September Progress Report (Look at Us Grow!)

Been a sorta quiet month so far as I'm diving into some repetitive placeholder animation tasks and file organization while once a week the programmers come together and bust out major progress on the next feature on our list.

We've got a few battle effects left to do and we're starting to animate the ones we do have implemented. There's also the VS Match screen still under construction as it's sub-menus come together and bugs are being sorted out as we go instead of all being pushed back to later and ignored until it's too late to fix foundational problems. 

We've got promo pics for the Chroma ponies that'll be releasing every Saturday starting in October as we begin to take #ScreenshotSaturdays more seriously going forward.

Another addition this month has been the Battle Debug Log. It'll help us with tracking all the variables going on in the background during battle. This will be an overlay on top of the battle action we can toggle on/off on the special tester builds.

There's a lot of info crammed into just a couple pages there, but the idea is to help us balance the battle system out and debug calculation problems without having to play the game in-editor. We can play any build on any device and just screenshot this stuff during playtesting.

Next you'll see the Team Select Preset being worked on. The idea is to have a list of about 20 of these to pick from to make VS match setup a lot quicker when you want to use certain teams over and over again.

Also, finally added some color to the in-battle feedback text. We'll work on the font later. Probably go back to the Noto-Sans one we were using before.

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In unrelated news, I just read the Undertale 5th Anniversary post today and it's made me feel some kinda way. Basically, the next game in the series Deltarune is in the works over the next 'who knows how long' and the creator is looking to make a list of people to maybe sorta reach out to someday.

I read that and knew I had to shoot my shot. Undertale is certainly a top contender for my favorite game of all time, I have mad respect for Toby Fox alongside the likes of the Video Game greats such as Iwata, Miyamoto, Daddy Sakurai, & Scott Cawthon. Guiding my decision making by being role models and painting a picture of what my career could look like if I stay determined and keep improving.

Basically using the BGP Greenlight Demo and Unicorn Training to pitch myself as a decent enough artist to make some minor Deltarune stuff (or at least get on Toby Fox's list of cool people to potentially contact). Just putting myself out there to see what happens, like that time I applied to be a Jr. Game Designer at Nintendo's Retro Studios. (Except I filed a full job application, made a custom resume, and submitted a game design doc for their challenge assignment to try and get my foot in that door.)

I'm not seeing this as a cross promotion opportunity or anything (my pie's not quite THAT high in the sky), but just seeing "Tony Yotes" in the credits alongside the likely 100 other artists signing up for this would be nice. Marking a piece of history outside of my own bubble. (Imagining myself pointing to some random NPC canon to the Deltarune universe and shouting at the screen "HEY! I made that one! :D") 

But most importantly, it's kindof an icebreaker if I ever get to communicate with the dude directly. They say to never meet your heroes, but I just think under the right circumstances, we could be good friends with a lot to talk about and life goals compelling us to push each other forward.

Looking up to someone the same age as me and who seems to be that same special kind of weirdo that I am is like having a platonic crush or something. Like a "senpai notice me" situation. Let's see what comes of it years down the road.