Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #89 (Drawing Ponies)

     Been working on pony sprites all week. I gave myself until the 15th before having to start on coding features and fixing bugs again. Then it'll be a 40 day march towards the next release. As you can see above, drawing pony sprites involves looking at a bunch of references that match the image in my head and eyeballing parts of each one to get the pixel shapes/colors I'm looking for.

     In the case of this Ghost class pony, Petrifus, I imagined a mummy/skeleton pony with purple fire over it's horn (now moved to just over the head because it looks better) inspired by the Delta form Charmander from the fan game Pokemon Insurgence.

Get more gamedev news and BGP stuff below!

   Completed:

• Gathered References for Pony Sprites
• Notes Describing Each Pony in Detail
• Rough Draft Sprites for Each Pony (30/60 "finalized" drafts complete)
• 10 Week Plan for Blog Posts About 6 Ponies Every Friday
• Plans for Easy-to-Find BGP Assets to Make YouTube Thumbnails With

     Lessons Learned:

• Discussions about Clones/Nostalgia/Copyright in gaming is becoming more and more of a hot topic these days. These videos by MatPat and Mark Brown explain it best.
• Mane6 has inspired me since the very beginning and they continue to this day.
• I haven't been seriously drawing on paper for so long that I'm more comfortable with pixel art than pencils now. Not sure if that's a good thing.
• Can't Ctrl+Z with pencil & paper. Gets real annoying.
• You know that feeling of fighting as Super Sonic against Perfect Chaos in Sonic Adventure DX? With the destroyed city, the music, and the lightning bolt speeds? I want to make kids feel that kind of hype and love for a final boss fight someday.

Jacklus WIP
The desert-dwelling fighter pony!

       Nothing to show yet with the pony sprites. They hardly look like anything at the moment and many are going through 3rd or 4th revisions today.You'll see them in due time. Ultra forms won't be done until after build 6 though. It'll be another nice break from coding. Plus it'll give time for their base forms to sink in and go through any extra changes over the next month.
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   Downloads:

Creeping on 80K Unicorn Training players holy crap that's a cool mental image.

     Amazingly, 3000+ people found and downloaded Unicorn Training in the past week on Google Play alone and 23 of them decided it was worth giving me a dollar to play more of it. That's a good feeling. Tons of people are still discovering and playing my game to this day.

     Google's AdMob service won't be available on my old apps after October because I won't update the apks with the new SDK because I don't feel like dealing with the headaches for changing the Unity plugins on files from 3 years ago. So it looks like I'll just have to deal with going from $0 in app ads each month to $0 in app ads each month. The sacrifices we make...

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     More news as it develops. See you next week!