Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #190 (Lackluster Progress)

     Here's my attempt to associate with the moth meme. Just wanna make a public PSA, the Battle Gem Ponies project is NOT dead. It's just kinda on life support. It's hospitalized. Yeah. Progress is still going, but at a snail's pace. Which (believe it or not) is a lot worse than usual.

     Gotta throw that out there because dev time took a massive hit while I'm trying to get a work/life balance going while also living an hour away from the office and ALSO trying to get back in shape after months of little exercise and ALSO, also fussing over finances. It's a mess, and I'm trying to get back on track. Time really flies when there's two endless mountains of work to handle and spend a third of the day sleeping.

Come see what I managed to squeeze out of the last 7 days.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #187 (When Will This Be Overrrr?)

     I swear, this isn't even a Battle Gem Ponies development blog anymore. It's me applying to every Unity Programming job on Earth and waiting weeks at a time for a response. Another week flew by and BGP gets covered in dust. But at least more promising opportunities are coming up lately. Just waiting for any one of them to throw me a decent concrete offer for a mid tp senior position and I'll probably jump on it.

The job search continues in this week in gamedev.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #181 (See you @BronyCon!)

     Can't believe I've been working on this game for almost 200 weeks. Feels more like a thousand and eighty one honestly. Nervous and excited for my panel at BronyCon, got an 11 page long story summing up everything I learned about game development. Looking to hopefully keep things concise enough to fit in the hour long window.

Here's the rundown of what I have prepared.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #180 (Coding, Cures, & Confidence)

Hope rises as pieces of the overworld are coming together.

      Weighed down by post-delay sad vibes all week and only just now getting back into the swing of things as I write this at 3:30am on a Wednesday. This week was code fever and I wore a programmer cap tight while sprucing up BGP's bones.

     Lots of things are working better than ever, and lots more are sure to come. The real issue right now is seeing how much can get up and running before BronyCon. The panel is going to be a slideshow about game development in general, some Q&A between slides, how I came up with and created BGP, and what features I have left to create and how I plan to implement them. 

     And all that will be sandwiched between a Trailer to show off the game and a gameplay demo of the battle system and overworld. Then I'd like to have some sort of teaser finale to send everyone off with and encourage them to download the demo to their phones on the way out so they can remember the game later.

     But how much I can show depends on how far I get in the next 6 days, so fingers crossed, I won't hit any more road blocks. Every precious minute counts right now, and I think I might just barely make it. So let's see what's been done in the past few days.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #170 (Re-Coding)

     Once again, starting from scratch. But this time it's in regard to how I code things. Going forward I'll be using new organization tricks to make sure I understand how the entire game works inside and out. No more endless bug hunts because I'll know exactly where they are and what that line of code interacts with, all to better help me deduce the cause of any problems. 

     Also took a stab at rearranging the development schedule to aim for a July 25th release. The path is laid out, but the main factor determining if I can make it is getting to that Alpha build I've been yapping about for years now.

     All this reorganization stuff should help with that, because things will be more efficient than ever. No more hardcoding, no more just copy/pasting from solution forums, and no more being stingy with line spacing, name lengths, or comments.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #169 (May 2018...)

Believe it or not, this organized chaos is way easier for me to understand & navigate than the version from a month ago.

     Can't believe I'm still working on recreating the menus. Haven't even touched core gameplay code yet! I feel horrible for taking so much longer than I keep thinking and promising out loud, but I can feel in my bones that this is the right thing to do. Taking the time to make sure my game is the high quality super-polished RPG I see in my head is sure to be rewarded. I don't want to just make a passable game, I want to blow people away!

     Taking steps to make a serious contender for mobile game of the year. Get this week's development news below. 

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #75 (The Great Code Cleanup)

Tommy Refene, another hero of mine. Watching the indie game movie now feels so different from when
I saw it as a college sophomore. There's this new gravity, an intensity to it now...
I'm on the edge of adulthood with  a pit of unhappiness below and a platform of greatness that could be just out of reach.

     BGP is now under construction with a much more readable codebase. The difference clean code makes can't be stated enough. It's a big game changer in terms of understanding what's going on behind the scenes. Knowing how the code works makes debugging and creating complex battle mechanics a much smoother process.

The Great Code Cleanup

     Got real sick of how annoying debugging can be and decided to clean up my code. I organized everything so that I finally know what each line does. With a system like this I can hunt for things to modify much more quickly instead of playing Where's Waldo every time I look for a variable.

     It took a week longer than I thought it would, but it's worth it. The lost time can pay for itself in how quickly things can be implemented now that code controls have been rearranged in uniform patterns, the comments are standardized, I'm being much more generous with spacing, and the code is laid out in a way that guides the eye to where I need to focus to solve a specific problem or squeeze in new features.

Battle Gem Ponies: Pre-Alpha 4.5 [Delayed because BUGS]

Version 4.5 was supposed to be up today...

