YotesGames

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

February DevLog: Fully Functional Battles!

... Aaaand one month full of crunch later, we've got battles! Actual working in-game battles! You can swap forms, use moves, alter stats, drain meters, and everything! Some visual effects are still a bit rough but all that's coming in the polish stage. The most important bit right now is getting the logic behind everything working as intended.

Now, some of the special side-effect calculations have yet to be implemented, but we've thought through all the dirty details and are confident about knocking them out over the next month. That way we'll be stepping into April with everything the demo will need plus an extra week of polish to spare!

 In terms of gameplay we've got the math behind it all, the interface to make choices and display information, and the animations to go with it. Just need to animate all 168 moves in the demo and add in a couple extra touches and we'll be set!  

Come see where all the love and long post-workday hours are going to. This past month was a straight up plentiful one in terms of results!

For the full post, head on over to yotesgames.com!

February Progress Report (Good Impressions)

Kicking things into overdrive! Get ready for a MEATY post this time around, cuz I wasn't kidding about progress speeding up this year.

We came into the month HAWT with a game jam to get a battle system up and running. Attacking, deciding turn order, calculating damage, lowering health, modifying stats, applying maladies, and determining a winner. We got it down pat.

We also updated the ways we handle tasks behind the scenes, how we communicate, how spreadsheets are organized, and made a buttery smooth cloud-based development pipeline where we don't step on each other's toes nearly as much as we used to.

And here's an example of me bringing in menu layout doodles to run by Royal before settling into work. (Excuse the wetness, I was having a bad morning, partly because of a hole in my pocket and losing some valuables, including my personal/BGP backup thumb drive, in the rain.)

Those ideas then quickly turn into in-engine mockups awaiting the code and polish that'll bring them to life! 

Main focus menu-wise is the new Team Select menu, which will probably be replacing the old pony customization menu. This fits in gem storage as well as access to BVs, Move Select, and Equipment management.

Players come here to pick out their teams for VS Matches right from the title screen. We can also use this menu for the Arenas in story mode, where you pick a pony loadout before facing down this game's equivalent to a Gym.

Also, I'm borrowing heavily from Pokemon Stadium with this Preset Team Select mechanic, allowing players to setup pre-registered pony pools with fully configured stats & moves in advance for quick access later.

Also laid out some interfaces to get to the team select screen. Trying to make up screens for setting up the test battle scene turned into just straight up making the VS Match mode functional since they'd basically be the same thing.

More details on that when its done.

Same goes for the battle scene itself, which we're having trouble with today in terms of getting all the pieces to scale at weird resolutions and seeing what placeholder sprites really need to go.

But the most fun story this week has to go to the buttons! Finally got around to making the merchandise we'll be bringing to Babscon on April 10th to sell at our Vendor booth. Tons of thought went into this and the aim is to make an impression with the best ponies to be the faces of the game for us.

There were a lot of options and variants to choose from, but after asking around and getting opinions from friends and coworkers I whittled the list down to the 19 best ponies, 1 of each class to best represent what this game has to offer in terms of lovable and cool pony designs. (See the header image for the final picks)

Next thing you know, badda-bing badda-boom a whole box shows up. The painful part was taking em out one-by-one, straighting out the pins on the back, and squeezing 11 of em into the slots of a bunch of containers I ordered off Amazon.

Ended up lookin' real nice too. Sorted em alphabetically and just spent all of my Valentine's night boxing up buttons to promote this passion project of mine. (What truer love exists than that for one's own hopes and dreams? None. I'm very single and very busy.)

Got 6 full containers with 1000 pony button  ready to go! All made with the templates I setup to quickly make a bunch of these in a uniform style. Outlined pony sprite with a drop shadow on top of symbols for the class it is and the background color of that class. Super vivid colors and a face with contrast you could see across a room.

I put outlines around the pony sprites using a new tool I discovered in Aesprite. Definitely gonna take advantage of this knowledge and outline things with this all the time.

And when it came to ordering the buttons themselves, wacky enough, it took em a few tries to get it right, despite basing my template on the pixel perfect one they gave out. 

They got straight up [erfectly cropped circles and the pure square versions from me. Sometimes it felt like they didn't even try. Almost caved in and ordered these after a particularly long night shift designing them, thinking that's just how buttons are. Too zoomed in, too zoomed out or even just cropped strangely. 

But then I thought about what this product means to me, how BGP deserves to make the best impression on everyone, and I got the energy to stay up late (or is it early if you don't go to bed til way after sunrise?) and messaged them back and fourth until all 20 pony buttons looked good. Eventually they got it right. All was well.

Went ahead and ordered a bunch of lanyards too. Something to put those buttons on or at least snazz up some convention attire.

It's all pretty darn expensive. Spent a couple thousand on everything so far. Plane tickets, hotels, merch inventory, tax forms, permits, all that jazz. And that's before we even get to the T-Shirts. The most expensive thing to sell several times over but also probably the one thing we're likely to run out of fast if other people end up loving the idea as much as I do.

Came up with this mood board to get the feeling of the type of shirt design I want. Something cool, universal, represents what this game is all about. Video Game Crystal Ponies Fighting each other.

And so then I got cracking on doodles, research, and mockups. Already had an artist in mind as well as some backups. Found the cheapest T-Shirt maker with the highest quality and ability to sell online as well as wholesale for cons.

Got the idea down, and now we just need an artist to make a version that actually looks good. So I chose Dawnfire. Famous for tons of artwork for conventions and overall aesthetic Queen who draws things exactly the way I wish I could. Can't put it into words, but its exactly what I'm looking for with this shirt in particular.

Hoping to make a good impression with this artist too since I'd love to be working with her on a regular basis for tons of ideas I'm cooking up.

Her commission rates are as follows. (Plus quite a tad extra for the design I'm doing and the fact that I'm selling something with her work on it)

It's aaaalll for building up the brand. To make sure people see anything about this game for the first time and be amazed at the quality and interested to see more. Basically the same feeling I vividly remember when I saw Pokemon for the first time. It was Stadium on the N64,  the bigger kids were playing. It was Gengar VS Wigglytuff on the Elite Four tower level. Gengar used Night Shade, my jaw probably dropped, and my life was never the same. I need to recreate that feeling for as many people as possible. Especially kids.

Printed out this new banner for the booth. Gonna hang the one with the Japanese spelling error on the back so anybody in the arcade looking over can still see some Battle Gem Ponies and hopefully get curious enough to walk over. Gotta keep as much attention as possible when we get there.

On that note I also ran the first ever Yotes Games facebook ad last week, just to see how that all works. Cashed in an offer for free $20 of ads, threw in an extra 15 to cross that thousand view guarantee rate and let it fly.

It was really interesting to see, and I hope to see numbers that big on a regular basis once things really get going.

And I'd say the most interesting part was finally firsthand experiencing what all this data-based marketing hoopla is all about. What it really comes down to is the ability to oh-so-easily pinpoint your exact target audience and get as specific as you want, so that the algorithm puts more focus into playing your ad for people who like most of (if not all of) the tags you list out. So I specified what a brony/gamer like myself would be and targeted the ad there.

