Final Year!)

Gonna keep this one short and snappy since an upcoming devlog in January will be showing off most of the visuals and details on recent accomplishments.

The Big Picture: What's the status on the BGP Project overall?

• We have a stable public demo available for everyone to play for free.
• That demo includes major features like an Overworld, VS Mode, Turn-Based Combat System, Shops, Surfing, Pickups, Music, Sound Effects, 14 Playable Ponies, Ultra Forms, a Capture System, Polished Menus, Fast Travel, Healing Items, Team Customization, and Hundreds of Attack Animations.
• We've currently developed Ridable Ponies, Overworld Obstacle Interactions (Cut Trees, Push Rocks, etc.), Configuration Tools, and settled on New Class Icons and Names to update the game with in the coming weeks.
• There's changes to the game loop coming including new rules for catching and keeping ponies on your roster, when and how you can Go Ultra, new ways to grow Base Stats, fully functional passive abilities, 18 Ponatina forms to choose from, and all sorts of helpful new menus too!
• We've also planned the layout of the entire Pinto Region, outlined and detailed the story and characters, created spreadsheets and data management systems for all variables, made template & example sprites for all NPCs (except backer OCs), came up with countless scenarios to keep the Adventure Mode interesting moment-to-moment, and prepared nearly all the game's ponies for animation. 

In case you're dying to see, here's the new class icons going forward. As well as the newly renamed "Magic" class now known as "Fairy".

Details on why & how all this happened will be in the next DevLog.

So, in short:

• The game's lookin' good and publicly available.
• We've thought the whole project through.
• Nearly all the features are done.
• And we'll be using our custom tools to craft the whole Adventure Mode starting Spring 2023.
• Keeping us on track for a Worst-Case Scenario Release in February 2024.

A new backer demo will be up by the end of January / start of February featuring new ponies to collect and battle with, and new places to explore on the demo island where you can test out new puzzle elements and slightly more cinematic boss battles.

We're still planning to only release public demos at the end of major milestones, and this current milestone basically just absorbed half of the upcoming Accumuland one so we'll be in here tinkering for a while longer. 

All for the sake of getting to the point where this isn't just a "prototype of the game loop" anymore and we have a solid foundation to build the rest of the full game with. And then that'll be several months of laying things out, conducting playtests with you guys, and polishing things up to a ridiculous degree to bring the full vision to life. 

We wanna thank you for your patience thus far, and hope you can forgive the extra year long delay it'll take for our small team to do this right.

- Thanks for following the development of Battle Gem Ponies into 2023!