August Progress Report (VS Match Teams)

We're getting pretty good at this teamwork thing. Splitting up duties between 3 developers and focusing hard on implementing features. 

For example...

Chroma Ponies 

My entire past few weeks have been dedicated to adding in the fully animated sprites for the chroma variants of each pony. So now all the playable ones have alternate color palettes to choose from!

The chroma selection process was certainly more art than science. throwing out a bunch of random combos at the wall to see what sticks. (As in random hue shifts, trying black and white, and color shifting specific parts for each pony until coming across a color that grabs the eye.)

Had to be sure the new colors were different enough from the original to be worth the price of the super rare Chroma Scales you'll need to collect to unlock each of them. So after picking a color out (and changing my mind several times for a certain few) I mess with the colors on that variant some more until I figure out where the appeal lies then go with that.

We'd be happy to show em all off right now (all 60 ponies have this), but then there'd be no exciting reveals for later, so you'll just have to wait-n'-see...

VS Match Teams

Psy has been revamping the Team Select Menu so it works more intuitively for setting up battle. Getting functionality on that screen bit by bit. All the while drafting up screens for the other aspects of battle setup that need to be completed by the end of September.

This neat pop up will let you choose which Ponatina form to select (you can only bring one of em into battle). I drafted this up just now, tonight at the weekly meetup, when we noticed that we needed a convenient way to change Ponatina forms without having to create all-new assets.

Battle Effects

And on the Battle Effects front, we've got the basic functionality down for simple stat changes and whatnot, but Royal is still working on the animations that go with each of the 180 moves in the upcoming demo. (Purple marked ones are for the upcoming demo. "X" for Done, "-" for Work in Progress)

Coding the systems that will handle the more complicated formula-based attacks is still underway with a lot of COVID-related dayjob overtime interfering with dev time, but it's moving along decent leaps at least one night a week when we've got everyone together under one roof to hash out ideas and examples.  

We've also updated the pony sheet with nicknames for the Chroma color schemes. Gonna put these in-game in a rather entertaining way when we get around to that surprise.

More to Come

Aiming for an End of October VS Match demo at the current pace we're going. The guys are planning to spend multiple weeks of vacation all at once when October comes around so these one-night-a-week game jam sessions can become a three weeks straight sorta deal and that's when we'll really knock stuff out. Looking forward to that.

Excited to show you more stuff soon!

 - Tony Yotes, on behalf of the Yotes Games team