April Progress Report (Recovery & Hope)

The T-Shirt design is complete! I commissioned the services of renowned brony & pokemon fandom artist Dawnfire (who I've been a fan of for years) to get a cool-lookin shirt made to sell at conventions. Conventions that I won't be attending anytime soon... But the internet exists! So I can still send em out into the world!

 The header image there tells the story of how it went from my messy doodles, to mockups, then to an actual talented artist, who did back and forth revisions with me until it was just right, then BAM! The most beautiful Graphic Tee I've ever laid eyes on.

Everyone will be able to nab one of their very own once the Yotes Games merch website opens sometime next month (to go alongside the new demo launch). 

I decided to go with spreadshirt because after comparing many different shirt printing sites, I liked the color fidelity and huge print size they had, as well as the ability to order in bulk and even potentially host my shirts on their platform instead of my own for complete automation (but at a significant price hike and margin cut, so I'd rather sell directly).

And there was a whole lot of research and asking around to figure out the optimal shirt style for the women's variant of the shirt. I learned more about women's clothing than I ever knew after this past week. Everything from the importance of materials, sleeve varieties and their effects on different body types, to bust adaptability, temperature control, graphic placement, and collar circumference. It was a whole thing.

Needing to strictly limit the variety for cost's sake meant only one.

Other than that and a whole photoshoot for the rest of the merch, I've been clocking in a bunch of overtime for job deadlines, but as of this week, all that's behind me. Smoother sailing just in time to welcome back the BGP programmer Royal who's been stuck working in Japan this past month and a half. 

We had a big long reunion meeting over discord to get up to speed and reevaluate things. We'll still be able to have a super polished Battle demo by May 20th despite the COVID Setbacks.

And thanks to the government Stimulus, I even got back the thousand bucks wasted on non-refundable convention travel reservations. I still have the boxes of physical merch I already ordered for BABScon, but at least they're not perishable or anything. I can tuck them away until conventions become a thing again.

Took a while to find a place to store inventory and ship from. Specifically in a way that lets me have certain items grouped together just the way I want (i.e. the buttons, which come in packs of 50 for each kind). For curious folk interested in creating their own Shopify store, that shipping resource is called ShipHero. Storage is free if you get the items rotated out within 60 days.

 At this stage, gamedev is gonna get super risky, especially if I'm considering getting help with the art, a $34,000 investment that would be the most expensive thing I've ever purchased in my entire life. To be sure I really want to commit to that I have to test a few theories. 

I want to see if I can do at least one pony a day. To test this, I made an idle animation for one of the most complex ponies using this new tool Aesprite that's become the indie standard over the last few years. (About time I stopped trying to animate sprites in Gimp, this is way faster and easier.)

Made this over the span of 4 hours while watching tutorials, figuring out how Aesprite works, and (just between us) doing my remote software troubleshooting day job in the background. #QuarantinePerks

So I'm really glad its a weekend and I can put this theory to the test. If I can dish out ponies lightning fast, then that just proves that a full-time indie lifestyle would be enough to get the job done and save me the trouble of either crowdfunding over $34K or if that fails (I shudder just thinking about it) taking out a loan to get Battle Gem Ponies out the door.

A $25K minimum funding goal sounds much more achievable. Giving us up to 6 months to finish this game up with uninterrupted focus. Now let's see if we can get a polished vertical slice of the story out by July...

- Tony Yotes