Battle Gem Ponies | Day One 🩹😀📈🎊

 

If you haven't heard, Battle Gem Ponies finally came out yesterday! 
And you can find every link ever for it on the BGP Linktree!

Players quickly let us know about some brutal bugs that snuck their way into release. But now we've SQUASHED the biggest ones and still have the rest already on our radar.

Get details on how launch is going below.

Experimenting With Dragon Souls Prologue

     I learned a lot about how 2D Toolkit's TileMaps work. I now know how to set the origin points to place character feet on the center of a tile, make it so no tile's coordinates are below zero, have objects with a lower Y value layer over things with a higher Y, and efficiently snap objects to the tile they need to be on. The objects are supposed to slide smoothly when moving and pause at the center of an adjacent tile if they stop.

Bugs... Bugs Everywhere...

     The release of Unicorn Training came with the expected nervous waiting for something to go wrong. In this case, many things. Being that I've never made a game this complicated, I had exponentially more bugs post-launch than I'm used to (with games like DragCore). I had some shaky internet access all weekend so there were lots of moments where I wondered what could go wrong next. The feeling disappears when I upload a new patch, allowing me to rest easy with the feeling of having a game that works. Too bad it's not permanent because I know there are some things wrong with the game that can't be changed due to the way certain systems were designed.

Join Yotes Games on Google Groups For Early Access!

     I was inspired by this Gamasutra article to get serious about using Google Groups for public testing. It may not be useful at the moment but having a playtest group / forum ready to go will benefit me in the long run. My upcoming game will be pretty community dependent as I try to make a competitive turn-based RPG. I'll need hundreds of Alpha and Beta testers to get it just right. Having tons of people involved in testing will help out marketing wise too as people spread the word.

     If I ever release a public demo or give out early access codes, it's going to be to people in one of these groups. Yotes Games Exclusive will be for the few I choose to help me find things like game breaking bugs or play through spoiler filled story moments that I don't want the public to see. Yotes Games Playtest will be wide open for anyone to find, share, and post to. This is where I can get feedback on balancing and what people like, dislike, or get confused about. This would be the stable build I push onto YouTubers who want to play an early version of the game.

If you want access to public playtest builds of my future android games, participate in exclusive download code giveaways, or post on a forum that I will read regularly:

Join the Google Group: Yotes Games!

Status Report #63 (Unicorn Training Beta)

     It's almost finished.... It's almost out into the world and I'm almost ready to take another step towards who I want to be. Keep an eye out for Unicorn Training which I plan to have up on Google Play on Friday, November 14th! That's next week! Crazy exciting.

     With that being the case I'll be doing my big blog post schedule change soon after Status Report #64 (which is cool because I love the N64) and it'll feel like new beginnings all around. I'm not sure when I'll be doing a full website color scheme change, but keep an eye out for that too in the coming months. As for content to see now, look no further than below the page break.

Unicorn Training Tested (+ App Description!)

     The game runs great on both tablets and phones! All things point to go for final app compilation. Unicorn Training is on it's way to an appstore near you! I'm going to scramble to get release info ready to go. Look below the break for my rough draft of the app description and leave a comment about what you think.

Balancing Unicorn Training

     Until now all enemies had the default amount of experience point value and magic cost / power was pretty unfair. Now those values have been tweaked to a point that feels more natural. Enemy HP was altered too. The game feels legitimate and easier to play this way. Aside from the basic balancing I also have been hunting for more game crashing bugs (I found so many!) and should have everything clear to go so I can finish this once and for all over the weekend.

Unicorn Training: MORE Save Bugs & Features

     I'm really treading on eggshells here with these saves because I found even more variables I missed, a bunch of mismatched file types, and even file some naming convention mistakes. While I was at it I changed up a few other features involving save data.

     Now whenever you die there is a penalty of losing 20% of your current experience points (up to zero) and pressing the quit button exits to the game's menu while save will allow you to quit and come back to the room you last entered. I even put an erase button on the main menu so players can erase old saves because I noticed that once all files were full there was no way to start a new game.

    This stuff allows players to use the pause menu's Go Home feature, escape from battle if they retry, or leave a boss room and come back with items. With these features out of the way I can do the final additions (music, then scripted intro and ending) and finally be done with this thing so I can watch other people play with it.

Bug Hunt, Scripting Saves, & New Video Editor

     Yesterday was all about fixing bugs and testing the data save features. I made another disembodied script called Saves to go along with Globals that handles all the save info in a central place. With this I can focus on saving the game at certain points rather than on the fly like I did with DragCore which caused some minor performance issues. I was surprised that there really wasn't much data to keep track of for this game. I hope my future games have data this easy to manage.

     I also got to try out Lightworks which I will now be using instead of Windows Movie Maker. Unfortunately I'm not able to transfer the edited file project to it and remaking the whole thing is more trouble than it's worth. I'll just take it as another lesson learned and make future videos with this free professional tool. For now, I just recorded some gameplay (using my phone as a controller instead of a trackpad) and played around with some ideas for the official trailer.

Bug Hunt: Unicorn Training Treasure & Electric Gates

     Most of yesterday consisted of debugging as I tried to fix things that seemed to be working fine. The electric gate switching was failing to get rid of invisible walls because of how I haphazardly grouped the objects in the scene's hierarchy and some were even mislabeled as the opposite color. I had to go through each scene with electric gates and correct them.

    Once those were settled I tried to move to new things on the task list but ran into another bug that ate a few hours of the day. I wanted excess items to do nothing when picked out of chests. I wanted them to be placed back in chests originally, but with the mess I coded it'd create less bugs if I had it just say you have no room.

    For some reason it broke my TextMaster script after working on the previous 3 tests. All thanks to the way I use " @" as the line skipper. It was as if using two line skips was against the rules despite it not breaking anything moments ago. The problem was sloppily fixed by adding a random bunch of spaces and having the script cut them off for me when pushing the next word to the following page.

    I can breathe easy now that this nonsense is behind me. It's Columbus Day so my early class is cancelled for the day which will give me an extra hour of gamedev before going back to the grind. I want the dungeon selector done before Friday.