Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #99 (Getting Somewhere)

New "Spotted!" letterbox, inspired by Sun & Moon

     Can't believe we're on DevLog #99... Last of the double digits. That means I've been at this for well over 100 weeks now counting pre-announcement dev time. Vacation week is coming to a close and I'll soon be putting a hard limit on my Pokemon playtime. Gotta get back to cracking down on that Greenlight build.

Catch up on this week's progress below!

Glad to see my old GameDev club was left in good hands.
With these guys in charge, I'm sure it'll thrive.

After playing Pokemon Sun all day, here's what I had to show for it.

   Completed:

• Minor Bug Fixes
• Secretary Opens Customization Menu
• Fully Functional NPC Line-of-Sight
• New NPC Movement System
• Overworld Polish
• Reorganized Bug List
• Studied Pokemon Sun

     Lessons Learned:

• The trick to actually getting things done is to limit the daily work scope to something really feasible. This project gets overwhelming real fast and that makes me spend most of the time staring into space trying to relieve the stress of it all.
• Helps to stand up every couple hours and stretch a bit. Keep the blood flowing, and move around if I catch myself falling asleep.

       I'm playing Pokemon Sun and analyzing the HECK out of it to see what I could implement to make my game feel more polished & professional. Also studying the pace of the game's events, noticing the variety of Pokemon in each area, taking in the color changes from route to route, making sense of the dense map that feels less linear than it really is, taking note of the gradual tutorial, what NPCs say about the lore vs what they say about gameplay, seeing what jokes are actually funny vs what wants to sound humorous, and noticing any flaws I should try to steer clear of.

     Basically, learning a lot of things that can affect the design of BGP once I finally start putting in features for the final game.

     Once small funny thing I noticed was that trainers don't walk up to you before battle like they did in the old games. Something I just spent a day programming when apparently you can take shortcuts like panning the camera over to the challenger and transitioning to battle. There's also a lot of fading to black in place of overworld animations, leaving a lot to the player's imagination. It was nice to see that even the Pokemon team, with millions of dollars behind them, cut corners to get the job done. You're never too big to work smarter, not harder.
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   Downloads:

    Featured:

     More videos were added to the BGP Let's Play Collection to demonstrate Demo 5.5.
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     I can feel myself gaining momentum. Little by little, I'm crossing this last huge hump. After the Greenlight launch, fleshing out the game with fun content will come easily (compared to how hard it is getting basic systems in place). Once this dang pre-alpha is complete I'm home free!

I can't fully express how badly I want this game to exist.