Mid June Progress Report (Let's Get These Ponies in a Row)

Things are finally back to normal here at Yotes Games as of last weekend, and the team is back to whipping these pixel horses into shape! Unfortunately there's not much to show visually this time around since it's mostly been paperwork, code, and business conversations getting done lately. 

We planned on stalling things out with a video release yesterday to go alongside the Summer Games Fest but we couldn't make progress on the editing since the last Progress Report.

Sorry to say it, but there's no DevLog this week, making us cross into 3 months late territory with that.

A COVID scare situation has put a little pause on @Confident_Cow's progress with the DevLog, and health & safety of team members comes first, so it's getting pushed back another couple weeks. It'll be worth the wait though.

In  addition to that we're currently in the planning stages of a bunch of new content and reworking some video ideas to be as quick & easy to edit as possible, so we can have much faster turnarounds with these releases. (Our YouTube channel can't grow if we don't post anything, right?)

Most of the design work lately has been on getting our Task List on ClickUp organized so we can start making more accurate predictions for how long things take to get done. Proper project management is going to be the core thing that makes this fledgling Game Studio work in the long run, so it's important to get it right and not just fly by the seat of our pants and never end up reaching launch day this decade.

And once we have every last thing we need to develop written down, explained in detail, and timestamped, all that'll be left to do is just execute. One day at a time and barring any setbacks (already accounted for with rounded up estimations) we'll have this game out within a highly accurate timeframe. Even if it's not by the end of 2022 like we wanted. (In fact we've heard from other creators that Kickstarter games often take a year and a half longer to come out than expected due to any number of complications.)

So it's not all sorted out yet, but we're getting close. As of today, it's time to carefully review the current list of tasks in each milestone and make sure we aren't forgetting something that needs to be made in order to make it work. Nothing's too small to note, especially since there's often small things that seem to be negligible that end up eating 3 entire workdays!

But as for what we've been up to since the last report:

• Psy is back from vacation and programming his tail-off!
• We've unlocked YouTube Community features after reaching 500 subscribers.
• There's new visuals planned for when you level up in the overworld.
• Everypony, Everybody, and Everything in the Overworld now cast a shadow.
• Plans for different kinds of Wild Encounter behaviors & walk patterns.
• Discussed adding a new musician to the team.
• Commissioned Promotional Artwork of Ponatina by SugarMorning 
• Carefully studying the success of Them's Fightin' Herds and Maretime Bay Adventure (trending games with pretty much the same niche audience as Battle Gem Ponies).
• Interactions with the Healing House NPC that can revive your pony and let us print custom messages across a blacked out screen.
• Your pony can now carryover maladies like Poison into the overworld and take damage while looking sickly and sharing unique dialogue about how unwell she's feeling.
• Overworld characters can now hop whenever we want them to.
• We attempted to rename certain classes but decided to keep what we have for now.
• Changed the way many moves worked (streamlining combat mechanics and side effects).
• Fixed menu scroll list glitches.
• Redesigned the Ponipedia Menu.
• Got some new music drafts for the OST.
• Revised Camera controls for the future Cutscene System.
• New Pinto Demo Expansion Plans to test new mechanics.
• Streamlined the Overworld UI to use less buttons.
• Tilemaps for the full game have been sorted into more manageable groups.
• We can now remotely control an overworld character's mood or walking style and they'll automatically update all their animations to match.
• We can also now track player steps in the overworld and do different things with that data (like cure maladies after 30 steps).
• Certain time-consuming marketing plans and Operation: "Daily YouTube Content" have been pushed back to post-BGP mobile launch as to not distract us from development any further.
• Experimented with fun new ways to animate text in-game.
• Cut down on the number of minigames in the mobile release so we can focus more on developing the core game loop.
• Several other ideas have been backlogged or pushed into being DX Edition features in order to get the mobile release out sooner.
• Nearly every task left to do in order to launch the complete game has been plotted out.
• Began gathering time estimates on an individual dev basis instead of a cumulative manhour total to get more accurate milestone time estimations.

And on top of all that, there's been a complete overhaul in the way we have ClickUp Tasks Structured, so now the layout is focused around everything we need to do on a per-milestone basis instead of a per-development category basis.

We're gonna knock this project out. One way or another. And making the light at the end of the tunnel less foggy is going to boost our drive a lot. Looking forward to the many back-to-back demos to come, and all the hype that comes with fleshing out the story mode dropping chapter after chapter.

- Thanks for (patiently) following the development of Battle Gem Ponies!