Nice to have a crunchy month to work on this day after day. Things are really starting to shape up around here. Visions of running a full-fledged indie studio get clearer all the time now that I'm enjoying a taste.
This month's major milestones include training a new programmer, adding a menu to the playable build, putting over a hundred working moves into the game, and creating a huge cast of human characters to meet in the overworld.
If you're curious about this past month's comradery and happenings in #GameDev, take a peek below!
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The scrolling lineup of chibi pixel people you see above are all the NPC sprites (minus a few WIPs) that are gonna be scattered across the game to populate towns and routes. A very colorful cast if I do say so myself, recycling a responsible amount of sprite pieces to make animation easier on future me.
But it's not everyone just yet. We've also gotta produce those special Patreon in-game characters too!
State of the Game
NPCs all have front facing sprites now. Gotta make templates for each reused piece facing every direction, then animating them all will be a snap.
Chroma sprite variants for all the ponies need to be drafted. Settling on the final color schemes could take a lot of time and a lot of polling since there can only be one for each. Gotta go with the best possible picks. 20/90 ponies are done so far.
Stats Screen was the first task assigned to our new coder Psyaryu!
(his username, like, a mix of Psyduck & Staryu)
It's where you can check how your pony is doing mid-battle.
Buff Cards are these little indicators that slide out to show when a stat has been buffed or debuffed and by how much.
Revisited the Battle Bible to make sure the implementation of the battle system is meeting the design goals and overall vision. It's been charted out in regards to how each mechanic will be balanced and every pony, and every move, must serve a purpose. Even if that means tweaking a thing or two that seemed fun at the time in order to make the gameplay actually fun.
This next bit's pretty huge. Still grinning about this one.
All of the game's simpler moves have finally been coded and functional, which is about half of them. The ones that just deal with straightforward damage, critical hit rates, dealing with chance, priority skips, casting maladies, buffing, and debuffing.
We set up the rules using Unity Scriptable Objects and customize em as needed. And we threw in some new indicators for menus that'll display info like active Weather effects or Buff values.
Currently we're figuring out how the more complex battle state calculations will work. Things like moves that use weird math, or managing when a pony in invulnerable, or moves that take affect many turns later.
Setbacks
Next Steps
Next targets in sight are some missing menus like the Bonus Value Screen, and some other Battle UI for things like leveling up and printing Debug Logs onscreen for testers. Royal's working on some Battle Effects experiments, Psyaryu's onto the next menu screens now with a better grip on the project's architecture, and Yotes is designing missing interfaces, informing the programmers on implementation, and drawing character sprites.
There's a whole team dynamic going now! And when we gather every Friday night to crunch out some progress over pizza at my apartment, it feels like living the indie dream.
Things are getting exciting over here and hopefully that spills out into some tangible playable demos soon.
You can see the mid-month Patreon Exclusive progress posts here!
Thank you, for following the development of Battle Gem Ponies.
New month. New team. More motive. Let's do this.
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