Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #16 (Milestone Complete!)

     The BYOC is finally over! I can take my foot off the crunch time pedal. Long story short, I lost the contest and hosted it poorly, but finally got a playable version of BGP in people's hands and made some friends. My game needs a lot more love before I can go around flaunting it, but I'll worry more about that once I catch up on schoolwork in prep for finals week next month.

Get some elaboration below the break, including a link to the BYOC Build video on YouTube.

   Completed:

• Cut Teaser Link, KO System, Separate Health Bars, and Real Stat Icons From BYOC Build
• Added Placeholder Music
• Updated Music Inspirations on Blog
• Uploaded First BGP Video
• Backed Up The Battle Gem Ponies BYOC Build (A Keepsake)

     Lessons Learned:

• I lost the BYOC competition because I had a convoluted way of tallying votes.
• Next year, I'll have a simple 1-5 star system to count feedback votes. I'll also put more work into letting people know about the event so they know where to play and where to vote.
• I discovered Fibbage at the BYOC, which makes me want to experiment with creative social games in the future.

       Here's a copy/paste from my PCT GameDevs Facebook Page:
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The BYOC is over! Game Expo Winners are as follows:

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1st Place: Ramen Man
2nd Place: Recursive Ruin
3rd Place: Summervale
4th Place: Bouncy Sponge
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The scores were determined by the number of votes given to each game in each ranking position. The judges' votes counted for 3 times as much as normal ones.

The number of votes for each attending entrant are as follows:

Summervale: | 1st: 0 | 2nd: 4 | 3rd: 6 | 4th: 5 |
Battle Gem Ponies: | 1st: 9 | 2nd: 2 | 3rd: 2 | 4th: 2 |
Recursive Ruin: | 1st: 5 | 2nd: 6 | 3rd: 5 | 4th: 5 |
Ramen Man: | 1st: 11 | 2nd: 10 | 3rd: 3 | 4th: 1 |
Bouncy Sponge: | 1st: 1 | 2nd: 3 | 3rd: 3 | 4th: 7 |
Venturous: | 1st: 0 | 2nd: 1 | 3rd: 3 | 4th: 2 |
Quadtris: | 1st: 0 | 2nd: 0 | 3rd: 3 | 4th: 0 |

I messed up in my rush to count votes for the prizes and forgot to multiply Ramen Man's judge votes by 3, leading me to read Battle Gem Ponies as the 1st place winner over the microphone. Counting Ramen Man's extra numbers and going by the rank system, BGP get's knocked off entirely.

I'm currently trying to contact the 1st & 2nd prize winners to arrange a prize exchange.
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   Downloads:

Seeing some pretty cool numbers this week.

   I've been thinking about tossing a $1 app out there as a result from the game jam. If I make even $100 from it before August it'll be a great help towards getting that Macbook.

    Featured:

     Battle Gem Ponies was playable at the BYOC. It was well received and could have won second place if I had a ranking system that made sense. Aside from that, it feels nice having a complete game loop. It'll just take a while to get it looking nice.

It is officially mid April. I'm sweating in my seat guys.

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     This past week was incredibly hectic and stressful. Tons of things went wrong, but at least it's all over now. There's a ton of neglected schoolwork to catch up on before diving back into fixing Battle Gem Ponies. As far as the contest goes, all I can do is learn from this year's mistakes and do better next time.