Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #153 (New Year, New Beginnings)

     Wow, 2018 is off to a great start already. Doing much better this January than the last with that whole Steam Greenlight fumble. Patreon keeps development afloat, I feel a million times wiser, the soundtrack is nearly complete, and the full game scope has never been clearer in my mind.

     The early part of this new year is just a matter of cranking it out already! Time to wrap up development on this 3-4 year project and launch it with a BANG!

Get this week in gamedev below the break.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #9 (Spreadsheet Code & Music)

     As predicted, this was a very productive week leading to a week with tons of visible progress. After messing with code stuff for a few days I now have an efficient way to put hundreds of moves, animations, and ponies in my game.

     The screenshot above is what the current Move Info interface looks like. If you click a question mark with a move selected in battle yo'll see this stuff pop up. Move type, power, accuracy, classes, description, elemental match-up, and so on. I think it'll be really useful to players so it should be accessible when and where you need it most.

     I considered just showing the Good, Fail, or Bad symbol above text next to the target but decided that it would be more beneficial to the player if they got the chance to memorize all the classes a move is strong against and get more familiar with all the classes.

If you want to see what else I've been messing with this week, hop on over the page break.
It's DevLog time!

Battle Gem Ponies Music

     A soundtrack really makes a game memorable. You may not always notice it, but the music of a game is the emotional bridge to the player. You can often just listen to a song from a nostalgic game and instantly recall the feeling of playing it. When you face off against an epic legendary boss the music hypes it up even further. You'll even go out of your way to download that song so you can hear it again whenever you want.

     I want Battle Gem Ponies to be one of those games with music you never forget. Unfortunately I can't make music myself and learning how to do it well could take over a year. My solution is to get some help with this. I requested the help of electronic musician Justin Heng and orchestral composer Eric Eom to make the Battle Gem Ponies OST something worth searching for.

     Below the break I'll list all the music I plan to put in the game. There's nearly 50 songs and jingles total so expect it to feel fully featured.

Musical Transitions In Unicorn Training

     Another small touch was added to the game that makes a huge difference. I smoothed out music transitions from scene to scene and replaced all the placeholder music with the final soundtrack, courtesy of OpenGameArt.Org. It took a while, but I finally found a soundtrack that fits decently. The selection of free stuff is alright, but it's impossible to find stuff that fits perfectly this way. I'm really excited to have custom made songs for my games in the future.

Unicorn Training: The Music Hunt

     The game is just about done now and needs some tunes! A visit to my go-to public domain song sites filled that spot up quickly. My game's audio component is finally complete! I wanted the game done in time for my birthday, and development-wise I pretty much did it, but there's final testing to do before putting it on the app store. Now that the placeholder tracks are swapped out, my game has all its elements together.

The Musician Search Ends

     The dust has settled and I have finally found the help I've been looking for. Stuntddude and Ai-shi-ter-u will be helping me out on the audio side of things for my upcoming RPG. I had them send me a test track each to see if they can get the feel down and produce something in a reasonable time. I was surprised when I got a sample track back the very next time I checked my email. It only took Ai-shi-ter-u 2 hours to make and sounded like a fantastic start!

     I can finally relax knowing that I'm in good hands on that side of things. I can even look forward to growing alongside someone else and having us all climb to ever greater heights. Like I said, 100% of the OST profit will go to the composers as payment, and when I become financially stable these guys will be the first ones I go to with payment upfront in addition to OST sales.

     You can find to those guys on SoundCloud to listen to stuff they made before.

Some Musician Search Responses

    I've been getting some E-Mails from people who saw my recruitment posts. There have been some candidates such as Stuntddude and Ai-shi-ter-u. I've been looking at their portfolio work and trying to see who's a good match for me (not who's best but who makes music like the stuff I'll be requesting and who posts new songs often). I'm looking for someone I won't be bothering really. It's almost as if I were reviewing job applications which is weird because I'm not even qualified for any professional position myself. I want this to be more like a great collaboration opportunity for both parties to improve, not a promise of fame and money.

