May Progress Report (Conventions are BACK ON!)

First big piece of news is that the Yotes Games team is planning to attend Everfree Northwest in a few months as vendors to promote the BGP Kickstarter that will be going on throughout that entire month! How cool is the timing on that?

A detailed plan and budget has been made, and hotel & flight has been paid for. No going back now! Counting on attendance being the usual 2700 that this con has held consistently for half a decade. And we're gonna introduce Battle Gem Ponies to every. single... one of them...

So with it all on the line again, this just raises the stakes even more for getting the demo together in time. The $3500 coming out of pocket to send 2 of us to this thing with a decent amount of merch to sell needs to be a worthwhile venture, so we're counting on making the most of it. Hopefully hosting a live panel to talk about the crazy past couple years of developing this game.

Our booth is going to feature:

• Devices to play the demo on.
• A monitor showing a live feed on our Kickstarter's progress.
• And a 2nd table displaying all the Battle Gem Ponies Merch 

We still got all the equipment from last time we did this (Magfest 2019) so that'll be a huge cost-saver for this trip. Plus, this'll be our first time on the West Coast and with a whole day to ourselves we can do a little exploring at the local nerd-havens around Seattle & Redmond. Here's a quick summary of all the trip costs:

There's a bit of overestimation wiggle room to work with in case new things come up, but really any leftover cash would go towards more shirts to sell since we'll be pushing those hardest at the booth.

Other than all that con stuff, it's crunch time over here as we're testing features one-by-one and fixing every game-breaking bug we come across to make that awesome first impression we keep delaying for. Current estimations point at the end of this month, giving us 2 more to work on the overworld mechanics needed by August.

Our 2nd programmer has been missing for a few months but is finally back and getting started with the overworld gameplay so we're confident in meeting these deadlines this time around. But only time will tell. Contingency plans are in place for if things aren't up to snuff and we know exactly which corners to cut to save on time since we can always update the build later on.

Looking forward to all the fun we can have showing this game to folks for the first time in ages.