Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #14 (Building First Demo)

Placeholder title logo, but it works for now.

     All is going smoothly for the upcoming build. I'll put a video up once the demo is ready for the BYOC. I really hope it does well. If I win 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, I'll get a huge boost in gamedev hardware. The OUYA prize gets me drooling especially hard. It would be so fun to get BGP running on a console like that. Playable on my TV! A Yotes can dream.

Catch up on some gamedev adventures below.

Battle Scenes are fully functional.

This is the game running on Windows!

   Completed:

• Changed Orscina's Stripe Back To Blue
• Reorganized Battle Calculations Code
• Added All 24 Demo Moves
• Coded Switching Ponies In-Battle
• Attacking Phases
• Title Screen
• Audio Code
• Placeholder Music & Sound Effects
• More Accurate Battle Calculations
• Character & Camera Shaking
• Built & Tested Windows Version of Demo
• Shortened List of Demo Features

     Lessons Learned:

• Making fancy text patterns to keep the English.txt file clean was a bad idea. Keep things easy for the Hashtable converter script to process because I have no idea how it works.
• I'm missing Open House this week, but getting this demo ready is more important.
• Making a title logo is tricky. I  need a better one at some point.

       A few features were cut from the demo in the interest of time. Things like team selection, animated ponies, and animated moves lost priority to basic battle engine things that make the fights work at all. As it is, ponies vibrate and flash white and red instead of animating.
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   Downloads:

   I finally got a paid download on SlideME! It is possible without some sort of fancy trick. Hopefully that opens the floodgates for more in the future. Gotta admit, it is pretty cool to say my games have been downloaded by thousands of people. What does a place with over 10,000 people look like anyway? Probably something like Times Square on New Years. That's a good feeling.

    Featured:

     EQD picked up my post and shared it in one of their Nightly Roundups! Getting on that blog at all is a big deal since those readers are my exact target audience. I submitted the second one, but it seems like it got lost somewhere in the realm of email madness. That link points to the site where the rest of my posts are, so it's no big loss. My real concerns with exposure will come when the public pre-alpha is out and I'm looking for reactions to my idea. That day just feels so exciting!
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    Gotta get started on decoding the text, adding placeholder music, and making the win/lose condition look nice. Just 12 days until my game is being played by total strangers up against a number of other student projects that may be a lot closer to completion.