Progress Report January 2025: This is OUR Year! 🗣️🔥 (for real this time)

 

We're excited to say we've finally reached the year that BGP (and possibly it's DX Edition) will both finally be fully released! Complete with all 3 story Acts and everything!

And knowing that the newly announced Switch 2 is backwards compatible takes a lot of worries about porting difficulty away. We can't WAIT to get BGP DX running on that thing!

Take a look on Patreon (even as a Free Member) at how the game is coming along so far and how we intend on delivering the first Act by the end of Spring 2025. 🌸

First Patreon Progress Report of 2025

End of 2024 Progress Report (Winter Wrap Up🎄🥂)

 

A new development update is here! Last one of the year.

Lots to celebrate as the year of BGP's launch comes to a close. But there's so much content yet to come that we feel like things have only just started!

Head on over to Patreon to get the details on progress as of December 2024, plans for 2025, and screenshots of the lovely places you'll get to explore in Act 1 a few months from now.

Battle Gem Ponies | Week One 🥳📅

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.

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.

The Arrival Story's Beta 5 Update 📲 (and Marketing/Release Plans ⭐)

 

Check out Patreon for Beta Update #5!

We've got big plans for marketing efforts and look forward to announcing a definitive release date soon.

Game's just about done cookin' but we can't just push it out without rolling out the red carpet first. Get more details on the Patreon community post or hit us up on the BGP Discord with any and all burning questions!

Backer Rewards (Wave 1): Complete! [New Merch Shop on RedBubble]

Everyone who ordered Add-Ons from the BGP Kickstarter should've gotten some special stuff  in the mail recently, or can at least expect it to show up before March 1st.

(If not, double check your address listed on Kickstarter and let ol' Tony Yotes know if there's been a mixup.)

It's been so nice to see the posts of people opening up their packages and we can't wait for the next wave with all the international ones and the PILE of T-Shirts to come!

More details on that and new stuff that's available now beyond the page break below!

The Big Rebrand: Yotes Games is Now YotesMark

Some people have been wondering what's up with the name change, so why not answer it here?

To keep it concise, it's about looking way into the future. Beyond making games alone. Could be shows, movies, toys, board games, conventions, anything involving delivering people a good time. As well as any number of other business ventures to keep this thing independent and afloat as we strive to create the best of the best in entertainment.

We could talk at length about this and the overall vision for hours on end someday, but perhaps for now it's best to be vague and just focus on getting the immense amount of work to be done out of the way so everyone can just see what we mean.

The past 10 years have basically just been practice for what's to come. And we look forward to having the YotesMark name really mean something to millions of people someday.

Battle Gem Ponies (October DevLog): A New Frontier!

The Yotes Games "office" (October 2020)

We're entering November with an all-new team setup, changed plans (for the better), a miles long checklist of finished tasks, a new potential source of funding, and cute little pony sprites you have to come see!

Time to show off what a couple weeks of hardcore indie development will getcha in this spooky good October devlog! 

Battle Gem Ponies (April DevLog): The World is on FIRE!!

We're mid-apocalypse as showtime approaches! I'm sure April 2020 has been rough for pretty much everyone. And the team here at Yotes Games is no exception. 

Spritework, cut budgets, major losses, and hard lessons finally learned. It's been pretty busy.

Get a full update on the new decade's most destructive month yet as it relates to Battle Gem Ponies and see how we plan to rise from the ashes, developers reborn!

Battle Gem Ponies (March DevLog): Corona Con Cancellation Craze

Some crazy new decade we're having, huh? Should come as no surprise now that delays and scrapped plans are happening left and right, even here at little ol' Yotes Games, thanks to ya homeboy COVID-19.

Get some details on how we're handling the situation below.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog (March: Warmed Up & Eager)

     The Unity project has been cracked open and filled with placeholders and tools for actually developing a playable build now. One screen at a time, one placeholder at a time, one feature at a time.

     There's a long road ahead and I can already see myself going mad trying to animate all these ponies and debug every feature, but that's what makes this work. It's the tedious price paid to get to where I wanna be. And where I wanna be is online sharing links to my finished game for folks to check out.

    A lot of gamedev went on this past month. Hope to be dishing out some videos on the matter soon enough. See what's cooking so far below the break!

Battle Gem Ponies @MAGFest 2019! (The 1st 4-Day Con Booth)

     This past Magfest certainly was an adventure! Supplies were gathered, 2 friends volunteered to help, and we ran the biggest Battle Gem Ponies booth yet. And for 4 days straight! I thought some folks out there would like to see what that adventure was like so catch a write-up on this indie dev experience below... 

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog (January: Foundation Framework)

     Itching to kickoff the new year with great progress on Battle Gem Ponies! Gotta admit, I'm sorta stumbling out the gate in this race here, but I'm getting a rhythm down now.

See what I'm talking about below the break.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #188 (Working Man By Day, Indie Dev By Night)

     Finally scored that gosh-dang job after months of chaos!

