Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #20 (School's Out! GameDev Time!)

     Ready to shift into MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE!! I'm all settled in at home and cracking down on my development task list. With the BronyCon panel fueling me, I have all the motivation in the world to get down to business. Every cent I've saved so far is about to be put to use as I get more supplies that allow me to launch Battle Gem Ponies on more and more platforms.

For details on the past week and what's to come, look no further than below the break.

A small missing detail is being implemented.
A simple display to show which pony you're using.

   Completed:

• Separate Health Bars
• Individual KOs
• Design Document Edits
• Readability Improvement Ideas
• Presented Current Build to Class on Last Day of School
• Random Ideas for Tons of Other Games Organized in Word
• Downloaded Tons of Background Working Music (GameDev Entertainment)
• Updated The Games Tab
• Revised Battle Flow Plan
• Ordered Macbook
• Plan For Affording PC Joypads
• Played With An Apple Watch  (Not Worth It)

     Lessons Learned:

• Soft music played in the background is nice to have during long days of development. Just downloaded tons of atmospheric stuff for the summer. I call it thinking music.
• I'll need to take breaks on set intervals to avoid burnout and have a light work out hours before the real one to keep blood flowing all day.
• Sitting at a desk for 14+ hours a day won't help me reach my secondary goal of being extremely fit. Make sure to exercise at least a little every day.
• The way I save up so much money then immediately spend it on something to earn even more money makes life feel like a tower defense game. Like I'm building up the ultimate fortress to thrive in.
• I'm putting all my time, energy, and money into making Yotes Games work. It has to work because my life depends on it. There is nothing I want to do more than work on my own game ideas.

Whole new possibilities opening up thanks to this.

     My Macbook was ordered yesterday and is on its way. When it arrives I can transfer whatever I need over from my last one then sell it along with my old iPod and Wacom tablet to hopefully get enough for a couple Rock Candy PC Controllers like what I've seen friends using at school. Gotta have at least two for testing. If I want the BronyCon demo to have shared screen multiplayer, I need to get joypad controls in long before August.

Here's a leftover shot from the game jam I forgot to share.

I wanted the skeleton to fit on a 16x16 grid.
My Battle Gem Ponies trainers already do!

     Development is just starting up and I have one new readability things to get in before finishing up the To Do List. Next week's post should be full of progress. Hopefully my stuff will arrive that day too and give me new things to play around with.
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   Downloads:

With 100 new downloads on Google Play this week, the Unicorn Training
Demo continues to prove just how many people like the Pony RPG idea.

     No spikes on Google Play yet, but glad to see sales don't dip below $25 a month. Hopefully it'll grow once I'm on iOS again. I'll need to put up an alternate Unicorn Training Trailer for iOS though since they reject anything mentioning other app stores. I'll just swap out the Android pictures at the end of the original.

    Featured:

     Google play is putting its Family Friendly program into action. Hopefully this means a tiny spike in Unicorn Training sales. I'll keep an eye on my rankings and hope I bubble to the top again.
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Took every cent I had, but I can finally sell on iOS again.
I'll make a deal with my parents to pay back the $100 dev fee.

     Looking at the way other developers do things, I'm wondering if I'd be better off doing monthly big posts instead of weekly ones and making the DevLogs every 2 weeks. Or maybe some variation on that. For a while this week thoughts of writing less often and only talking about big updates came to me. Maybe when I'm working full-time on this there will be more substance more often.

    I'll just keep going as I am for now. Let's see how the summer turns out before coming back to that idea. This is my biggest project ever and there's a lot of work ahead of me. Time to knock a ton out before next Tuesday!