September DevLog: Forming a TEAM!

I finally did it... I caved in and sought help. You know those plucky prodigy millennials, 25 and under, somehow both fresh out of college AND equipped with 5 years of professional experience with a portfolio stretching across multiple related software / hardware / IT / & database sectors of an industry? 

Yeah, well I found one of those. His name is Brandon Deaton. He's the coworker I've basically studied under over the past year, and he's the friend that gave me the desktop I've been using since all the Macbook files got corrupted. This guy is the best programmer I've ever known and he wants to help me finish Battle Gem Ponies and become the first long-term member of the Yotes Games team.

Here's us being goofballs

Now let's let this all sink in... I'm  now getting help from a professional programmer to take on all the annoying bugs, holdups, syntax, behind-the-scenes logic, and Unity errors while focus on the part of gamedev I love most: designing it! 

He writes a script, I lay out a tilemap. He fixes a downloaded asset that won't compile, I design artificial intelligence for the characters. He comes up with a brand new system for saving and managing all the game's data, I come up with a clever way to layer objects in a scene to make them easier to edit later. He makes all the playmaker charts while I animate every visible sprite in the game and balance the hundreds of variables. 

Thanks to this setup and splitting duties based on what we each prefer doing more, the game is coming together at a blistering pace! I mean, the groundwork's all laid out. Super detailed documentation, all the code outlines I have written out, every single thing is thought out on paper and we just have to follow the notes really so there's no going in blind.

This is a godsend. It feels like I can actually work on the game now that the tools are all there and the wrangling behind the curtain is being taken care of by someone who lives and breathes that stuff.

By far the biggest development this past month has been finally asking for help. My dayjob is software development using the Unity Engine and there's a whole software team dynamic going on there. Each person handles the stuff they're an expert at and if a task is too overwhelming or out of your scope of understanding, you find the person who's got the skills and they get the job done. Wow, I know right? It's like magic!

There were months and months of playing with the idea of forming a team or at least paying someone in the office to code certain things for me, Jokingly discussing having my coworkers join in on this crazy train. Then came the existential crisis I had from realizing it's been exactly one year since I started working there and Battle Gem Ponies still doesn't have even a vertical slice yet. 

What's holding me up the most? Why is this so stressful, shouldn't it be fun to make to be fun to play? What am I doing wrong? What's missing here...?

Well, for starters, I've always fantasized about just feeding the computer my ideas and having the game come to life at the speed of thought. Or I'd fantasize about running an indie studio where every day there's radical progress on all aspects of the project on a daily basis instead of me having to pick and choose one feature to focus on each week. 

Basically, this is the best thing ever. Because now I can focus completely on the aspect of development I love most. Bringing the ideas to life. The hard stuff is handled by experts that love doing those bits as much as I love designing. 

 So now, Yotes Games has 2 experienced Musicians, a professional Programmer, and a Creative Director leading the vision. Sounds like a team to me. Finally a use for this logo I made in high school! 

From a business standpoint, I'm super careful and picky about who's in on this, which is part of why I didn't dive into teamwork beyond musicians right away.  I wanted to wait til I had a successful game under my belt before trying to hold any kind of authority. I wanted the credibility first, to know that I could do it all on my own if I had to. But I really don't have to. There are people around me willing to help and there are specific things I want done that I'm fully confident they can do.

Right now it's just a matter of avoiding folks wanting a huge percent chunk off the game's revenue on top of what's already going from taxes, platform royalties, and what I already promised to the musicians after release.

There's really no money to grab here, so unfortunately payment upfront isn't even possible. Then there's the issue of there not being a set in stone release window. Or buildable demo because all the files got corrupted. Until now BGP's been on life support thanks to both the most generous and patient Patrons in the world and my own indestructible will to see this thing through.

And now my gamedev power feels like it's gone super saiyan. I'm more hyped up about development than ever thanks to Brandon!

I mean, this guy eats programming challenges for breakfast AND lunch. He puts in more hours than even me thanks to his (sometimes concerning) sleep schedule (or lack thereof). He's just as sick of 40 hour office life as I am and has a genuine passion for programming tools and systems for whatever he sets his mind to, and in this case, it's creating a Pokemon-like RPG.

I have approximately zero musical talent and I clearly can't put my heart into programming, leading to years of frustration, countless setbacks, and buggy games that make me audibly cringe when watching players come across errors.

Should've taken the hint my soul was giving off when I dropped pursuing a Math Minor in college after sitting in Calculus 3 realizing programming is just a means to an end and I just want the dang game to work. All that's what attracted me to the Unity Engine in the first place. Someone else took on the hassle of the engine so that all I have to do is pay them what they ask and get busy makin' the game already. It's a beautiful arrangement.

Feels like we're rowing along at a fantastic pace. More than I possibly could have before and we're pushing each other to keep exceeding expectations each weekly meeting/showcase and peeks at a days work over Discord chatrooms. I can actually see a finish line on the horizon now.

And of course everybody involved in the project is getting a slice of the pie, but the main point is, nobody involved is even that concerned about the cash at the end. Well, except for me since the sooner I'm out of debt and able to do this fulltime the better. Eric is happy making music as a side hobby while he pursues engineering, Justin is happy with being a musician and is more concerned with getting his work out there than becoming the next SoundCloud millionaire, and Brandon's had a great enough salary for so long that he's months away from being completely debt free and already has half a decade's worth of hefty retirement savings tucked away and growing.

So if anyone here is desperate to make sure this thing turns a profit, it's me. Which works out since that's one of my job duties here anyway. I have to market and sell this game to turn Yotes Games into a sustainable business so we can make games instead of taking up boring IT jobs forever.

But I digress... To give you a clear picture on what we've been up to since the last update:

Week 1 - Explaining the entire project, the old code, and my workflow. Also setting up a blank project to work from and Unity tools for collaborating remotely.  

Week 2 - Gauging ability with example features (Overworld Navigation & Unity Bugs). Cleaning up documentation for getting my ideas across. Getting broken Unity assets to compile.

Week 3 - Development really begins, Title Screen becomes functional, Overworld input & grid movement are bug free. Tile Sheets are reorganized. Explaining more about the game world and long-term vision of the series. 

Week 4 - Testing tilemap & other workflows, reorganizing project to stay clean, clear, and consistent long-term. New way of managing the user interface. 

Week 5 - All 5 Prototype tilemaps are complete, prefabs organized, pipeline established, tile brushes created, new animations imported. Data management & new save system coded.

Now I could go on and non for pages about this whole thing, but I'd rather not make this too wordy and save some stuff for later. From now on, expect 2 Patreon updates per month. One on the 5th of each month and another somewhere in the middle to show off the latest feature or milestone.

In a couple weeks I'll give you guys a nice long peek at all the fantastic things coming along.

I'm really excited to show you more of what we're cooking up, so stay tuned. The future of Yotes Games is looking very, very bright.