    I wanted to contact some folks this early to test out reception and give as much notice as possible in the two places where I'm most likely to find the kind of help I need. The brony community is known to be supportive and collaborate often. Works by these people inspired me to get started in the first place. I know for a fact that there are others like me here trying to perfect their craft and would be all for making music to match games like mine. Spreading word to general indie game music forums might attract a more professional crowd that would expect more from me.

    I'm still away from my work desk this week for the most part but I am still reading any responses that pop up. The correspondents are asking m very good questions I hadn't considered a prospective musician asking and it's giving m better insight into what someone's concerns are from the outside looking in.

The Great Musician Search! (I Need Help)

    I posted a couple recruitment requests last week as a means to reach out a little and try to see if I can find someone at my intermediate level of experience. I didn't go all out yet because I want to see hat kind of reception I'd get. I've never asked for help before and feel really bad about doing it because I still have nothing to my name that proves I'm as good as I believe I'll be in a few years' time.

     If someone says "Why ponies? Are you counting on a fad?" I can only explain how I just like the aesthetic the way others enjoy elves, dinosaurs, dragons, or anthro characters. If someone asks how popular I am, my Status Report numbers aren't really something to brag about. When it comes to pay (the most important factor) there is none, and there won't be any even if I'm a moderate success (I have $100K in evil student loans to pay and I need $2K to release games for iOS). All I can offer is a chance to boost each other up so I'm looking for someone in my age/experience range to take a chance with me.

Find more details and the recruitment post below the break.

Learning FamiTracker & Mixcraft (Eventually)

FamiTracker. Make 8-Bit tunes with this!

     Amid feelings of uncertainty in my ability to maintain a game studio alone I considered forcing myself to adapt to one aspect of game development I never truly tried before. I already learned programming, got a feel for good design practices, and practiced pixel art so what if I can do music on my own too? It may take a dedicated very long time to get any good at it, but it might be a worthwhile investment at some point.

More Sound Effects in Unicorn Training

     I've added more audio to the game in order to make up for all the silence going on. I wrote down every little thing in the game that would need to be heard and wrote what it should sound like. Now it's a matter of spending hours in Bfxr and Freesound to mix the right sounds together and toss them into the Unity script I have setup for them.

    It's kind of silly how disorganized it all is now that I've down-scaled and won't be using any of those reserved variables I made to prepare for a much larger world. I'll just keep churning these out for the next couple days and have every sound I could possibly need ready to go.

I also got all the NPCs working yesterday!

Seeking Musicians For Unicorn Quest

         With all the things being done soon I'll need to get in touch with some musicians. I'll get started on a sizzle reel style video that makes the game look good so I can send that video out to other blogs and things to announce Unicorn Quest's existence and seek help from music makers.

        I'm looking for something that sounds like Super Lesbian Horse RPG's soundtrack (found here) so I might as well contact the people that made that fan project first. I'm interested in the way they went about monetizing it and I want to do something similar. They released a soundtrack alongside their game on iTunes and Bandcamp and made a bit of cash.

       In exchange for them making the soundtrack for Unicorn Quest I will give the artists 100% of the OST profits and credit in the game (and basically everywhere else I mention the music). Now I just have to convince them to get on board! Should that fail, I have a friend at school who offered to help and I'm sure I can find other musicians somewhere on the net willing to help me.

New OBS Video Recording Software

     After putting out a call for help on the development video side of things my buddy Cybermagus showed me Open Broadcaster Software. It's an open source tool made for livestreams and Let's Plays and it works like a dream! It records just the computer audio and ignores the mic input just like I wanted and comes with an adjustable screen resolution and window size adjuster. In addition there' tons of customizable options that will let me do much nicer development videos and even game trailers in the future!

    See a Recording Test Video I made for it on YouTube!

Audio, Not My Favorite

Adding sound really makes the game world feel three dimensional.
It's just that making it all is kinda tedious.

