Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #101 (December Crunch!)

     Demo 6 is coming along. Hopefully done in just a couple weeks in time for Star Wars weekend. But likely sooner at my current pace. Being a little stricter with my time and using little techniques to keep me focused on one small task at a time is helping me get down the to-do list. Racing against the calendar and staying up til 4am every day to get this thing done!

It's crunch-time, baby!

   Completed:

• Wild Ponies in Crystal Cave
• Ride & Surf Sprites
• Tile Effect Sprites
• Fully Implemented In-Battle Flavor Text
• Teleportation to Town Hall
• Surf Functionality
• Usable Move Tutors (new moves not implemented though)
• Caught Up on BronyCon Panels (mental notes on engaging a crowd)

     Lessons Learned:

• I actually need to have my game on Greenlight at least a week before the 9th so that it can get enough upvotes to pass before games press would even bother taking me seriously.
• There's an entirely different gravity to being able to say "This game WILL be on Steam" as opposed to me just wanting it to eventually get there.

       Remember last Friday when I said Demo 8 would be the Steam Greenlight build? Well it's actually going to be Demo 7 since I don't see a point in releasing 2 December demos (one of them being #6) so I'll just be lumping improvements I had in mind for 7 & 8 together. Good 'ol lucky #7! The number of completion/perfection in some cultures.

     But for the sake of not confusing the Greenlight audience I might be renaming it to something like "Greenlight Pre-Alpha" and follow up with updates like "Alpha Build 0.1" and so on.
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   Downloads:

     I told a fellow dev the other day that Unicorn Training had 100K downloads. He actually thought that was an impressive number that passed his own. And this is someone who had his game Let's Played by Machinima! That little ego boost plus being reminded of the current state of Steam by Jim Sterling eases my worries about failing a Greenlight campaign. There's no way my game can't get through when so many broken projects can with minimal effort. I just might top the charts if I hype it up right and keep the bugs minimal.

    Featured:

     Equestria Gaming is BACK!! And they even featured all the gaming panels at BronyCon this year. This will be another place I send press release stuff to, starting with the next demo in fact. Hope it can rise to the original site's popularity and even surpass it. Seeing brony indie devs getting stuff done is one of my biggest inspirations. Makes me feel like my own projects aren't so impossible when others just like me manage to get it done.
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It's coming...

     Whittling away at my task list and somehow managed to get slightly ahead of schedule. Full throttle until January as I try to get this thing out there. I need to become a noteworthy story in early January to get some press attention. Can't afford to miss this deadline.