Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #135 (BronyCon Vacation)

Reunited with my very own BronyCon fam!

     I spent just about all of August recharging my creative batteries, experiencing new places, meeting new folks, bonding with long-time friends, learning more about myself, and evaluating my life goals. Also, I played Sonic Mania and it's got me hella juiced up to become a developer making things people could go nuts about.

     In short, the BronyCon panel went well, I've already got plans for how I'm going to celebrate it being complete next year, I'm brainstorming convention booth setups, and I'm more eager than ever to somehow get the project done in time for Christmas!

More on all that below the break.

   Completed:

• BGP Demo 7.0!
• Opening the Yotes Blog on Mobile Devices Shows Desktop Version of Site
• BronyCon Panel
• Inspiration Surge from Experiencing Sonic Mania's Launch
• More Placeholder Tiles
• Plans for an Expo/Vendor Booth
• Plans for Touring Brony Conventions & Indie Game Expos
• Starting to Use Itch.io's New Devlog & Refinery Systems
• Updated About Me Page
• Expanded YouTuber Contact List
• Reviewed Remaining Tasks for BGP's Development
• Updated Unity to 2017.1 (and kinda broke the game in the process...)

     Lessons Learned:

• Just keep on going and I'll get there. Battle Gem Ponies WILL be completed...
• I'm getting better at these panels each year, but there would certainly be less technical difficulties to worry about if I had a Windows laptop. That'll be one of the first things I buy post-launch. A demo laptop to bring around to conventions.
• People love meeting me in person, so I've gotta use that to my advantage when talking to game's press. Make them love me as much as a dev/person as they love the game itself.

Man... This game changes everything.

       There must be something in the water, because the past couple years have just been jam-packed with video games and the like that are super inspirational to me. Tons of indies and creators overcoming the odds and making huge impacts in the geek culture world we all live in. 

     With Sonic Mania's creation story being the latest explosion, I want to experience that kind of success more than ever. To put every drop of love I can into my dream project and give fans something to flip out and cry over... Something that inspires some other devs out there. Ones just like me climbing their own mountains to get their start.

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   Downloads:

     Nice n' steady growth, always good to see! I'm about 50 downloads away before I can say Unicorn Training earned $3000 over the last 3 years. Not very profitable, but at least it proves to me that it's physically possible to earn money on the app stores. Just gotta figure out how to earn more of it.

     A glitch with the android version is keeping me from pushing the 7.0 build more. I need to figure out why the game just freezes after showing the Unity logo, but works fine on every platform except Android.

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     Right now I'm noticing a bug with the android version of BGP 7.0, so I'll be messing around with Unity trying to figure out this Black Screen Freeze bug. Then I'm going to sit down and crunch out all these placeholders I need to make the alpha build happen. Then I'm going to finish programming every game feature it needs. And THEN I'm finally going to start tying the Alpha build together.

No time to waste. Battle Gem Ponies is long overdue!