June Progress Report (Art Focus)

If you're curious about the header, that's us playing with the super saiyan style arua Ultra form ponies should have. We're thinkin' the top leftmost Vinerva has the look we're going for.

STATUS

Unemployment checks are coming in, so that's a relief on bill payments, even extended the deadline a bit so we have until January 1st to make a living wage off of BGP before being financially doomed and I'll have to rethink careers until getting out of this debt mess.

So the steaks are high and I better cook em well!

It's quite the To-Do List, but it must all be done.

To get organized Royal suggested moving all our tasks to a Task Manager system he's using at work. It's called Clickup and its pretty nice and clean. Interesting to see literally everything we have to still do to complete the game, but its also cool seeing a handful of tasks get checked off in here, making the mountain smaller.

A lot of the tasks this month revolved around animations and particle effects. It's fun getting all those sorted out and it'll be killer seeing them triggered in gameplay.

And this past week I've been setting up how making Chroma ponies will work. These are the special color variations for each pony and I gotta settle on the one best Alt color for each. For the ones that are particularly hard to choose between I'll be running polls for Patron opinions (so keep an eye out for those). 

Here's the first one done, and actually working in-game now. Furum!

I've had this next batch in my backpocket for a while now. Settled on one for Poni-Bot kinda based on the Steelers  or maybe an electrical hazard (I know people obsessed with that football team so it just stuck out to me). But choosing between the couple black Vinervas might be more difficult.

Then ya got these guys:

Mauss!

I call em Autumn, Graveyard, & Purple Flurp. Can't choose a favorite yet.

As for Orscina...

This reminded me on how I settled on Orscina's look in the first place. None of these look right to me, but the one that looks the least not-right is the Purple 1st. 

Here comes Simber

The 3rd one is the first Chroma I ever came up with back when I was coming up with the original Simber sprite for the concept of the game. Might just stick with that if the others don't grow on me.

Ponatina's next! And kinda hard since I have to stick to plain colors for it to work and not look like her other forms. Gonna need to think on this one... 

Verrow's gonna look cool no matter which of these I go with.

Mothlass! (I think I gotta go with the rosy maple moth look, for honor's sake. But I like the cool palette of the first one too. It's a nice contrast.)

Rainbryte is gonna be wild, with the most varied pallet in the game and a ton of animated pieces that come and go. Or come and glow.

The Fyre-Fly reference is cool, but I'm thinking the blacked out one makes for a nice contrast with the bright rainbows of the original. Plus it'd look pretty cool if the player had a black & white Chroma Rainbryte like that for the racing minigame I have in mind.

Doing Petrifus is gonna be a challenge since it's just so flippin' cool that any of these could work. (Feelin partial to the top one currently, but preference switches daily)

Shyshock kinda had me stuck on a brain fart. Kinda thinkin only one Chroma option even looks good.

Xenoir's a tough one, kinda wanna keep it dark. Maybe play up the devil angel with the red version.

And my scrappy baby, Thestra! It's a tie between the middle two. Grayscale and Choco Mountain.

But for now I think I'll let these ideas sit for a bit, come back when its time to really implement them, and see what look truly sticks. There's more urgent tasks to check off currently so I can't spend a whole month fiddling with aesthetics, but I'll get back to it eventually.

(Let me know whatchu think in the comments tho, color combos you'd like to see, which one looks best, etc.)

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INTO THE FUTURE

The team is still split due to COVID stuff affecting dayjobs hardcore for about 2 months straight now, but things seem to be smoothing out.

At some point this week (probably wednesday) we'll have a big catchup meeting and get code-focused features up and rollin' again.

And it's really no surprise, but there is now 100% confirmation that all cons are cancelled this year. Indy Pop and Everfree Northwest included. I can keep my submissions and shoot to tour the completed game next year, but for now any big breakouts need to be done online. So going through my list of over a thousand Let's Players and messaging them one by one to play the game is the keystone marketing task above everything else planned for demo release hype.

We're trucking along and gonna get this done ya'll! Too much is at stake to fail! Countdown to January 1st stops for nobody.