So, lots of expenses this month... Should balance out. I'm throwing about a 4th of my monthly paychecks at BGP stuff now since its all cylinders on FIRE right now.

And I'm also aware that we are DEEP in the red right now, but Patreon is definitely helping with the new things popping up each month. It's gonna be worth it. Especially if Babscon goes well and some serious buzz starts up.

I'm handling all the bookkeeping, tax prep, and accounting stuff myself because of the scary $500+ bill for help is just too steep on top of everything else I'm doing.

But now with merch bought, permits prepared, taxes filed, accountants consulted, and bookkeeping complete... We can March into March with all eyes on development and polish.

Even made a checklist spreadsheet of all the stuff left to do. There's a lot, but we're checkin em off rapidly.

We're gonna keep at it until this gets done. Nothing is more important than being ready for Babscon right now.

Thanks for being on this hype train before it was cool, guys. Wanna make you proud, and leave you with a final game that makes the best possible impression. 

January DevLog: Battle System Framework

Rapid progress continues. We've got menus up and running better than ever, some really polished placeholders, fleshed out design notes, charts and graphs for pony stats, hundreds of character animation files, and most of the math behind the revamped battle system!

You'll need to get more info on the Yotes Games website this time, cuz this one's gonna be a doozy!

January Progress Report (Winter Wrap-Up)

It's been an exhausting yet exhilerating few weeks into the year already. Making killer progress with the game's menus and managing data behind the scenes as well as making a whole bunch of pixel art graphics to dazzle you all with once the next demo comes out.

There's been countless discussions about how the game's mechanics work over lunch, weekends have basically become weekly game jams, we've got a discord going with daily progress screenshots & GIFs, the game's design document has never been fuller, there tons of communication going on about the intention behind every idea and design decision. IT's just felt like we've been on fire since crossing the line into this new decade and we're really going for it.

Here's a sample of what I'm talking about when it comes to design notes:

And if you're following us on Twitter you've probably seen a few #screenshotsaturdays of sprites being drawn up. Trying out apps like Sketchbook, Krita, and Pixel Studio to find ways to draw on the go and also do some minor digital doodles without having to buy a drawing tablet by just using my phone and a stylus. Getting used to it still,  but its handy.

Adding in neat touches here and there to make the interface look super-fresh and I think it's already a dramatic improvement over what was done in the last release. Things I noticed Let's Players struggle with are being updated for clarity and the game's new mechanics are shaping the layouts of menus for the better.

Been making templates for animating people and ponies in the overworld, seeing how far I can push these 22x24 pixel graphics to get the expressive characters I want players to fall in love with. A little something unique to each one so it's not just [insert generic rpg monster/npc here] following you around and spouting speech bubbles at you like some kind of cyber-puppet. They all need to feel alive.

We're in for a big crunch the next couple days, calling it the Polish Weekend where we sit down together in person and touch up every last detail in every menu to get it to a state where it's prototype release complete. Not coming back to edit these pieces of the game til way down the line, so they gotta get wrapped up here and now.

All this is being done so that next week we can get the overworld's basic mechanics up to snuff before diving into Battle Weekend where we get started on implementing the combat system that's down on paper, and making sure its much more stable than what was released in the 2017 build.

Thanks again to everyone who's been patient with this whole thing. I'm sure everyone knows by now that game development is crazy hard, but its the crazy passion from me radiating out and bouncing back twofold from you guys that keeps this from falling and evaporating into development hell. Things are moving forward and I'm sure you'll get that Patreon Exclusive first-look by the time this winter wraps up.

December DevLog: Prototype Detailed

Battle Gem Ponies is shaping up nicely. The fun little details are being added in now and we're seeing how far we can run with the little things being implemented in this prototype.

 We've got villain concept art, working data, cutscene scripts, character animations, working menus like the Ponipedia, and calculations for the battle system all done over the holiday break! 

State of the Game 

The main accomplishment over the winter break was fleshing out down to the tiniest detail what all is going into the prototype demo from a player's perspective. The moment-to-moment action that'll immerse people into the BGP world while testing out all the mechanics we want proven to be solid with this sort of grand re-opening event.

Each interaction, mechanic, cutscene, and unlockable was planned out in a way that tells a (simple) story, provides an engaging (hopefully comedic & sometimes epic) experience, and demonstrates what makes BGP different from other RPGs in the collectible monster genre. 

 I also decided to make the overworld characters a lot more expressive. Taking advantage of their huge heads and eyes and visible arms to make more poses for cutscenes so that the emote bubbles don't have to carry the entire conveyance of emotion. 

This stuff is meant to all come together to make the moment-to-moment experience of playing this more interesting than mashing A to get information and proceeding the aim here is to entertain. As well as show off the look, sound, and feel of the major character types like Mavens and the Paragon Cartel. 

All the base ideas will be in this time, really giving a sense of the final vision this time. And I'm excited to see people's reactions to the nuggets of personality injected into everything to make this world feel much more polished and alive than last time around. 

Behind the scenes we've got data structures mostly figured out and a plan for tackling the challenges of the combat system. We've figured out formulas and formats to get everything to work as intended, Royal has found miraculous ways to speed up compiling time and streamline the code, and we're overall getting much better at communicating and tracking schedules. 

Those weekly meetups do wonders. We chat in detail about everything we're working on or have done, computers in hand, at my place or his to clarify things that just don't get across clearly over text or in whispers at work.

Additionally, Royal's been implementing the menus one-by-one at an incredible pace. We go back and fourth over Discord about exactly how certain mechanics work or what systems interact with each other, and which spreadsheets control which variables. 

It really feels like something important is accomplished every day and the excitement keeps building toward that prototype launch day. 

Setbacks 

Having a whole week off from work is the exact opposite of a setback. Unfortunately in the grand scheme of things we're a month behind where I thought we'd be back in October. Winter Break was going to be battle system implementation time but team meetings were had and we came to conclude that polishing the overworld, redesigning menus, confirming how we manage data, and providing a detailed scope were more vital in these super early stages, so January & February could be spent 100% focused on battles.

 Next Steps  

Really looking forward to the coming months, the buildup to Spring is gonna be intense, but it really feels like we're on the verge of something amazing. Can't thank you patrons enough for your endless patience while this small team figures out game development.

It's because the trust you've put in Yotes Games that we want to deliver not something that's just okay or as good as expected, but something that blows expectations out the water and has the quality of a timeless classic.

It was nice showing the fine folks at EQD what we've been up to, but that's just a reminder that we're still out here making this game happen. 2020 is the Year of the Yotes! We're gonna come outta the gates swingin' so I hope the internet's ready!

Big thanks to everyone who stuck around during the last couple years of chaos that could've killed the project and my career if the fact that so many people are still following this game closely and still donating to make sure financial burdens can't halt it... 

Really means everything. Thank you, for following the development of Battle Gem Ponies.

Happy New Years, Everypony

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.

