Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #164 (Still with the Menus? Come ON!!)

     Another week in and the game's revamped menu systems still aren't done! Feels like I'm running in place sometimes, but week after week new things are being added and I'm feeling more and more capable as a developer. I just want the alpha build done already!

     Take a look at what I managed to do this past week.

Some improvements were made to the interface.
It's a Work in Progress, but I'm liking the blades way more than the grid.
Maybe I should get rid of all the white outlined sprites altogether. Colored Borders look so much nicer.

And here's a WIP of what you'll see when you press the "Study" button on the
Ponipedia page seen as the header for this blog.
There's a lot of info to cram onto this, but I'll make the important stuff stand out.

   Completed:

• Changed "Super" Effective Text to "Strong" (to clear confusion with "Weak")
• Entry Accepted for Orlando Overdrive 2018
• Changed My Mind Again and Making Stat Buffs Show % Instead of Decimals
• Fixed Raycast Bug with Flipped Buttons
• Fixed Menu Transition Animation Bug
• Experimented with UIElement Animations
• Reorganized Code to Account for Menus Handling Themselves
• Bought Easy Editor (got frustrated trying to organize my Script Inspector values, then found out someone already made an elegant solution)
• Talked with Patrons About their OC Appearances & Teams
• Organized List of Conventions / Indie Showcases to Attend
• Discovered Some Indie Meetup & Showcase Places around Orlando
• World Maps Again, Made Minor Adjustments
• Spent Way too Long Looking Into Optimal 3 Monitor Home Office Setups

Spread things out in the Unity Scene view to make minor adjustments go faster.
(Don't worry about the yellow lines, those go away while all the screens are inactive.)

And this new tool here will help me keep things organized. Especially when editing battle info for each NPC trainer.

     Lessons Learned:

• Podcasts are only for listening while doing mindless tasks like copy/paste jobs, recoloring, renames, and just about anything where my mind would otherwise be zoned out. 
• Podcasts actually distract and slow me down when it comes to making menus, tile maps, and stuff like that. So there's a distinct line for its usefulness that I understand now.
• When it comes to in-game readability, it's easier to comprehend how much a stat is buffed or debuffed using percentages rather than decimal math. 

       BGP has been confirmed for the Orlando Overdrive's first local indie showcase. It's a little concert/rave thing held across the street from Full Sail University and should be a good opportunity for me to network and practice showing my game to new people and even try to win over those put off by the pony aesthetic. This'll also give me a big reason to make sure the alpha is done by April 14th. 
__________________________________________________________

    Featured:

     The Orlando Overdrive event is doing all the pushing on their social networks, and I'm excited to see who else shows up. 
__________________________________________________________

     This picture really spoke to me. Mostly because this happens to me at least twice a day. The one consistent thing I hate about game development is the random little hiccups in syntax, typos, or untoggled boxes that stop development dead in its tracks for hours at a time. Then add countless "compiling..." wait times and it's enough to drive anybody bonkers.

     This is why I'm all for buying assets that can handle these things for me. Who knows how much time I'm saving by just plucking a feature out of the store instead of figuring it out myself and debugging for months on end. I can only hope the Unity community continues to flourish, and according to the conference at GDC, they're doing exactly that.