December Progress Report (Eventful as HECK!!)

This has been quite a month so far, everything is moving at a nice pace as we gain momentum to CRUSH through into the new year! 

For starters, we not only got accepted into BABScon as vendors, but were offered a special position in their Arcade!  Here's some screenshots of what went down:

So we basically get to be the first thing people see when walking by or walking into the arcade for this con. Definitely a great way to bust into the scene and make ourselves known to the Bay Area bronies hardcore enough to show up to this convention.

Battle Gem Ponies stands as the living proof that this fandom still has ambitious projects backed by determined people packing-in as much love and quality as they can. The wave of creativity spawned by the bronies still echoes far and wide.

There was lots of internal debate back and fourth about which position to go with, but in the end, RoyalPizza said to go with my expertise, if this is my element I gotta figure out what makes the most sense and go for it. Ended up making a chart that made things pretty darn clear.

Some of the items in the chart above were proven false, but still, the idea stuck. From a "What's better for promoting Battle Gem Ponies?" perspective, setting up shop in the Arcade is the best choice. Now we just gotta make sure we don't disappoint! This booth has to be bigger and better than Magfest's by a mile!

The next super cool thing on the Done List is the color scheme for the GP bars in battle. I was trying to think up a way to have a max of 50 GP represented in a visually interesting way instead of the standard blue mana bar. I decided to go for something resembling a fighting game's Super Meter instead. 

So you'll see a big number on the left inside an animated gem icon that tells you how many bars you have left beneath the one you see ticking away. Each bar has 10 ticks inside that need to either vanish or overflow before the color changes to reveal the next layer.

I settled on a palettes that  matched nicer with the vibe I got from the mockup image. Contrasting Yellow & Purple, shifting hues a bit as the layers climb higher to make things more visually distinct. Like everything else, it's subject to change, but I'm really diggin the look so far.

Now one more awesome revelation so far is the progress made on data management. We've been working towards fixing the severe lag problem by storing all the spreadsheet data into in-engine managers called Scriptable Objects. and if you're familiar with programming, it's basically like making a class out of all the spreadsheet entries, but these guys know the nifty trick of pretty much populating themselves.

The trouble with this part fell onto my shoulders, as after Royal was done coding the tools making this possible, I was tasked with creating a Scriptable Object for every row in every spreasheet, then fixing up the variables Unity couldn't populate on it's own by searching for it in the Assets folder and drag/dropping it all in.

I'll tell you right now, it sure is a grind doing this several hundred times. Even worse when you mess it up and get things out of sync with the numbered naming scheme. Or when you try to rename something in the spreadsheet, then gotta remember to rename all the places in code it changed, and fix the base files using the renaming tool which doesn't account for numbered things so you gotta get rid of em to think of a new way to order sprites, then re-alphabetize the code to stay consistent, THEN you have to rename every scriptable object coming after it alphabetically one-at-a-time because re-ording the code makes everything else out of sync and... and... sheesh...

Nobody's here for that mess. Long story short (but still long-winded), we finished updating all the data handling so that this game can run smooth as butter and be updated at a faster pace in the future.

Guess I should also mention that some gameplay elements are going through revisions as we go. I made all the moves, items, and abilities years ago, so naturally I have even better ideas and better ways to balance them, so it'll be fun to go over everything with a fine-toothed comb and make the game more fun once the prototype is in a more playable state.

Here's a preview of what I'm talkin' about:

• Iron Tail has been renamed Metal Tail
• Iron Shield has become Iron Coat, no longer just buffing DEF 2 stages but now the description reads " The user applies special coating on its exterior to provide resistance against Steel class weaknesses."
• Ki Blast has now become Ki Blasts to further differentiate from Ki Wave. Now it fires a barrage of 3-8 energy balls dealing 10 damage each.
• Nature Power will now change its secondary class based on the environment.
• The piercing attack Shatter is now a powerful Status move that destroys defense buffs.

All those changes and more on the way as we march towards the big 2020 demo! Hope you're still as hype as we are about bringing this game to life.