November DevLog: Getting the Little Things Right

Despite numerous distractions like travel, coma-inducing Thanksgiving meals, and an intense workout regiment to counteract it all, progress is still being made towards BGP's public prototype launch.  There's a lot of little changes being made behind the scenes to turn this into a super smooth operation that can sidestep mistakes of the past and there's still a couple week's worth of problems to solve before we can touch the combat system itself. 

State of the Game  

The current task is another big one to chew away at, but is gonna result in incredible and visible progress come December's winter break. I need to make some script templates for every object in every interface so Royal Pizza can see how it's all supposed to work together. In the meantime he's tackling the ones I've already covered with him in the Wednesday meetups.

Separating all the pieces of the game into little manageable chunks and configuring those chunks to each be largely independent (or is dynamic a better word?) in a way that allows for rapid changes in the future that won't result in an avalanche of bugs like before.

  Setbacks  

So I guess here's a good a place as any to bring up the biggest factor for slowdown this past month. Lately I've been skipping out on exercise in favor of getting in more BGP time despite the 41+ hour day job workweek sapping away my lifeforce. There was even that period a few months back where I was just super depressed and exhausted by the end of the work day I couldn't get anything else done and just ate and slept off the stress.

Well, all that stuff over the past year caught up with me bigtime. I go to the doctor for a physical around my birthday every year to see if I'm dying or not, and for the first time... The answer was a "kinda". It was a warning. 

My family has a history of diabetes and according to the doctor those 30 pounds of fat I gained since the last visit are put in the bright red danger zone of TOO MUCH SUGAR AND CARBS so his response was basically "Stop skipping exercise and start eating less bread, ice cream, breakfast donuts, pasta, and pizza or you'll be too dead to enjoy a long career working at that game company of yours."

So I'm taking this seriously. Home-cooked meals and daily salads. Dumbbell by my computer so I pick that up instead of my phone when my computer's compiling. Random stretching throughout the day to stay ready for the next workout. A stricter sleep schedule  and setup that'll have me knocked out in minutes instead of 30 or so minutes of YouTube. I need to get on top of this and still find a way to make 4 hours of BGP work.

So now I'm making sure to include a solid, MINIMUM, uninterrupted hour of exercise into my daily schedule no matter what (and that's not counting prep, warm up, cool down, or showering after).  I don't think I can replicate the 2-3 hour sessions I did before getting a day job without seriously putting BGP behind, but this outta be a great holdover while I'm trying to get this off the ground and free up an extra 8 hours of my day. 

Lucky for me, the new office building my employer had us move to is literally 5 minutes of "Get up, put on shoes, walk to car, drive there, and park." as a commute, so traffic is no longer a problem and I've gained the ability to eat lunch at home, meaning either an extra 40 mins of BGP in the middle of the day, or a quicker lunch break that'll have me home half an hour sooner.

In addition to all that, I had an intense talk with my bosses the other week about things to change up so I can perform my best, which was lowkey making my day job relationship with the team a lot more like how I work on BGP now. Focus on design and direction, less on programming, troubleshooting, and debugging (which are the real sources of stress for me in this field). 

They've accepted my request for a lighter workload and are allowing me to delegate a lot more which is a huge load off my back. So hopefully I can translate that extra energy to more BGP and more intense workouts day-to-day.

It'll all be real nice once I get into the groove with things and feel like I'm making notable progress in all these important aspects of my life.   

  Next Steps  

So soon I'll have about 2 weeks to myself to sit here with my programmer on call (and a short 10 minute drive away) and crank out something incredible for everyone to play during the new year.  April is approaching fast and the game needs to be in beta by then for the convention plans to work so the fire is lit and we're going for it!

Should hear back about whether the panel/vendor applications to any of em were accepted by the next DevLog.

November Progress Report (Menu Setup)

This month's main objective is to get the various interfaces up and running. My task is to lay out, anchor, color, and attach scripts to the sprites [complete]. Then hand them over to the Programmer for data display and management. Then once he has em all nice, dynamic, and  functional I add some polish and other effects to make em look beautiful. 

Like, imagine this but all animated with glowy effects and actual pony faces instead of placeholders everywhere.

It's gonna be pretty tedious to get every single menu up and ready, but I'm down for jamming out to the Pokemon Sword & Shield OST and cranking these out all weekend.

And speakin' of Pokemon... 

I noticed the series catching up with my ideas on Quality of Life features like Mints for skipping EV training, a dynamic Bike replacing HMs, Name Raters in every PokeCenter, and so on. The core of BGP is still unique though, meaning the shapeshifting 3v3 combat system, balanced roster, and buddy adventure story still differ enough from the Pokemon games that inspired this to stand out and give players a unique flavor of RPG. 

It's cool that Game Freak got around to adding all the small stuff I've been wanting since I started dreaming up this game 10 years ago, but personally it's still not enough. 

There's a certain direction I wanna take Battle Gem Ponies as a series that I can't see Pokemon Company doing anytime soon, especially with the way the development of their latest game was handled (I'll just say, shockingly cheap & rushed for the creators of the highest grossing franchise of all time).

So I'm completely undeterred and dead-set on getting things setup so I can make the RPG of my dreams. In my head I have eyes on the long-term prize:

BGP1 - Introduce the world to the concept that's been in my head since 10th grade.

BGP2 - Open World Competitive Multiplayer RPG dream game.

BGP3 - Big budget, super-polished, hyped up, eSports-worthy 3D Adventure.

Feels like if I keep on this path and give it all I've got and more, then I'll reach those dreams. One step at a time...

But for now, it's back to work! I got menus to finish!

October DevLog: Full Speed Ahead!

The initial hurdles of learning to work together and getting a foundation in place for the project are all behind us now. The Yotes Games team is hard at work every day and we're knocking out features one-by-one.  

Here's a tiny bit of redecorating for the Battle Gem Ponies Download Page in anticipation for big things to come...

  State of the Game 

Now if that ain't the prettiest code ya'll ever did see...

And I'm sure you can tell from the GIF above that the gameplay is already looking much smoother than it was before.  Lag, tile snapping, animation skipping, and all sorts of other little kinks are all being ironed out as the new programmer (who wants to be known as Royal Pizza going forward) redesigns much of the behind-the-scenes architecture.

He's been turning my spreadsheet CSV files into Scriptable Objects so when it comes time to implement the things I put in there, it's just a matter of clicking a few things and the game is updated. Royal Pizza's always got new ways to increase efficiency and we're cutting out the repetitive steps of this game-making progress one problem at a time.

The end goal is to have data management be no more complex than some multiple-choice boxes and sliders.

Unfortunately though, there was one thing that had to be done the hard way... Animation.

 Setbacks 

Animate each pony. And its ultra form. And the chroma color-swaps of its normal and ultra forms. AND make separate UI versions of each of those! Also reorganize the files in a way that makes them easier to find and edit. Double also, the 15 finished ponies need to have each individual frame replaced by the color-swapped versions as well. 

