Battle Gem Ponies (June DevLog): Spare No Spritework Setup!

It's been a colorful month of new discoveries and a bunch of mouse-hand cramps. Gearing up the BGP cast for more efficient animating and coloring as well as crossing off some long-procrastinated tasks like "DESIGN THE LEGENDARY PONIES ON THE TITLE SCREEN". Which was fun!

     Along with a million other tiny things (gamedev or otherwise) that made this month... Interesting? Yeah, interesting.

Get the full deets below if you're curious.

Overworld sprites are gonna have little effects like in Animal Crossing
to make emotions more expressive.

State of the Game

Lots of spritework this past month. Especially in regards to setting up sprites for animation and chroma variant color swapping. All the pony sprites needed their pieces cut up like this to make animating individual parts easier. 

There was also the task of finally making final designs for all the legendary alicorns (which I won't reveal just yet 😉). It was seriously giving me some designer's block but over the course of 3 days I came up with sprites I'm proud of for the celestial goddesses and their altnernate forms.

Now all 90 ponies exist and just need to be animated!

Sprites with sections separated and enough space to make poses for each body part.

The team expanded a bit, having another pro programmer friend of mine going by Psyaryu helping out with the tasks Royal might not always have time to get around to each week. Although it means slowing things down a bit to get someone new acquainted with the project, in the long term it'll be nice to have another hand on deck.

We've got a big fat list of things to do, and only until February at the absolute latest to do it all.

We're using a task manager tool called Clickup

Setbacks

A lot more time was spent away from the project than anticipated due to family emergencies, extra-long day job hours, and some time spent getting a 2nd programmer up to speed. Settling into a new groove of things right now but July will be our real full speed ahead charge.

Aaand, the final planned convention of the year has been cancelled.

BGP's marketing efforts will need to be entirely online to survive 2020. The irl word of mouth approach will have to wait til the pandemic isn't a thing anymore. And the next pandemic too if that #SwineFlu2 stuff dogpiles onto this mess right after.

Next Steps

This here's an example of the Chroma palette tests we're conducting over on Patreon.
There's some for all the ponies currently in the game, more coming soon.
Patrons get to vote on the colors that will make it into the final game.

Milestones are set for the end of July. All the improvements wanted from the private demo implemented and for a new build to be released for any and everybody to play. All combat focused, with overworld gameplay coming soon after that.

You can see the mid-month Patreon Exclusive progress posts here!

Thank you, for following the development of Battle Gem Ponies.

Gotta rise from the ashes of 2020 like a Phoenix!

- This has been Tony Yotes on behalf of the Yotes Games Team