     The publisher hunt is over... The job hunt is over... The storm is finally settling and I can start making a game plan. Not a literal game design plan, but you know. An adjusted 5 year plan with branching paths and failsafes sort of thing.

     October is around the corner, and I can't stall any longer for these 50/50 chances in tech cities across the country making sweet sounding proposals but taking weeks at a time to get back to me. 

     I got a software engineering offer from a place within driving distance where I'll have a chance to learn, a chance to excel, the ability to satisfy all my financial objectives, the ability to start as soon as Monday morning, AND it allows me to still live close to my friends and family as well as the growing Orlando gamedev community!

     Excited for this next chapter in my journey, doing the common indie thing of kicking ass at a day job to earn enough money to live on, enough to kill debt, and enough to save for the long term. Burning midnight oil to bring a dream project to life, no matter how many months / years / decades / centuries it takes.

     So here's one last devlog where no progress on BGP is made, but lots of things to reflect on about these past 2 transformative months.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #184 (A Mad Scramble)

     It's been one hectic week. Job searches, contract work researching, phone interviews, resume remakes, documents galore, and listing a whole lot of things that'll cost a whole lot of money over the next year. Current mission status? I'm looking for a publisher to finance the upcoming breakout hit of Yotes Games, LLC. That's right, Yotes Games just became a real-deal company! 

     It's as official as it gets. And it'll make contracts and legal protection a lot less risky for me and a lot more straightforward for anyone I strike a deal with. I made a list of compatible publisher options and I'm pitching the game to them one-by-one. Someone says no, too bad, next in line. I figure out of the 20 of em I narrowed the list down to, one will agree I'm a perfect fit and give Battle Gem Ponies the budget needed to carry on to Launch Day!

Get yourself a whole buncha hoopla and gamedev news below!

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #183 (Patron Palooza)

     I got an itchy twitch finger and put up the new Patreon ideas immediately. Still eager for feedback and willing to add any new ideas or mix things around, but I really felt like kicking off August with the new revamp and just having that ready to go as soon as my first couple YouTube videos go up.

    And new videos will be popping up twice a week at least for the next little while, just to build some momentum. It's all really exciting stuff and I can't wait to see how it grows. 

Now then... Onto to the devlog!

Brainstorming New Patreon Plans, Rewards, & Goals

I'm brainstorming some new plans for making the Yotes Games Patreon a much bigger deal. My general idea is that I need to put more effort into my YouTube channel due to the level of engagement that gets out of people.

But I'd like to hear some feedback from you! It'd be super great to hear someone else's take on where I should take this crazy train next. Or hear exactly why you personally wouldn't donate to my Patreon but would to another. What rewards would you like to see? Should the project be more polished? I wanna know how to get strangers completely HYPED about this game!

Trying to emulate the success of ALBDifferent, Exiled, & YandereDev here, and a solid YouTube effort is the key ingredient I'm neglecting. Even just read an article today about how Fighting is Magic might not've exploded if that demonstration trailer didn't get shared left and right earning 900,000 views. Nerds like me read development blogs, but everybody watches videos. I outta make some videos.
Check out the huge list of ideas about how I'ma to do just that below the break! (regular gamedev posts coming back tomorrow)

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #160 (Big Changes Worth the Wait)

     Improvements to Battle Gem Ponies workflow are showing some promising results and I'm looking forward to showing off a very impressive demo in March. For now I'm slowly getting used to the new tools I'm using and figuring out the most efficient ways to bring all these ponies (and everything they can do) to life.

     Each passing day I want to see the alpha build exist more and MORE but new things just keep slowing progress down. Game development really does take forever and the small things are always big things in disguise.

Take a look at the full devlog and see for yourself!

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #157 (Study the Competition)

     Another week flew by and somehow I spent most of it in planning/prepping mode instead of programming crunch. One link led to another and I ended up researching marketing techniques, storytelling tips, Lets Plays of competitor's games, game design breakdowns, and tons of RPG reviews. All while comparing what I saw with the notes, documents, and files I have open for Battle Gem Ponies. 

     Every part of me so badly wants this game to be perfect. Seems like I've become addicted to double checking my work before it's even finished. Time to fix that. This next week has to be ALL gamedev. One by one I have to knock out bugs and add in features.

     But thanks to this past week of knowledge binging, I can go in knowing exactly how high the bar is. Take a look at this week's blog to see how I intend to counter BGP's potential shortcomings and how I think it'll manage to stand next to some pretty established RPGs.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #154 (Story Beats & Maps Aplenty)

     A whole week of wicked coughing and drawing maps on graph paper. It's been a drag-myself-through-the-mud kinda week but I finally got there. The maps are done, detailed, and ready to be tiled in-game soon as I line up all the placeholders.

     Also handled some story details and progression design. The game's design document has been updated with new overworld interactions, cutscenes, object placement, and more to make for a more fun/smooth/professional experience. I want people playing this game to be blown away by it's quality and looking at the overall vision now, I think this'll be a pretty great attempt.