Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #138 (Waiting Out Hurricane Irma)

     My hurricane setup. Just some light, some paper, some music, and a lot of ideas. Did a lot of map drawing, scenario planning, and running through the entire game vision in my head. At the end of it all, I'm more confident in this project than ever. There's no way people wouldn't want to share this with their friends! It'll sell just fine, all I need to do is make it exist now. I literally have the blueprints to an amazing product sitting in front of me. I... JUST. HAVE. TO. MAKE. IT!

(Get this week in gamedev below the page break)

   Completed:

• Remaining Pony Sprites (first drafts)
• Redesigned Joyance
• Planned Logic for Animating All Moves (simplified)
• Ideas for MORE Ponies (saving for sequel)
• Added Tons of Pieces to the Pony Parts Library (animating pony bases should be easy breezy now)
• Revised Map Sketches
• Improved Adventure Mode Flow

     Lessons Learned:

• Good ideas come from meditation. In my case, showering, car rides, or hair cuts. At least when I'm not daydreaming about girls, moving out, or being successful anyway.
• My house is possibly one of the safest in Florida, so Irma had no lasting affect on my family. (Besides about 30 hours of power outage)

       This week I found that super satisfying feeling again. The one where I find an obvious super efficient way to do things that'll cut development time down by a lot. In this case, it was an idea (that came to me in the shower) for making a Move Animations script that controls everything.

This just popped into my head in the shower and it felt so good I had to write it down.
I can't describe how satisfying it is to come up with stuff like this out of the blue!

     I also had a surge of story ideas come to me while drawing second drafts of the game's maps and adding fine details to them. The Paragon Boss especially got a lot of development and feels like a much stronger character to me now. He feels like a sort of cocktail with bits of Evil Morty, Rick Sanchez, Seto Kaiba, Disney's Hades, Flowey, and that voice in my head from my dark high school years. Hope players fall in love with hating the character, or at least find him more entertaining than standard "Do Evil" bad guys you see in most Pokemon Clones and fan games.

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   Downloads:

     Fish Feaster is basically doubling TriGrid's numbers now. Unicorn Training is approaching 3,000 sales too. And Battle Gem Ponies downloads seemed to slow down a great deal, so the player base is around 700. Same as the views on the latest trailer. Gotta get that number into the tens of thousands before launch if I want to top those charts!

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     The march continues. But now, with a bit more pep in my step as the vision becomes ever clearer...