Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #113 (Roster of 12)

     The new ponies have been implemented, the animations play, and I even dealt with sprite distortion bugs. Altogether, adding these new ponies to the game has pretty much eaten up this entire month and I need to find a new way to do all this. Efficiency is a must if this game is set to come out in time.

Separating each pony sprite took longer than expected.

Can't unsee the similarities in color. Just hit me while making the overworld sprites.

Dealt with this annoyance as I was writing this post.
Bugs involving in-game pony transparency & color issues.

   Completed:

• Implemented 6 New Ponies
• Fixed Sprite Importation Bug
• Updated Unity

     Lessons Learned:

• Separating each pony sprite takes too long.
• Animating the remaining 80+ ponies will take way longer than I think.
• I believe the transparency bug may have something to do with the recent Unity update affecting my likely out-of-date 2D Toolkit asset package. I fixed it by tweaking some settings, but can't help but worry that the foundation of my game will be outdated sooner than I think and I'll have to start from scratch with sprite importation on a BGP sequel a few years from now.

       Separating each frame on the pony sprite sheet eats a LOT of time, so I think before I add any new ones, I need to start using an in-engine spritesheet method like I do with NPCs to animate ponies.That'll mean having a clean, evenly spaced sheet for each pony though and keeping track of their individual dimensions to save as much space as possible.

     I think that in the end it'll make the file size slightly bigger, but I'll be able to implement new ponies much faster. Basically cutting weeks off of development time.
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   Downloads:

    Featured:

     Extended the playlist of BGP gameplay videos with uploads like this one. The turnout is much smaller compared to the initial Greenlight release, but that makes sense because the update was a much smaller splash than the launch boom.

     That's why I need to get this game in the hands of a bigger YouTuber. Hopefully, with the next update, the demo will be impressive enough to entice more people to show it off.
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     The month's halfway over and I'm nowhere close to where I wanna be because of my slow pony spriting pipeline. Time to kick things into high gear now that I'm back to coding. Let's see what I can get done within a week.