Doing this literally over 7,000 times was a HUUUUGE grind.

Got real familiar with my mouse's keyboard shortcut controls this way...

I spent about 3 weeks straight animating placeholders for every pony and human in the game. Right now most of the ponies (All 60, plus Ultras, minus the 15 that were already made before the Great Computer-Crash Calamity of 2018), well, just stay still. Static sprites posed in their initial idle stances until I get around to fully animating them. 

Which can be done as one of the very last steps before release. Just making sure each pony is animated as they're added to the newest playable build. Same goes for the humans which are getting additional facial expressions, blinking, and dynamic poses for specific events  and personality quirks.

Everything in this game is meant to feel alive. I want players to get super invested in the world I'm trying to build here. A big part of that is shaking off the notion that this is just a pokemon clone. 

Oh. And while I was at it I also came up with a new water navigation idea that fixes the Sapphire Sea variety problem. You see, now in addition to any water pony being able to tug you along to sail on your hover-surfboard, you can also be pulled along by any pony with even modestly powerful wings allowing them to fly and you to jet-ski behind them. 

Any pony that meets neither of those criteria either float in the air behind the player avatar or sit tight in a little futuristic raft being tugged along by the player on his/her hoverboard. There's also a secret option of having an ice pony at the lead of the team that can freeze up a tile path beneath you and let you just walk/skate across the ice in order to basically walk across water. Outta be nice watch players discover that one .

Jet-ski style with surfing or flying ponies gives you the extra ability to dash and quickly zoom across water, which will be helpful in minigames to come. But at least now it's possible to progress without forcing the player to have one of the like, 3 water ponies in the entire game with em at all times. And it also means you can run into a wider variety of enemies out at sea, both trainers and wild ponies. 

Also, it's completely unrelated to the above paragraphs, but look what the overworld follower system can do:

Everything is being built in a dynamic way this time that allows for easier editing of the project, and a more polished version of the vision we're bringing to life here. 

We also ran into a bit of trouble with the menu files. RP couldn't find the ones I made (tucked away in a poorly named file hidden among similar junk files) and spent a week preparing his own by laying sprites over the screenshots I sent him, thinking those were just mockups. 

It was a time of stress and frustration for him since it overlapped with a bunch of overtime and other very un-fun dayjob related stuff (they have him doing documents and meetings more than actually programming anything over the past year and it drives him nuts). But the big crunch is over, I salvaged the original files, established some rules about no more working on features without at least sending a quick message first, and now things are back on track.

Menus look more like this when they're all spruced up in-engine. We've got the variables tracked. Just gotta make it all functional now.

Whenever something big is done, it's just a matter of hitting "Upload" and the other team member gets all the files added to his version of the Unity project. We have a nice rhythm going and it's super soothing to know each time we do this Unity automatically stores a backup. 

But we each also make local backups before uploading or downloading changes just to be safe, and I even store extra copies on a flash drive and to Google Drive just to make certain we never have another data-loss Calamity.

 Next Steps 

We hold monthly showcase nights where we have friends come by to see the game progressing and explaining the latest developments and features to them in-person pretty much the way I do it here on Patreon. This month was basically just explaining the project and showing off tile-based movement.

But its not a complete game loop yet, so nothing worth you patrons installing. We're optimistic for getting overworld and menus in a playable state by the end of November then spending all December on the battle scene and having a new demo to play by the start of the new year.

So keep an eye out for that stuff. These are very exciting times for BGP and I can't wait to show you all exactly how much better the overall quality of this game will be now. 

Workin' together to figure this out!  Two heads make better decisions than one.

October Progress Report (Grid Movement, Animations, & Teamwork)

Earlier this month I said I'd talk more about the new workflow for Battle Gem Ponies now that there's 2 people on it on all hours but 9 to 5. Having a programmer help me tagteam this is such a godsend and we are straight zooming through the to-do list at record pace. We might even have a release window in mind, but more on that at the end of this post...

Anyways, I thought I outta post some examples of our back & fourth chatter over discord to show how we communicate outside of our weekly dev meetings at my apartment or our quick back & fourths at work when the bosses aren't looking,

It's sort of magical how some problem comes up that would normally sidetrack my day and throw off the whole schedule, then I just have to explain my intention and the problem gets resolved overnight while I stay focused on what I was doing. Then TWO things get checked off the list and it feels amazing!

Brandon really knows his craft so all he needs is for me to occasionally point to a direction and he'll just go after it like an eager retriever.  It's all very reassuring.

And there's a sense of productive competition between us where we show up to the weekly meetings with some surprises or impressive work to be pushed to the shared cloud build and it inspires the other to kick things up a notch for the next meeting.  

Features are coming along all at once and the game is really seeming more and more feasible this way. Like a 5 year project can actually be done within one year when the work is divided up and a detailed plan is already laid out. 

You can save, copy, and delete files now.  All the game's variables are in place and ready to be manipulated to suit our needs and form something fun with. We're finally ready to roll!

So enough gushing about that here's some cool stuff we're making right now. Brandon's messed with the TextBox system lately and is getting the hang of making the Zelda-style dialogue flow. And sent me this teaser:

(before you get excited, no, ponies don't talk. that'd be just silly)

Meanwhile I've been reorganizing the project files so that they're easier to manage in his code. But I was truly getting sick of the snails pace I had to move in to get thousands of files renamed in similar ways. So I had to check google because SURELY someone somewhere has had a similar issue and came up with a solution. And they did. 

There's a program called Advanced Renamer that lets you perform a bunch of file renaming tricks in any order you want to get beautiful results. The changes were like night and day and we both appreciate the new naming conventions for it all. 

We can now take a bunch of messily named files across multiple folders...

Drag & drop em into this list here, pick a few rules like "Swap these two" or "Put this string of letters here" and hit 'Start Batch' then poof! Hundreds of renamed files in a matter of seconds instead of hours.

Then I just repeated the steps for everything else. Sound effects, animations, sprites, all kinds of things that were pretty messy or hastily done back in 2016 or so. New and improved for smoother flow.

Before:

After:

It's so much easier on a dev's eyes this way...

Naming conventions really have a bigger impact than you'd think starting out. But speaking of conventions...

Really seems like brony-focused cons are shutting down left & right. 2020 might very well be my absolute last chance to run a BGP booth at one of these things. So I looked into it, calculated the costs, and concluded that I should go for it. 

Each of these cons will cost about $3,000 straight out of my pocket, so I need to be prepared to risk taking a $10K loss for the sake of trying to promote BGP straight to the target demographic while also gaining some firsthand salesman experience by pushing merchandise in a vendor hall next to super talented artists selling much nicer looking stuff.

Here's the cost breakdowns of the 3 cons I'm considering for 2020:

(prices rounded up to the worst case scenarios)

(Possible additional expenses pending and could be taken from my personal budget's food expenses if its under a few hundred.)

Assuming my YouTube plans go well, a boost in Patreon numbers could make those numbers less scary (Or at least cover taxes & tips). I'll be putting student loan debt on hold while throwing everything I've got at this convention tour. Then after launch I'll set my sights on bigger expos like PAX.

