Battle Gem Ponies (May DevLog): Demo Drop Date!

Ohhh, it's coming... FINALLY after months of delays, the Combat Demo is nearly complete! We're taking the next couple days to review the whole thing one last time, but we finally scrubbed it clean of all the terrible game-breaking bugs that would've made such a bad first impression. 

You'll be playing the new and improved Battle Gem Ponies within a week! So long as no nuclear disaster strikes central Florida within the next couple days, we should be able to keep that promise. Come bask in the pre-launch hype with us below the break! ~

We plan on uploading the Battle Gem Ponies Combat Demo to our Itch.io page June 1st, sometime in the afternoon. So keep an eye on the Blog for that major Release post. If something goes horribly wrong before then, we'll only delay into the weekend and address the problem, but this demo is coming out sometime between Monday evening and Friday night no matter what.

As for accompanying content, we're running behind on that since we wanted a stable build to make trailers with, but you can expect lots of things to flood our YouTube channel over the coming months.

State of the Game

The game is in a stable, playable state. Things don't freak out anymore when you use basic attacks, and even the complex attacks behave as intended.

Things aren't perfectly clean yet, visually, and there are tons of visible placeholders, but for the most part it all looks close enough to what's in mind for launch that it won't be embarrassing to show off our baby to countless friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers.

We'll be adjusting a few animation settings and minor camera issues as we review things one last time, but we're now at a point where anything short of an easily replicatable game crash will be a bug that gets fixed after the Kickstarter overworld features are done.

It's time to get this thing out into the wild so the thousands of you who've been following this game for years now can run it through its paces.

One amazing other thing we get to do now is finally submit BGP for consideration to get a portion of development costs handled by the Black Game Developer Fund by Humble Games. Something we've been putting off until we had a decent demo prepared (and I mean we're really pushing it in terms of the June 11th deadline for a thing we've known about since December).

We recently checked out previous winners of this... Well, I guess it's like a grant? For supporting minorities trying to break out into game development. Anyways, we scoped them out and think Battle Gem Ponies can stand alongside 'em and get us that much needed cash boost so we can hire an army of 48 artists to divide up all the battle animations & spritework.

Fingers crossed. It might be a few months before we hear word from them, if we get a reply at all. Until then, we'll be running the Kickstarter & Convention Booth in August as if nothing will come of this.


Setbacks

Bugs. All month we've been plagued by em. We're talking about a To-Fix list hundreds of entries long. Psyaryu was the MVP on this one. With our 2nd programmer missing for the 4th month in a row, he's had to put in the extra days to get the battle system sorted out on his own. And surely & steadily he got it done. The game is looking better than ever and is days away from being prepared for public scrutiny.

Camera jerkiness, zooming in too far, missing banner text,
and effects not spawning on time are the most common bugs
we come across during testing.

All that remained after the big stuff like pony sprites disappearing, multiple HUDs spawning, weather effects following you back to the title screen, and moves applying effects to the wrong pony were minor visual issues like the camera acting up or a particle effect missing here n' there.

All-in-all, I think we can live with whatever manages to slip through at this point. This is merely a prototype after all, not even alpha yet. Players will understand it's all a work in progress.

Next Steps

With combat wrapped up for now, we can spend all June getting the overworld up and running again. And with a lot fewer things to worry about on that side of gameplay, we're expecting a much faster turnaround. 

We have a list of priorities when it comes to what to implement in Adventure Mode, so that no matter what happens, the Kickstarter Demo is going to contain something to play.

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

This has been Tony Yotes, on behalf of the Yotes Games team.

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

Next Stop, Pinto Island... AAALLL ABOOOAAARD the Hype Train!