     I'm learning more about myself all the time. I now have a deeper understanding of exactly how much I don't like working on audio. When I'm searching for the right combination of bleeps & bloops with Bfxr, I don't feel the same passionate force I do when I'm drawing sprites or writing code. I'd honestly rather just have all the sounds available to me so I can just place them where they need to be. Editing things until they sound right then editing them again in Audacity feels like a lot harder for me than it really is.

    It's just my weakness presenting itself. There's no way I can handle audio on my own far into the future. Hopefully as this project comes to an end, I'll have someone willing to cover sound on board and I'll actually have money to pay for the help.

    Anyway, all of the sounds and music for stuff in the current build is in place. Back to adding features now.

Starting Unicorn Quest Audio

     Using tactics mentioned in other audio posts, I've been chipping away at the tunes and sounds of Equica. I want to do a combination of realistic sounds and 8 bit sounds in an interesting way. If you shoot a fireball you'll hear cackling flames and the initial whoosh but you'll also hear an 8-bit explosion as the fireball comes out and when it hits a wall. Hard to explain, easy to hear.

    As far as the music goes though, there's placeholders from other games for now. I'll try to match the mood I'm going for so that later on, when the game looks way more impressive, I can show it to people who may be interested in my grand plans for releasing the soundtrack separately from the game and splitting the revenue between all the music creators like this team did.

     So for I have one guy on music but I might be able to get extra help when the game looks more complete and word spreads. I'd like to find people I can work with during future projects. If I can get off the ground now, I can start simply hiring or contracting folks when I make Yotes Games a company.

Make 8-Bit Sounds on Bfxr.net!

     This is on the top 20 list of most awesome things I have ever discovered. For those like me who didn't know, there is a website where you can create unique/randomized chiptune sound effects for free and download them to your computer. Perfect for 8-bit / Atari style games like this. This is an excellent tool for making audio in my next project. Just yesterday I decided to make it have stylized 8-Bit graphics and now I know about this thanks to Versimer on deviantART!

     One of my favorite things about it is the preset list on the side that randomly produces a sound that always resembles what the button says. Really, click the Pickup/Coin button 100 times and it will always sound different. You can then tweak whatever sound you have until it sounds pitch-perfect. There's even a chaotic Randomize button that you'll need to experience for yourself. I can't wait to play around with it more when I start my next project. So back to work on my current one for now!

Fixing Audio With Audacity

     Audacity is a free program I use to edit music for my games. I'm slowly beginning to master it but I really only use a few of it's features to edit the open source music and sound effects I find. I like the Effect menu's Amplify, Change Pitch, Reverse, Change Speed, and Change Tempo features the most. I also tried recording my voice for videos here once but the quality was awful so I decided to use text instead.

     As far as lessons go I learned how much amplitude and dB effect the final sound and I've made a habit of maximizing the volume before exporting the files and using them in Unity. I still haven't mastered making songs loop nicely. It's always a noticeable skip and me messing with it usually ends up with the song sounding worse. I'm planning on teaming up with a friend for music in my next game so hopefully this won't be a problem anymore.

     Another lesson in efficiency was making audio playing game objects load when they're needed. Loading every sound effect and song could make the initial load time take forever and some scenes should have their own files for things they need. All this knowledge will make my future games all the better.

Finding Sounds for DragCore

     I need to start putting sounds into DragCore soon. In normal circumstances this would be done earlier, but I'm working alone on this project and I can't make music at all. I also don't have a good microphone for foley art or software for making sound effects/music that I can use to make audio files. It's faster to work this way. I just find public domain stuff and edit them for my needs in Audacity. For future games, I'll be teaming up with others (don't know who yet) for audio creation.

    I'm thinking about using a lot of things from TriGrid as a starting place. I know new sounds I'll need are beeps, a power down sound, and some celebratory tunes. For background music, I want to find some new public domain stuff. Just a track or two that fits the theme and I'll find a way to make it loop nicely.