(running one of these in the heart of brony territory would probably do wonders for the brand)

If I were to do more cons or expos, funding would have to come from managing to sell out on merch and pre-orders or Patreon boosts from attending these ones. 

I've already sent in my requests to run vendor booths and panels at each of the ones I could, and now we play the waiting game...

But if you were curious about what those panels entail, here's some blurbs about what they're about.

Who's that Ponymon?

Game Development Q&A &  Let's Play: Battle Gem Ponies! 

Who's that Ponymon is definitely the newest and most ambitious panel from me, but I can see that being whipped up quickly then reused at tons of conventions as a fun & interactive panel. I also had an idea for a brony gameshow that was gonna be brought to the last bronycon, but I don't think that one can be done in time for this, so I'll just store it for later should another opportunity arise. 

Also, just thought I'd mention how very aware I am of the popularity of the new Ponyta. 

(And the neigh-sayers. See? Even the big boys at their best get picked on.)

An overwhelmingly positive reception overall though. Guess there are folks out there craving "ponymon" -esque designs... If only someone were to make something catered to that large, overlapping MLP/Pokemon fanbase.  

But besides all that one final thing coming along this month is the revival of Yotes Games on social media. Got DeviantArt, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram content coming on a more regular basis. And I even finally posted those Magfest pics and videos from January. (remember when I did a whole detailed writeup on my first expo booth?) 

Feels like a shame that I'm missing out on having BGP floating around as a word of mouth deal during all these final goodbyes and swelling of emotions around the MLP finale, but there will always be a time to shine later. Still need to focus on getting something polished and playable out there first.

Exciting things are coming ya'll. And I can't wait to share more with you. Now to make up with this post being much wordier than usual I think I could share a bit of valuable info with you. People are always asking this question to developers and I vowed to never answer it with more than a "when its ready"...

But I think you Patrons deserve the inside scoop about the release date of Battle Gem Ponies...

By our estimates, there is approximately 25 weeks of development left (and that's giving a generous amount of extra time). Beyond that there could be added time for rebalancing, playtesting, and timing release for a marketing boost, but for the most part, it looks like this could genuinely wrap up next Summer. Perhaps in time for E3 season?

We'll see. But for now, take comfort in knowing this game is actually coming out now and you WILL be playing the finished version some time next year. 

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.

August DevLog: Variables & Messes!

 State of the Game

I converted all of the game's 600+ variables into Playmaker Globals that can be accessed both in scripts and easily within playmaker itself now. It was pretty tedious and took a few days of work to finish what i started but things are ready to be put into action now.

There was even quite a bit of renaming and restructure to make sure that this time around every variable and every function is crystal clear, so no more tangled webs of code I'm afraid to touch. Everything needs to make sense, be efficient, and be accessible from anywhere. 

So now I can focus on the logic that makes the game work. The building blocks are here, now I just gotta put em together.

Setbacks

This past week I've been down with a nasty coughing flu, ruining what should've been a super productive hurricane vacation week (OH, the timing). Combine that with how just as soon as I'm feeling decent enough to sit upright and work, I make a colossal mistake that took and entire Saturday to clean... 

I FOOLISHLY had my Visual Studio Find & Replace settings set to the Entire Project for some reason instead of just the current script I was working on. Long story abrupt, I replaced all "0"s in the codebase with "_" signs. Including all the built-in Unity code i didn't make AND the hundreds of plugins I imported. As you can imagine Unity didn't like that. And it wouldn't let me undo.

If you can imagine dumping glitter all over some precious priceless white rug, or dumping a mug of sand into your gaming keyboard and being tasked with removing each individual grain, or just having thousands of glass shards scattered across your backyard because you're the special kind of klutz who makes cyber-mistakes on a weekly basis, that's sort of what I'm dealing with here.

Had to Find & Replace every possible scenario where it wouldn't make sense for a _ to be and replace it with a 0. The tricky part is accounting for all the variable names involving a _ next to other common symbols. I can imagine this saving me a week's worth of trouble.

After going in and trying to clean up as efficiently as possible, it came down to having to remove the remaining bits of the mess one-by-one and that ate up a day. In truth I should be making backup files on a daily basis, but my last one was just before I got sick about a week ago and I guess this is just how the universe wants to remind me to stay sharp and not laze for a second.

Lesson Noted.

Next Steps

Need to get started with a playable game loop. Have it so you can walk into grass, start a fight, then leave the fight, and repeat.

If I get that much done I can finally stop beating myself up about the game not even being playable. The sprites are here, the variables exist, I figured out playmaker, I got controller inputs to work, the menus and interfaces have been laid out, the entire project's been reorganized, and even the old code logic has been recovered for reference. 

All the pieces are in place. Time to make the magic happen.

July DevLog: Aha! Now I see...

Time was in fact wasted cleaning up old code and creating all those Variables in EzDataManager, because Playmaker isn't as compatible with them as I thought. Extra oof because I spent a couple weeks tidying up my old code to find out enough small pieces were still missing to not have it working the way it did 2 years ago. 

All the hoops to jump through to get these scripts & plugins to play nice with each other just aren't worth it so I scrapped EzData, and disabled all my code while I recreate it all in Playmaker Finite State Machine language. 

It's a lot less devastating that it sounds, cuz Playmaker turns complex stuff simple once you know where all the tools are. (But it's a pretty big toolbox so I got a little lost until I took the time to read over everything and study tons of example projects.)

I'll admit that it took me an embarrassingly long time to get the basic fundamentals down. Dunno if its stress, losing my touch, or what. But after getting my feet on the track I've been able to run ever since. 

Turns out you'll get tons of stubborn infinite loop errors without having little buffer states called "Next Frame Stalls" between everything that checks updates every frame. Not how I'm used to coding, but after 2 days of headscratching I'm wrapping my head around it.

Other than hiccups like that Playmaker is super sleek and helping me make sense of the game's logic in a much clearer way. I can tell this time investment will be a net blessing once I get started on combat stuff.

Making the game feels more like a logic puzzle now than a scavenger hunt for syntax. If I just keep at it, one little feature before bed each night after work & exercise, by this time next year I'll have a complete game on my hands, being stress tested by super hyped patrons and followers (and my doctor will be proud I replaced daily pizza with salad). One step at a time man...

Unfortunately this is a pretty slow pace compared to what I was expecting, but hey, I'm the one who chose to make a video game. Ya know, the hardest and most expensive kind of art to do... And after 4+ years and countless other sacrifices, there's no turning back. I clearly love this idea, so it will see the light of day.

Even if its late. Even if the Pokemon backlash comes and goes. Even if Friendship is Magic is long gone. Even if I have nothing to show at the very last BronyCon ever. Even if I can only squeeze out 2 hours max of relaxation throughout any weekday. Even if I basically miss an entire generation of gaming to make this one. I'll keep at it, because I truly love this game.

Whenever life comes at me with its worst, Battle Gem Ponies is the one thing giving me hope. I want to see the future where I can say it was all worth it.

