It's been a week since launch and a new Week One Patch [1.0.3] is set to soon go live everywhere! (As of this post it's up on Windows already!)
And as for how sales are going? Amazing. Our best release yet, beating both of Unicorn Training's launches (2014 & 2024) by a mile. We've closed out Day 7 with 1000+ copies of BGP being played by folks out there! (And still ticking upwards by the hour ⬆️👀)
That's just over a thousand people across Mobile App Stores and PC's Itch.io after being in the Top 50 charts across the board for a few consecutive days.
More details on this whirlwind of a week below.
Selling a thousand of anything in a week is crazy. Couldn't be more proud of what we accomplished so far. Top ten ranking among RPGs on every platform. Nearly unanimous praise and positivity, with the only negative comments being about known (and now fixed) bugs or about how people wish there was more to do (which there will be over time).
BGP's Launch Trailer is making it's way around the internet, becoming our 3rd most viewed thing ever on YouTube and landing on tens of thousands of feeds across social media. And only starting just today (because of some Meta account issues), we're ramping up ads to keep the hype going and introduce BGP to even more people!
We're looking forward to what having this 4 digit audience baseline will do for the game once everyone's excitedly trying out the 1st DLC at the same time. Or even sharing around the Act 1 Teaser Trailer before release day.
It'll be interesting to see BGP float to the top of the charts periodically then hopefully stay at the top long-term once it's truly complete (hanging out with the other years-old big indie mobile games forever).
In the meantime, there's bugs that need fixin', and boy did we fix em.
[Patch Notes for 1.0.3]
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- Pressing the Act Button will no longer lock up player controls in the overworld.
- No more level up resetting. We stopped a wayward level cap check that activated too early.
- When you defeat a wild Chroma pony (captured or not) it will drop a Chroma Scale item you can use to make your pony "shiny"
- Chroma Scales function like they're meant to. Trade them to Auntie Haze to make ONE pony form of yours a new color. And you can toggle that color at the Crystal Stable whenever you want.
- You now must unlock Fast Travel by buying the Warp Button. (And skips the warp map.)
- Music changes to match the scene after Fast Travelling
- The Tamer ID screen is more accurate and helpful.
- Reward Money now displays the correct amount in your Bit Bank.
- The game no longer crashes when you use certain moves, like Solar Blast.
- Game Over checkpoints won't leave you in weird states anymore.
- You can't buy one-of-a-kind items more than once.
- You can't use items on ponies outside of your party of 3 in battle (which fixes a number of wacky battle issues)
- Party Management UI and Overworld Pony Swapping is more consistent & stable.
- You can Nickname your pony right in the Pony Gems menu.
- Radiance Rewards state the correct effect you've unlocked for levels 5 and 6.
- Numerous issues involving ponyback riding & surfing have been fixed. (You'll find overworld is much less janky overall.)
- Can't pet ponies while surfing anymore. (Too dangerous for the stability of the digital universe apparently.)
- Countless minor details polished further. Typos, alignments, tile layering, overlay effects, etc.
- Revised a bug in 1.0.2 submission that was damaging Saved progress on certain maps.
- Fixed Ultra Form Switching in battle to behave consistently.
- Prevented cheat code allowing all Ultra Ponies to be unlocked in VS Match.
```
Short Version:
Fixed a lot of jank. No more getting stuck when leveling up. Touch controls won't freeze you in place for pushing a blank button. And the Chroma & Ultra systems work like they're supposed to. ✅
Bugs still on our radar include some rare Surfing state problems, uncomfortable joystick controls in need of more settings, and attacks acting weirdly among about a hundred other small things 90% of people won't notice or encounter.
Believe it or not, we launched with 100 known (small) bugs.
Then by end of launch day, we had a list of 112 more. (It just never ends!)
Wishing we could've gotten to them all in time, and it's really embarrassing to be launching in a state like this (bugs and the missing story expansions are showing up as the only negatives noted in reviews). But it's better to have half the problems patched out right away than to keep folks waiting 2-3 weeks for everything to (maybe) get fixed in one go.
We want to clear the bugs at a faster pace, but our hands are just tied.
We can really only make decent progress on weekends since the programmers have tough day jobs to keep up with. And as the sole marketing/planning dev, Tony Yotes has full hands trying to promote this game while it's hot and ensure there's going to be an active audience for the Act 1 DLC when it finally releases in either December or January.
The whole YotesMark Team gets together on Saturdays to work on BGP basically from noon to sunrise. Then Sunday is spent recovering from a hectic week, running life errands, and playtesting to verify stuff was actually fixed before pushing out an update. Sometimes the coders can squeeze in a couple hours on weeknights, but that's it.
Ideally, we'd be working on the game as a team almost every day like we've gotten to experience a few glorious times over the years. So if sales keep up a great pace long-term, we could all be doing gamedev fulltime, making massive progress month-to-month. And that's the career dream pushing us forward.
For now, we tackle bugs in order of priority, and intend to squash as many as possible before the end of September, then it's time to move on and finish what we have laid out for Act 1.
Hope you're looking forward to it like we are!
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