Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #179 (Summer Stalling)

     Pretty slow work week if I'm being honest. Life got in the way and the game's delayed yet another week. You know, going in you always assume you can handle the workload but only expect it to be a certain amount of time. Then you get so far into it you can't justify changing course because the end just has to be near by now...

     I really wonder exactly how long it'll take for this game to be completed and how long the people supporting me or waiting for me to finish will tolerate this crazy passion project of mine. You can imagine how many times I hear "get a real job" on a regular basis.

     Feeling all kinds of negative things right now, but I need to carry on anyway. This game needs to be made, and I need to do it. If I can just make this super polished Alpha go even just a little viral, I'll finally know if it's all worth it. 25 thousand players is all I'm asking the cosmos for.

   Completed:

• Demo Tilemaps
• Tile Maps I Forgot to Draw on Paper (house interiors, city entrance gates, & a shipyard)
• Drew Some Missing Tiles
• Reviewed Early Game Story Beats
• Changed Tile Maps to Account for Black Space & Invisible Walls
• Reorganized Tilemap Layers & Templates

     Lessons Learned:

• Release dates are a myth. Just work towards the next playable milestone and renew the hype from there.

       To keep things brief and vague, 4th of July week involved a lot of family trips and things that kept me away from my desk and soon as all that calmed down telling some folks involved with my career plans that the fruits of this labor won't be available til early 2019 at the earliest resulted in some backlash and me feeling even worse about the slow progress. 

     That disappointment in myself, seeing my personal life crumble apart, and the overwhelming pressure of having something cool to show at BronyCon in just 2 weeks broke me down for a few days. Which only makes the problem worse, because a day I'm not on fire cranking out objectives on my task list is another day further from releasing this thing.
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 Patreon:

If you didn't know, Yotes Games is on Patreon!

This month's heroes! 

     I cannot express how amazing my Patreon experience has been other than just saying "WOW" a hundred thousand times. So glad I finally decided to just go for it after seeing so many other projects use the platform to stay afloat and I'm so thankful for the kind folks and friends you see above still supporting my overambitious pony project to this day. 

Can you BELIEVE that over a thousand dollars has come in from this thing in under a year?
It's about as successful as Unicorn Training already, so I guess I can smile and say to myself that
BGP is already doing better than my last game. Yeah, I think I'll say that for a boost in morale.

     And we can't forget my first ever donor, known around here as Mr. Craig who's been donating $10 on PayPal every month for years now. We've talked over emails and he's super excited for BGP and to see his character in the game.

     And if you didn't know, that's the biggest reward available to the Patrons. Accumulate $50 in donations and I'll put in an enemy trainer that looks like you (or an OC of yours) with a pony team of your choosing. As a cool "thanks" and easter egg for ya. Gotta fill the overworld with tons of trainers anyway, so why not have a few special ones around to mix things up?

     A cool thing to note is that once the big rewards are underway, like free codes and access to early full game builds, I dish them out based on Lifetime pledges and not just the monthlies, so donors who've stuck around for a long time are going to get upgraded status in my eyes, even if Patreon itself won't allow me to mess with tiers that way. (or if it can I haven't found out how).

    Featured:

     Found a Spanish Let's Play that was tweeted at me, and kinda made my day to skim through and remind myself of what the game looks like up and running and how cool it'd be if I just made it less buggy and had a story/tutorial behind it all.
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     Gotta keep on marching. Two weeks to BronyCon. Even if it's not pretty yet, I need the game to be playable. Just the first part up to the 2nd town at least. I can make most of the presentation me talking over the slideshow and answering questions.