June DevLog: A World Restored!

The biggest win this month has been the successful revival of the lost Tilemaps I spent a week on just a while back covering all the zones to be available in the Alpha demo.

After the tragic loss of the Battle Gem Ponies files during what I call The Great Calamity, one of the losses was the overworld layouts I converted from graph paper doodles to playable micro-worlds.

I was disheartened for a bit while I thought they were gone for good and I'd have to make each one again, which was a shame because of how happy I was with how they turned out (including all the little touches I didn't have down on paper that made me love these Work in Progress towns & routes. 

After checking through old hard drives and google drive accounts on a whim, I came across the corrupt backup files for Battle Gem Ponies and came across the tilemap data. After importing that into Unity and reassigning some missing scripts and prefab data I was able to make somewhat salvageable versions of the maps and just do touchups on what's left. 

And in case you're wondering what the Letters are all about, each one stands for the object being spawned on the invisible layer of the map. W for walls, D for doors, R for readable objects, N for NPC paths, and T for triggers affecting game data and cutscene events.

Some maps recovered better than others, but at least they're mostly all there. It definitely beats starting from scratch and its now easier to remember those extra little touches I put in place. Don't mind the placeholders in these screenshots too much by the way, these tiles exist just so I can tell what everything is supposed to be, everything's getting a major polish up and new sprite from scratch once the Alpha is all laid out and playable.

Now I completely remember how the old way I layered these things was really hard to follow. I needed to come up with a neater way to tell my future self where every object goes in a clear and concise way. (Instead of vague nouns and layers left in the order I drew them)

The new way I'm going about organizing these layers is a specifically named ID system where 0 through 7 describe the depth and a simple name describes the subject belonging in that layer. 

You'll have things like dirt on layer 0, water over the dirt on layer 1, decorations over the water on top of that, then step effects from wandering characters, the characters and interactibles themselves, then things covering their feet, things hanging overhead, and tints to change the colors of everything on a tile.

There's also things like reducing script redundancy. Instead of having different scripts for NPC AI, Partner Pony AI, and Player inputs all using similar code to navigate the world and animate, I cut those parts out and made a more universal script for handling character movement and animation that the objects could share (Getting rid of some bugs and reducing future dev time in the process).

You can see here that I've been using a little journal for notes and doodles. I keep this next to my composition book of graph paper maps on my desk so I can jot down ideas for the game during those long minutes where the computer is frozen up compiling something in Unity. I figure it's a healthier habit than constantly opening social media.

I think it's all the little optimizations like that which can improve productivity and keep my willpower flow going, cuz lord knows it's just all that determination and all you guys cheering it on keeping this project alive.

A big thing I let eat up way too much of my time was all the app store maintenance that needed to be done since I haven't checked on those accounts in a while. Had to do things like update Unicorn Training to run on 64-bit devices, reconfirm publisher info, and figure out this infuriating two-factor ID thing. 

If you've been following me for a while you'll remember me putting all Unicorn Training earnings toward getting a Macbook since it's the only way to legally upload a game to the app store. But I guess the number of hoops to jump through weren't enough for Apple's taste and now developers need at least TWO Apple devices to publish. One modern Mac product and either an iPad, iPod, or iPhone with at least iOS9 is required.

Basically what it comes down to is I can't just rely on my Macbook and need at least 2 devices to keep my games on the app store. Luckily I have a busted up (as in chunks missing, unreadable screen, nonexistent home button) iPod Touch Gen 5 that just barely qualifies and I can get away with that for the time being. 

I've really been bogged down with work, weight loss, and depression. On top of the 42 hour workweek having me sick of staring at Unity by the end of the day, I've been waking up super early to get a workout finished before heading to work so that when I get home mentally exhausted I don't have to worry about forcing myself to become physically exhausted too. I have more time and energy to throw straight at BGP this way and every little optimization like that counts.

Working out for a solid 2 hours a day is a must as well. I have a year's worth of depression gut going on and literally everyone I interact with lets me know it (daily). So skipping that more than 1 day a week isn't really an option if I wanna return to my old happy go-lucky super healthy self. 

It's silly because the main reason I'm in such a rut is because I wasn't able to get this game done a year ago like I wanted. Life problems all started stacking up around the same time, immediately after graduating college. Welcome to adulthood, amirite? 

But that's enough with the boring stuff. Gotta remember what this is all for... Battle Gem Ponies!  

Getting this thing in the hands of the people is priority #1. It's long overdue and this prototype phase needs to wrap up by the end of next month if I want to actually make a 2020 release date. 

It's important to get a demo out and strike while the iron is hot too. Fans are starting to get upset over Pokemon's shortcomings. Seems like I'm not the only one tired of seeing the highest grossing franchise of all time not putting those billions back into the core product that made them superstars in the first place. 

I wanna show the world what one guy can do with enough time on his hands. A passion project that checks all the boxes of game design, storytelling, visuals, music, and characters. Then I wanna REALLY go nuts on the sequels to show what that same guy can do with more resources. 

But for now... All eyes on what can be done between now and the 1st of August. Looking forward to showing off some gameplay, folks.

Late Post is Late (and possibly abridged after rewriting)

Was literally minutes away from posting a super long update full of pictures and explanations of whats been going on this month. Then power goes out and I lose all forward momentum... 😑

Oh, the irony... This is so familiar.

No drafts saved. Spent like an hour writing that and gathering screenshots. Its the little hiccups like this stacking up that make me wanna lay on the ground screaming instead of working myself to the bone

Alright, alright. Deep breaths...

All part of the journey. New post in a bit.

(Really need to invest in a backup battery for the desktop pronto if I wanna survive Florida's summer)

May DevLog: Back to Basics!

I spent more time trying to figure out new tools than actually implementing anything, and that hurts. This stuff was meant to make things easier and faster, but I find myself hitting roadblocks and playing stop-n'-go when I've only got a few hours in the day to focus completely on gamedev. 

It's maddening and I think I'll need to brute force some stuff just to see anything get done. 

I've got CSV Tables working. That's the spreadsheet stuff that lets me spell out what moves do and which ponies have which attributes, then scans them during gameplay to print information onscreen. I went through a lot of heck trying to find a better way to do all that, but in the end the old way was tried & true. Same thing with Global variables for controlling save data and seems to be happening with animating sprites.

The current problem I'm facing is coming up with a smooth way to animate things like pony sprites without  jumping through a bunch of hoops.  I did  it before, but it was convoluted so I'd rather it not be this time. Unfortunately each new strategy I try comes with it's own problems or setbacks that have me thinking I should just stop with the experiments and move forward with what I know. 

So that's kinda what I'm doing now. Taking the few things that worked out like Playmaker, but  combining it with things like Odin-enhanced versions of my old scripts to see this project through.

Other than that, I'm relieved to have the variables figured out. Now I know which numbers and names are the most important to keep track of and which values are worth writing to save files. Things were messy and confusingly labeled before so I made sure to be extra clear and organized this time around.

