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Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #116 (April Release Part 1)


     Working hard to iron out the bugs in the current version of BGP by Friday. After that, I have a lot of behind the scenes restructuring to do in order to make the game ready for code-completeness. Goal is to just get everything in there and working, no matter how simple/ugly the sprites are, and finally get the hardest parts about developing this finished once and for all.

     That way I can spend the next few months doing the fun stuff. Making maps, drawing prettier sprites, and testing what's fun to play. The polish can come later, but right now, I really want this game to have a solid foundation. So here's part 1 of that. The Penultimate Pinto Island Demo!


   Completed:
  • Levitation Code
  • Ridable Furum Pony
  • Move Execution Bugs Fixed
  • Animation Libraries Reorganized
  • Sketches of More Map Layouts on Paper
     Lessons Learned:
  • Releasing rushed & buggy demos does more harm than good. And honestly, not that many people care yet. I can take my time and come out with something truly impressive.
  • Steam Greenlight might be staying a few months longer. Seems like they're still brainstorming new ways of running their service.
  • If my game has to be discovered by a select few gamers sifting through garbage releases, BGP is sure to stand out as a hidden gem (pun unintentional, but I kinda love it).
  • Articles are popping up about the benefits of accepting that a lot of pony content creators are distancing themselves from the MLP fandom. 
       Once this update is done it's time to crack down and fill in all the gaps. I have to add placeholders for EVERYTHING. Ponies, move effects, malady animations, item sprites, special battle conditions, and things like that. Everything needs to get in, no matter how ugly (I'll be the only one seeing it for a while anyway) and be functional so I can focus on building the game's true adventure mode.

     Well, "everything" needs a placeholder excluding tile maps, for now, since that would require rebuilding all 3 areas of the demo and I think that feature can wait until 7.0 is done. When I finalize what the tile sprite sheets will look like, I need to order them in an efficient and uniform way. Doing that to the current maps would make the entire world a crazy mess I don't feel like dealing with until I'm preparing to start from scratch on the final world anyway.
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   Downloads:


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     This thing is basically done as of tonight, but I need to keep checking for stability and strange cases. Riding your pony tends to break more things than I expected, and every now and then an attack move won't spawn and freezes the game.

     Can't release until this works again, and I can't get started on finishing this thing until Friday's build is submitted.

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