Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #126 (Finally DONE with the Basic Battle System!)

     This one's been a long time coming. At long last being finished with the part of development I've dreaded most! Getting all these wacky moves and status conditions to work properly! You can use almost any move now and it'll actually do what it's supposed to!

I wanted to display your stat buffs the way they show up
in Pokemon Insurgance. 

Wanted it to be a bit more stylish too.

Then I finally moved the pony sprites a bit closer together.
It's a small visual thing that's been bugging me for a while.
The class icons used to partially cover the sprite.
Also the gap in the middle was a bit too wide.

   Completed:

• Stat Buff Notifications
• Dynamic Malady/Stat Animations
• Moved Pony Sprites Closer Together
• More Detailed Tutorial Segment Plans
• Reviewed & Edited Story/Game Flow 
• Altered Some Character Roles
• Studied Games at E3 

     Lessons Learned:

• I feel so bad about leaving my musicians with nothing but words and Google Search images when it comes to what I envision for the scenes I want them to make music for. In the future, I need to have decent concept spritework done for locations and scenarios so they know what they're working with.
• Seems like I'm getting nowhere fast but can feel a sudden boost towards the finish coming up. Like development is being pulled back on a slingshot almost ready to fire.

Internal debate. Decimals or Percents?
Which is more understandable in 3 seconds?

For now I'm going with decimals and waiting for feedback.
That's an easy change I can do later if necessary.

       Happy to have finally gotten to a point where you can select any move and it does what you expect it to. I can test combat strategies for the first time! Catching wild ponies becomes more interesting like this too, now that there's other ways to weaken ponies.

     The game feels solid and real like never before and I'm super excited to quickly put the rest of the game together. I can finally feel the relief of having the toughest part of coding the game behind me...

     After some bug fixes and polishing demo 7.0 a bit, I think I'm gonna take a week and do some of the fun stuff. Write out story & gameplay plans walkthrough style. Flesh out my map sketches. Write some character bios. Draw some new pony sprites!

     Man this took forever but it feels like I reached the peak of the highest hill. This feels very satisfying and I can't wait to get it into YouTubers' hands.
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   Downloads:

Final Steam Greenlight Stats

Never did get that second spike.
At least I know there's 2,200 people out there who would buy the PC version for sure.

     No sugar coating it. I failed my Steam Greenlight campaign. Proof that just getting mentioned a few times on the most popular blog for your demographic isn't enough. Maintaining the attention is what you need to stay popular enough to catch staff eyes over at Valve. 

     So when I'm launching I have to find ways to keep people talking for at least 4 months and also have to have new folks discovering the game constantly. I'm thinking about handing out review codes to YouTubers in waves. Starting with my current fans before launch, hundreds of smaller ones launch day,  then going for bigger and bigger names as I approach November/December.

    Featured:

Welp. Campaign's over. Finally got this message popping up.

     Steam Greenlight has officially been pulled and Battle Gem Ponies is going to  have to cough up $100 to get onto the platform now. I'll have a few month's worth of data to work with by the time the game's ready for Steam, so it'll be an interesting wait n' see if the new systems Steam wants to implement help indie discoverability at all.
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Wrote this little blurb on Steam Greenlight as a sort of goodbye message now that the service is going away.
Not sure what'll happen to the current BGP Steam page...

     New dawns and all that. It's late as heck, but I can safely say the BGP update will be coming next week. Gonna get rid of as many bugs as I can this weekend then launch 7.0. The last Pinto Island build I'll make the public sit through before the juicy story stuff.

Hope I can make this worth the wait!