Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #190 (Lackluster Progress)

     Here's my attempt to associate with the moth meme. Just wanna make a public PSA, the Battle Gem Ponies project is NOT dead. It's just kinda on life support. It's hospitalized. Yeah. Progress is still going, but at a snail's pace. Which (believe it or not) is a lot worse than usual.

     Gotta throw that out there because dev time took a massive hit while I'm trying to get a work/life balance going while also living an hour away from the office and ALSO trying to get back in shape after months of little exercise and ALSO, also fussing over finances. It's a mess, and I'm trying to get back on track. Time really flies when there's two endless mountains of work to handle and spend a third of the day sleeping.

Come see what I managed to squeeze out of the last 7 days.

Welcome Home.
My new workspace is Visual Studio Code. The super popular coding platform.

   Completed: 

• Submitted Demo to Magfest Judges (Hope they like what they see. Threw in a little warning about the bugs.)
• Wrote More YouTube Scripts
• Setup Visual Studio
• Discovered Tons of Helpful Assets on the Unity Store
• Learned Some Programming Techniques & Syntax from Work
• Made a Mothlass Promo Pic (and saved the template for reuse with other ponies)

     Lessons Learned:

• My particular coding habits have formed over years of adjusting to just what works best for my brain to assess what's going on. The spacing, the pop of certain syntax, the completely black background allowing me to hone in on the important text better. Everything I do has some minor psychological trick going on to help me quickly read and understand my tens of thousands of lines of code.
• Visual Studio Code is popular for a reason. There are tons of neat little features and add-ons that make it an ideal environment for quick, neat, beautiful programming. I just need some time to get used to using it.
• Honestly, I was lost trying to just figure out how to customize the colors to the way I had them in MonoDevelop. I figured out how to hack my way into just about every color setting, and the ones I couldn't fix don't look too bad so I just decided to move on with my life. Check out the before and after: 

MonoDevelop Color Scheme (I'm calling it, "Yotes MonoDark")

And here's what it looks like now. (In "Yotes Neon Dark")
A bit more colorful thanks to using a spinoff of the popular Dracula color scheme.

       Finally dug back into the code of BGP and it felt like coming home after a long, long trip. Back to my nice, clean, orderly home. Fresh and ready for even more improvements with everything I've learned from my travels.

     A type of comment I see a lot is people assuming the project is dead. I've been quiet for so long a rumor of it getting a C&D apparently got in some people's minds. I really need to get my YouTube videos lined up and out there on a regular basis. 

Man, I really just made a mess the delay decision... Hoping to make up for lost time.
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     It's been so hectic trying to squeeze in literally any Battle Gem Ponies time. Whenever I get the chance to sit down long enough to get into the groove, something interrupts me or I glance at the clock and see I have to wake up for work in 6 hours. 

     I found a way to turn my 60 minute commute into a 45 minute one, and cut my exercise routine in half (and only do it every other day), but I'm still getting next to nothing done indie games wise. Significant progress comes in 4-6 hour chunks and I'm just scratching half of that if I'm pushing myself. I really need those 2 hours I spend on the daily road trip.

     Eager to move as soon as possible. Waiting for these life-changing paychecks is agony.