March Progress Report (The Show Must Go On)

Hey ya'll,

Sorry about the late progress report this month. It's been a hectic week so I'll try to break things down as concisely as possible.

Due to the Corona Con Cancellation Craze plans had to change for the big multi-thousand dollar BGP summer tour.

Couldn't have predicted all this back in January and crossing my fingers and waiting isn't a very solid strategy so plans are in motion to have a stronger online-focused campaign. (While still crosssing fingers and hoping other cons don't cancel 3 weeks out like Babscon)

The current lineup of cons and their liklihood of postponing:

• Babscon, April 9th, (CANCELLED, pushed to 2021)
• SeaquestriaFest, May 29th (in Danger)
• Indy PopCon, July 9th (not likely)
• Everfree NW, August 9th (very unlikely)

But as you know, predicting this situation is about as effective as looking at the sky to determine next weekend's weather. So I'll continue to be on the edge of my seat until check-in.

Con related expenses wont need to be refunded since I'm fine with it carrying over to next year. Hotels have good cancellation policies, and I can always hold onto merch inventory to sell in person at later events. The real struggle has been dealing with airlines that would really prefer refunding as little as possible, but after some hours of messing around and deal hunting I got a little under half of that $1300 in tickets for two back.

(Did you know that buying 2 seprate one-way tickets to the destination and back comes out $100 cheaper than a round trip reservation on a bunch of airlines? Because I didn't till yesterday. Guess that's Kayak's secret sauce.)

Anyway, the financial situation is under control, even got taxes filed so the major losses this past year got me a decent $875 return to help cushion the losses going on here.


Now, onto the current objectives...

We'll be taking an extra month to polish up the combat portion of the game and release that as the big comeback demo, then the following month we'll release the Pinto Island self-contained Adventure mode with all the features as polish you'd expect.

The date was GONNA be 4.20.2020, but our programmer Royal suggested not putting such a tight crunch on things and push it to mid-May so we can have something with way less bugs and a lot more attack animations instead of placeholders.

And the reason this is crunchy at all is because of our bosses sending him off to Japan on such short notice for 2 weeks (potentially 6 weeks if things go REALLY bad) and he can't get much BGP done while crunching night shifts over there while also being in the country of his dreams for the first time.

So I'm counting this as at least 2 weeks of delay. But I'll stay optimistic and continue my portion of the To-Do List.

Such things include
• Overworld Sprites and Animations for vairous character & environment effects
• Importing and individually naming all the pony and human overworld sprites that have different expressions
• Finishing the Spreadsheet of "Tricky Battle Effects and How to Execute Them"
• Re-writing the NPC dialogue for the Pinto Demo
• Overseeing a T-Shirt design commission
• Setting up a Shopify store and figure out how Direct to Customer would work for Lanyards & Buttons
• Creating a BGP wikia
• Creating a BGP Presskit
• And relearning some video editor tools to get YouTube started for real. (No "Adventures in Babscon" video to warm up with)

Busy times indeed. Thanks for sticking around for it. Hope you stick around just a little more. Because things are just about to get goooood.

- Tony Yotes