May Progress Report (Anticipation)

Doing my very own EDM fueled crunch night after night over here to get things ready for initial launch JUST 3 DAYS FROM NOW! 

As an example, all yesterday (9am to 3am) was spent making sprites for ALL 360 moves so that we finally have organized placeholders to work with. Now I'm spending today importing them all so that we can finally start animating them (But won't have em in time for the 20th). 

Nice finally having such a daunting task all complete. Makes things much less paralyzingly scary.

So many pieces! Can't believe how much can get done in a single day with intense focus. (Hope we can keep up this pace, cuz time's ticking.)

Also got some placeholder weather effects in. Dynamic stuff that looks neat on every battlefield. First lets see Sunshine.

Nice and glowy. Gonna add some subtle dust particles or something to fill the air but this one's near complete. A much harder one to pull off is gonna be Rain.

The top is a dynamic rain and wind system with rain drops that splash against solid objects. A more realistic looking rain system. The bottom GIF shows the pixel rain version based on a different prebought asset in Unity. I want to combine elements of both to find the nicest look and feel, but for now sticking with pixel rain and moving forward. Next up is Sandstorm.

Just gotta replace some sprites and this would look pretty neat. I wonder how mobile will handle all these particle effects going on in just the background.

Then Snow and Oblivion effects are pretty self-explanatory.

It's just super nice having a bunch of scary stuff in the past. Even the CSVs have recieved lots of love, finally filling in information like all the moves each pony learns and at what levels. Then all the battle stats and functions are finally planned out to the tiniest detail so Royal can begin coding the more complex battle mechanics. 

Attacking development from both sides, Royal making the Battle Loop player friendly while I'm cranking out the last of the tedious tasks so that we can kick off June with super-interesting rapid development. Where each DevLog update can come with a new playable demo with improvements people can actually appreciate from the outside looking in. 

Up til now the game has really been all behind the scenes setup and stuff that's not all too interesting to folks that aren't into knowing exactly how games are made. But now we're finally getting into the fun stuff. Looking over the state of the project as of right now makes me really proud and I can't wait to watch this grow, starting with you guys playtesting the heck out it!

And I'm super excited to get to the game balancing part of development. Going over the spreadsheets now I can already see changes I want to make. And other sections are just fun opportunities to inject some personality that the ponies really need. Like check out the Ponipedia entries here.

It's all coming together. As I mentioned in the last major update, I'm in dire financial straits due to being not really, but kinda actually basically fired. So I have 6 months to start generating at least $1100 a month or else I'll be in financial ruin and need to consider moving back with parents and job hunting, basically 2018 all over again. 

I bust out the old credit cards I had finally gotten cleared and hid away half a year ago. They'll help cover living expenses starting June 1st and they'll last me up to November if I'm real frugal about it (Royal is still fully employed and doing fine as far as risk goes, this little gamedev venture is all on me).

Did a bunch of spreadsheets and accounting to be certain about this. And I've decided to go for it. I'm betting my life Battle Gem Ponies here and now. I either make this a thing, or put my indie dev dreams on hold indefinitely while I clean up the mess I'm about to get into.

The whole world's on fire and like a phoenix I think it's about time to be reborn. Take advantage of this opportunity to go all-in on a risky dream. Just this one last time. Third time's the charm, new decade/new beginnings, plus I'm not getting any younger with 30 approaching, and all that.

With this kind of fire under my butt and all the time in each day to make it happen, I'm feeling confident about finally breaking out of development hell and releasing my dream game by year's end.

With that said, do forgive me for pushing this merch store in like, every post going forward, because it really is going to be a big help in addition to Patreon. You guys have kept me going for years and now more than ever each month's payout is a huge sigh of relief and clears some big scary bill looming over the company.

Hopefully as the official biggest BGP fans on Earth, you guys will find something here that suits your fancy. The shirts in particular have been selling really well after the BABSConline event last weekend. I've seen a few friends and family members rockin the gear and it makes me warm and fuzzy seeing these pony characters I put my heart and soul into on real things in our physical world. Hard to explain the feeling, but I love it.

Hopefully you do too:  https://merch.yotesgames.com/  

Now, back to development! New demo outta be up by Wednesday night! At the bare minimum a playable battle randomizer with basic attacks working, followed by a huge update on June 1st that we're gonna try to blow up.

We could just delay the demo again, but I feel like I've done that way too much to you guys over the years and its time to do or die. So you'll finally be playing the same build as we are. 

Going forward Patrons get first dibs on the dev builds we play as we update them every couple weeks, and the public will have access to the monthly updated "stable builds" that way we can all see this project grow together. And you can provide feedback the whole way through to help us make things even better!

Exciting times to be in the know about BGP. Thanks for sticking with us through all this.

See you Wednesday.