Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #67 (Reaching Out)

     Battle Gem Ponies has a whole new look! Or at least some new tiles anyway. The game feels more real without the placeholders. I also might be attending FillyCon in Philadelphia this August. Might as well if I'm in the area that month. A lot of this week was spent doing marketing stuff. All the big prep before the big Demo 5 release.

Find out all the stuff you want to know about below the break!

This little pony has joined the party.

The game no longer looks like this placeholder-filled mess!

BronyCon's been posting some cool lookin' pony designs.

Wish I could draw horses that good. I'll stick to pixels for now.

   Completed:

• Derpzee Sprite
• Replaced All Placeholder Tiles
• Sketches of Title Screen & Game Intro Sequences
• Sketched Secret Puzzles to Unlock Mystery Alicorn
• Managed Public Bug List on Itch.io
• Noted Many Bugs to Fix for Build 4.5
• Fixed Many of Those Bugs
• Plans for a Very Simple Multiplayer Mode
• Renamed YouTube Playlists
• Edited Pony Sprites
• Added and Contacted Many More YouTubers
• Submitted Panel Application to FillyCon

     Lessons Learned:

• I just submitted a panel application to FillyCon. Hope it's like BronyCon and offers a free ticket (I could use that $60 for food). I have to look into the cost of getting there and reserving a hotel spot if this gets accepted. August is closer than it looks.
• Starting the plug push early by getting demo 4 out there. When demo 5 is out in 2 months, it'll be the big improvement I want thousands of people to see. The next major milestone after that will be the BronyCon Build.

For a second there, I thought my game was going to perfectly match this year's
BronyCon theme. Imagine the attendance to THAT panel, huh?

     @BronyCon has been posting Ponimon pictures all over the place for April Fools and Pokemon's 20th Anniversary. Not entirely sure if my game inspired/influenced the prank in any way. They closed up submissions recently so I may hear if I made it or not in the coming months. It took a while last time, but I think they'll be more efficient this year.

This one got me to laugh.
I'd kinda like to see Battle Gem Ponies fan art like this though.

     Feeling pretty excited about the project. As more people play it, I feel like it's worth all the effort. I keep having daydreams of going to BronyCon and meeting real people who are excited to play this thing. Then I jump ahead to the month after the game's release when tons of Let's Plays are up and people are  having conversations with each other over it. It's very exciting for any indie to have a community going. I'm pretty sure it's a reason why a lot of us do it in the first place.
__________________________________________________________

   Downloads:

Saw some minor jumps. Probably thanks to Battle Gem Ponies.

I started looking at who's downloading Unicorn Training on Google Play and found this useful chart.
I can see how many people looked at the game's page and how many people decided to try it.

    Already blasted through 1000 downloads on Itch! Let's keep this thing rolling! Demo 5 needs to be huge and for that to happen, BGP has to shake off its current bugs and become playable/easier to install on all platforms.

    Featured:

I found another 3.1 build Let's Play by Pastel Zombii 

and a 4.0 build Let's Play by Green Bean.

     Reached out to a ton of YouTubers this week ranging from subscriber counts in the hundreds of thousands to the low double digits. Reaching out to the smaller channels will be a great fit for me because I'm a small fry too. Aside from Unicorn Training (which only about 40K people know about) there's not much to my name. Gotta prove myself like every other content creator out there.

     Although a couple have gotten back to me, I don't think many of those people will see my message anytime soon. YouTube sometimes doesn't notify you when a community message is received and even if someone does check, the message is likely to be filtered as spam. If nothing comes from it, I still have build 5 to look forward to. That's the big one I want every brony to see.
__________________________________________________________

I need to edit some tiles a bit and make shadows transparent.

    BYOC is this weekend so I need a nice build for people to play! Back to crunch time!!