This game's officially got variables and data tables that update in realtime. So the hidden logic behind everything is up and running. I even tested out an Xbox 360 Controller for input and it just works thanks to Unity's Rewired plugin. Now I just gotta show cool looking animated things based on that behind-the-scenes data. The fun part begins in June... 

My number 1 goal is getting a prototype finished ASAP. Something playable to kick off the hype machine. More Pokemon games and clones are being announced for mobile by the day, making my game look more and more like a copycat falling behind the times. I need to get this out there. Like, yesterday. 

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P.S. Looks like there won't be a Magfest VS style gameshow for the final BronyCon

Ah, well. Gives me more much needed time to work on BGP itself. So far that one's panel looks like a maybe. Happened last time. Got confirmed a couple months before the event and I jumped on it. We'll see if that panel comes through. 

Either way, if you're going to the con, I'll see you there! 

April DevLog: Align the Stars!

     Currently still getting everything into place to make sure this works out perfectly. I'm really just taking it one day's mission at a time in order to not get overwhelmed and stumped by paralysis anymore. 

     I mean, this project gets really scary when I think about how much work there's left to do and how much my life depends on it coming out at the right time with the right quality and shown to the right people in order to take off the way I need it to. 

    It personally helps me to just zoom in and focus on the individual pieces, that way when I look back at the project as a whole every month, I can get a sense of how impressive progress has been.

State of the Game

   I have screenshots galore for you guys this time around! A whole buncha updates to old layouts and a few new ideas on top.

     The snapshots below are all in-engine mockups with placeholder data. That means the buttons you see actually exist and the menus can interact with each other. Each menu also adjusts to any landscape screen resolution, so it fits well on any rectangle shaped screen.

     Next I gotta use data-binding and monoBehaviors to populate them, which is nerd speak for filling in all the blanks and gibberish with actual numbers and sprites. After that I'll use PlayMaker to handle anything trickier than having certain GameObjects appear and animate. Then comes portrait mode...

     Here goes the first example of a menu overhaul. The left one is the newbie, now featuring 6 slots for weaknesses (since you'll be hard-pressed to find anypony with more than that) as well as room for squeezing in the GP meter. 

     Another addition to the screen is the filled bar beneath each stat showing the base value in the stat's color. Any buffs will be represented in bright teal, and any debuffs show up as grey. It looks messy here, but it'll be more clear once it's actually up and running.

     Another example of a revamped menu is this here Options page. Now using sliders instead of making you click 10 or 20 times to get to the sound level you want. 

     When leveling up you'll get to choose to upgrade your health, mana, or stats. This should do wonders for replayability as you try out different specs each run in addition to different pony team combinations.

An extra surprise for leveling up could be your pony learning a new move right then and there. You can choose to add it to your moveset immediately (all the text is placeholder junk for now til I put something in there, but this is pretty much where I'll be putting everything).

On the left you'll see details for the new move, on the right you can compare it to the move currently in the slot it's trying to occupy.

     And we've got a new storage screen here. Picking out your pony team now resembles selecting a fighting game character! Looks cooler this way, I think. We'll see how it looks after I add a bunch of fancy effects.

     And the last really noticeable change is in the Party screen. Listing the party members more prominently and trying to make it clear that the top one is the currently active form who's stats you can see. 

     Your pony's travel moves are listed on the left side, showing if anypony in your party can cut/surf/smash/etc. allowing you to do those things in the overworld without a second thought. 

     I'm also gonna add some finger pointing cursors here to demonstrate how to select a pony from the pool then place it in one of the 3 party slots for use in battle. All=around, things are looking cool.

Setbacks

   Figuring out CSVs was way more convoluted than it needed to be. I wanted to find a more efficient way to read from these things without the massive slowdown present in the last build of the game. What ended up actually happening was a week full of failed attempts, false starts, and a couple instances of wasted assets. 

     In the end, it looks like I'm better off moving forward with what I know works instead of wasting another week trying to get what should be a super basic thing to compile properly. I'll just need to get clever with how and when I load these things to keep slowdown from annoying anybody.

     I tried going back & fourth troubleshooting different excel spreadsheet reading tools and just ended up nowhere after days of effort. I know this is an opportunity to revamp everything, but sometimes it's wiser to just let go and follow the path of least resistance to get to the destination I'm after.

     Here's to hoping there's no more unforseen snags in the road ahead. This journey's gonna be long enough.

Task List

     There's still a bunch of things to do before I can go around promoting a new demo for the game. Getting to the complete prototype milestone is taking much longer than expected, but it seems like this time around I'm getting the bulk of the hard stuff out of the way first.

My upcoming tasks for May are as follows:

*************************

Prototype

*************************

1. Foundation
   1. Fill in Save/Load Scripts with proper references. 
   2. Test CSV scripts for reading new spreadsheets 
   3. Test Interface Localization pipeline (English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese)
   4. Make Debug Controls affect variables.
   5. Make Menus fully interact & animate.
   6. Playtime Tracker Script
   7. Hold Escape to Shutdown or Bring out Debug Button
   8. Data Bind to populate Menus.
   9. Tile Map Process Test on Demo Island
   10. Grid Navigation in overworld with D-Pad input.
   11. Pathfinding system test. 

If I can manage to do all that, I'll be proud. Putting the YouTube ideas on hold til there's actually something to show. I want a new demo out there more accurately reflecting the new vision for the game.

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     There's a bunch more screenshots to see if you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, so keep an eye out there since I usually can't help but post a thing as soon as I finish,seeking attention and riding that high of actually accomplishing things.

     Thanks for your unprecedented patience and hype for this game that's taking me half a decade to finish. Without that monthly reminder that patrons are out there counting on me to get this game out, I'd be way less motivated on these endless weeks of work/excercise/gamedev. 

Trying real hard to get my act together over here, and you guys keep me sane. Thanks for being the earliest fans of Battle Gem Ponies.

March DevLog: Warmed Up & Eager!

        A lot of gamedev went on this past month. Hope to be dishing out some videos on the matter soon enough. See what's cooking so far on this super-wordy special edition devlog!

     It'll be the last of its kind as we know it as I transition to posting these updates on YouTube while saving the juicy behind the scenes secrets with just YOU patrons. 

(So be on the lookout for videos coming to the Yotes Games YouTube Channel by month's end.)

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog (February: Charted Out)

 I'm basically a month behind the 2019 master plan. Cleaning up the multi-hundred page design docs for BGP is taking way longer than I thought, so to celebrate fresh beginnings in March, I'll be switching over to framework development and save polishing out the details for when they become relevant. 

