Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #46 (Finishing RoShamBo)

     It's coming along now but still not done! My senior capstone demonstration got pushed back by a week so I need a build by next Monday instead of yesterday. A simplified overworld with battle encounters, game analytics, and online play. All feasible stuff. Polishing it all up for a real BGP demo release... I'm thinking it won't be done until Christmas. Everyone will be playing Fallout 4 anyway. Heck, I'd be surprised if anyone's taking time to read this when that game is out today.

Get more gamedev below.

   Completed:

• Confirmed MAGFest Ticket (No panel, just attending, come say hi!)
• Game Analytics Implementation
• Scheduled Next Semester's Classes (a little less dev time, but reasonable)
• NPC Placement
• Item Placement
• TextBox System
• Scrapped Universal Font: Noto Sans
• New Text Wrapping Code
• RoShamBo Specific Code
• Battle Determination (Wild, Trainer, or Paragon and Which Ponies)
• New Villain Character Drafts (Trying Different Story Directions)

     Lessons Learned:

• I can worry about localization (and redesign the text system if I need to) later.
• Battle gem Ponies will be localized post-launch, so worry about launching for now.
• Coding for Online Unity Gameplay isn't as confusing and scary as I expected.

     I stopped using Google's Noto Sans font, which supports characters in any language I would localize for, in order to progress with the text box system. Figuring out a way to cleanly code word wrapping (not the mess I made Unicorn Training with) was taking far too long so I started looking for easy prebuilt ways to do it instead. 2D Toolkit seemed to have the exact solution I was looking for, but it comes at the cost of having to use bitmap fonts.

The two best demo fonts available.
All the ones I found online were too pixelated.

     Of the fonts selected I went with the skinnier, rounded text because the other was jagged and blurry. That wouldn't look good on high resolution devices no matter what I did with the sizing. I've seen a lot of iPhone games using this font style anyway, so it may make players feel that much more at home. I can always mess around with fonts later since the toolkit handles word wrapping and page breaks dynamically. This is just what's working for right now and I need to get a demo out ASAP.

       With RoShamBo in a simple playable state, all that's left to do is fix some crippling bugs then add that much needed coat of paint.
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   Downloads:

   I'm really thankful for the $10 boost I'm getting every month from the PayPal donation button along the right side of this blog. Extra money like that will really come in handy once I'm saving up for adult survival facing bills, fees, taxes, and other things to bleed me dry.

     All these mini-spikes every other month makes me optimistic for the holiday sales season. Maybe a bunch of people will find Yotes Games on the app store now that I'm established there.

    Featured:

     Got a warm reception when I put the panel video up on Cartrdge. There aren't many videos up so it does stand out a bit. More views on the video is a good thing. I want people interested in BronyCon to see my game there and I want people who like my work to see me in video form (no matter how awkward I think I acted).

Now we wait with crossed fingers...

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Can't get them to walk as much as they should.
Even though steps are set to random... It worked fine yesterday.

     There's going to be a 12 hour game jam held at my school this Saturday and I plan to attend and scrape together something simple. No idea what it will be, but if it turns out good, I'll spend an extra day polishing it up and toss it up on the app store just because I can. If it's not worth posting though, there's no point in interrupting BGP development time.