     So for right now, what I need to have on paper is the final list of mechanics, what assets I still need to make the vision happen, and what interface changes have to be implemented. And here's a good example of what I mean. Get a full look at what's going on in BGP development on the main blog! 

https://www.yotesgames.com/2019/02/battle-gem-ponies-devlog-february.html 

BGP @MAGFest 2019! (The 1st 4-Day Con Booth)

     This past Magfest certainly was an adventure! Supplies were gathered, 2 friends volunteered to help, and we ran the biggest Battle Gem Ponies booth yet. And for 4 days straight! I thought some folks out there would like to see what that adventure was like so catch a write-up on this indie dev experience on the Yotes Blog...  --> 

DevLog November 30th, 2018

Really looking forward to what's to come. To be this pumped up about the project this many years later, and somehow feeling more confident about how it'll turn out has to be a sign of love. This project means everything to me and I have to see it through. 

DevLog Nov 14, 2018

    Serious planning has begun, so far it's only been preemptive measures and bookmarking things to come back to later. Now I'm getting down the fine details of everything I need to know, do, study, and purchase in order to make the most out of this Magfest trip.

BGP DevLog #195 (Inspiration Manifestation)

My entire past week revolved around a game that wasn't mine for once. I took the time to play the newly released followup to my favorite indie game of all-time (Undertale, in case you didn't know) and it was time well spent.

I came out the other side of those credits re-energized, inspired to work harder, and pumped up on well-designed RPGs and quirky/interesting fantasy worlds. Overall, a nice reminder of why I love gaming so much.

See what notable new design elements are coming (without getting too specific) along with some Earth-Shaking indie dev news on the Yotes Blog.

DevLog: Nov 1st 2018

Happy Halloween, Folks! (Give or Take a Day)

     Only thing scarier than the monsters out tonight is the possibility of Battle Gem Ponies getting delayed again. Amirite? Harharrr!

But really.

     You know how everybody hates the sound of their own voice in recordings? I've been tackling that uncomfortableness all week. The scripts may be written, but I swear saying all this stuff out loud is more difficult than I anticipated. So used to monologues with the voice in my head for decades, my poor mouth muscles can't keep up. 

     Tons of shoots and reshoots, capturing this narration while I adjust to pronouncing things clearly, using an audible voice, and not making any weird mouth noises. Ooohhh, it's a process alright. But at least they're coming along. Might be a week delay between each one until I get into the swing of things, but my YouTube channel is gonna be a lively place pretty soon. Keep an eye out.

It's been a while, so here's some gamedev goodness: yotesgames.com/blog!

Changing Direction

Like, literally all the posts from the last few months have been depressing #sadboi news and this blog's not about that. Gotta pick up the pace with the videos and breathe some energy back into the hype machine!

January 2019 is when I'll be going full steam ahead, but I definitely want these videos out there holding you over til I have new goodies to share.

For those sticking around through this super rough patch, I thank you. With everything I have. 

You patrons still throwing money at me especially. It's incredibly motivating to know theres still a handful of people out there who believe in me to such an extreme that they're paying for the game multiple times over just to make sure it'll exist. 

I really, truly cannot wait for the day I finally hand this thing over to you.

DevLog #192 (Missed the Train, So Up the Standard)

     Tiny bits of progress get done week-by-week and right now I'm one step closer to getting those YouTube videos ready to fill in the gaps. With scripts written, it's a matter of recording all of them and splicing a few videos together.nI can hope it takes a weekend, but I'll just take this one day at a time. You know how I am with deadlines.

Get this week's GameDev news and introspection on yotesgames.com

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #190 (Lackluster Progress)

     Here's my attempt to associate with the moth meme. Just wanna make a public PSA, the Battle Gem Ponies project is NOT dead. It's just kinda on life support. It's hospitalized. Yeah. Progress is still going, but at a snail's pace. Which (believe it or not) is a lot worse than usual.

     Gotta throw that out there because dev time took a massive hit while I'm trying to get a work/life balance going while also living an hour away from the office and ALSO trying to get back in shape after months of little exercise and ALSO, also fussing over finances. It's a mess, and I'm trying to get back on track. Time really flies when there's two endless mountains of work to handle and spend a third of the day sleeping.

Come see what I managed to squeeze out of the last 7 days.

Welcome Home.

My new workspace is Visual Studio Code. The super popular coding platform.

Completed: 

• Submitted Demo to Magfest Judges (Hope they like what they see. Threw in a little warning about the bugs.)
• Wrote More YouTube Scripts
• Setup Visual Studio
• Discovered Tons of Helpful Assets on the Unity Store
• Learned Some Programming Techniques & Syntax from Work
• Made a Mothlass Promo Pic (and saved the template for reuse with other ponies)

Lessons Learned:

• My particular coding habits have formed over years of adjusting to just what works best for my brain to assess what's going on. The spacing, the pop of certain syntax, the completely black background allowing me to hone in on the important text better. Everything I do has some minor psychological trick going on to help me quickly read and understand my tens of thousands of lines of code.
• Visual Studio Code is popular for a reason. There are tons of neat little features and add-ons that make it an ideal environment for quick, neat, beautiful programming. I just need some time to get used to using it.
• Honestly, I was lost trying to just figure out how to customize the colors to the way I had them in MonoDevelop. I figured out how to hack my way into just about every color setting, and the ones I couldn't fix don't look too bad so I just decided to move on with my life. Check out the before and after: 

MonoDevelop Color Scheme (I'm calling it, "Yotes MonoDark")

And here's what it looks like now. (In "Yotes Neon Dark")

A bit more colorful thanks to using a spinoff of the popular Dracula color scheme.

       Finally dug back into the code of BGP and it felt like coming home after a long, long trip. Back to my nice, clean, orderly home. Fresh and ready for even more improvements with everything I've learned from my travels.

     A type of comment I see a lot is people assuming the project is dead. I've been quiet for so long a rumor of it getting a C&D apparently got in some people's minds. I really need to get my YouTube videos lined up and out there on a regular basis. 

Man, I really just made a mess the delay decision... Hoping to make up for lost time.

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     It's been so hectic trying to squeeze in literally any Battle Gem Ponies time. Whenever I get the chance to sit down long enough to get into the groove, something interrupts me or I glance at the clock and see I have to wake up for work in 6 hours. 

     I found a way to turn my 60 minute commute into a 45 minute one, and cut my exercise routine in half (and only do it every other day), but I'm still getting next to nothing done indie games wise. Significant progress comes in 4-6 hour chunks and I'm just scratching half of that if I'm pushing myself. I really need those 2 hours I spend on the daily road trip.

     Eager to move as soon as possible. Waiting for these life-changing paychecks is agony.

Hiatus is Over, Battle Gem Ponies is NOT Dead!

The last few weeks took a lot out of me, the devlogs went up on my site thanks to auto scheduling, but I could never squeeze in the time to repost on all the other sites and social pages until now. 

I really have my work cut out for me these next few months, but this is going to be as worse as it gets. Only getting better from here as I squeeze more and more time out of the day to actually get BGP stuff DONE. And you patrons will be the first to know about it and play the darn thing. 

Development Update (Aug 22, 2018)

Yotes Games is in serious need of financing, so the search is on. With the way things are going, I may have to rely on a mix of day job hourly pay and Patreon support to carry me to the next BGP milestone.

That beautiful Vertical Slice to share with the world. A super polished vision everyone can see.