     This one's a minor update with some bug fixes, new sprites, new text box system, and full gamepad/keyboard support. It's a sort of halfway point between the last version and the big jump to version 5 (where the game starts looking real). Too bad the gamepad control functionality is acting up. Now whenever a menu pops up, the game gets confused as to what the button presses do and locks you into a certain screen, making the game unplayable.

     As always, when the game is ready it'll be up on Itch.io. I'm betting the bugs can be squashed by the time final exams are over and I can concentrate on it. I'm kinda drowning in last minute projects and cram sessions, so programming this game an hour at a time isn't getting me very far.

Look forward to the 4.5 update in early May.

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 DevLog #8 (Maladies & Battle Interface)

     This week is going to be a productive one. I'm determined to get to a point where the ponies can use moves and hit each other. No fancy animations just yet, only functionality. Messing around with ideas for this has gotten me to dress up the menus again, giving a nice polished feel to everything.

Check out this week in gamedev below the break!

Status Report #62 (Finishing Touches To Unicorn Training)

     It's soon to be trailer week as I finish up some last minute things with Unicorn Training. Game breaking bugs have been turning up all week and I've been squashing every one I could find. Next week will be all about the game trailer, a gameplay compilation, and bug testing before making a free version of the game and putting both on the appstore waiting list before next Monday. It's really the home stretch now!

Unicorn Training: Cleaning Up The Save System

     Things are as busy as ever. School is back full force and I spent most of the day either in class or in a textbook. I used my few hours of gamedev time sprucing up the save script and rechecking it for important data values I overlooked (there were a few). As of tonight the save system works great and is easy to edit. It' important to get this down now because my mobile project is going to have a ton of variables to keep track of.

Hopefully more gets done tomorrow!

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.

Improving Coding Skills

     One big thing that keeps popping up as I work is how much more organized I'll have to be for the next project. After every project I learn to prepare the next to take some concept into consideration when making connected scripts and folder hierarchies. Every code library is neater than the last and now that I've had practice with an RPG scale game's code, I can make a much more organized workspace.

     This is a big deal because Unicorn Training is currently a mess behind the scenes. Debugging is tedious because I have to alter every instance of copy/pasted code when I should have central scripts multiple objects can point to. I should have been more careful about the variable names and comments because now when I go to fix a script from 6 months ago I can't tell what all the pieces do.

     I had to Frankenstein a bunch of code together and patch on tons of fixes I never thought of. I will have a better start next time if I keep all these things in mind. In some ways my code is better than ever, but in others it's atrocious and needs to be improved. It's that constant drive to always do better.

Unity Maze Generator (For Programming Class)

      My programming 3 class was tasked with making a random maze generator over the weekend for our first exam grade. Needless to say it ate a lot of my free time. When people talk about programming 3 they always mention the dreaded maze assignment so it's my class' turn to suffer. Next semester we take on the assembly classes seniors are complaining about.

     The teacher wants to be able to pick the width, height, and frequency of wall blocks. He even says it doesn't have to be solvable. It definitely doesn't search for the fastest path either. Just a start, end, border, walls, and a final path. As to not let my hours of headache go to waste I figured I could share a bit of how I did it below the break.

Unicorn Training Item Shops

     Both the item shops are open for business! They work like a charm, allowing you to buy helpful things in exchange for gems. It's as simple as walking in from of what you want and pressing the action button. The price of your selected item hovers over the shop keep's head. I'm currently debating on whether to have item descriptions somewhere or let that be a surprise. At this point I realize items are not a necessity but are more like a bonus to make things easier. Especially the potions. Items and currency kind of just exist for the sake of existing. I'll definitely overhaul it all when making Unicorn Quest.

Organizing Enemy Code (Unicorn Training vs Future)

I should keep a comment list of all methods before the first one starts.
I can find them easier that way.

     One of the things I need to keep in mind for future projects is the way I write AI code. I need to organize things into very specific methods to minimize copy/paste lines of logic and everything needs to be placed in a way that makes looking for a particular method easy. I think I did pretty well with Unicorn Training, especially compared to how I started with TriGrid.

     All the enemies have similar behavior methods organized in the same way. The AimAtPlayer() method is always after the NearPlayer() method and before the Knockback() method. Over time I'm getting better at writing clean code because I'm learning what my needs as a designer are. It'll be interesting to see how my way of thinking changes when I switch to turn-based AI code next year.

Working Obstacles in Unicorn Training

     I got the basic travel stuff down finally. Dungeons are navigable and feel great! Just throw in some enemies, treasures, and a boss then they'll be complete. I made things like pits you can only cross by teleporting, electrical gates that turn on/off in alternating patterns, switches that open gates, and booby traps that spawn baddies when you touch them. Next on the agenda is testing every door to make sure they lead to where they're supposed to. It'll also give me a chance to experience the world from a player perspective instead of a zoomed out tile map view.

I Think I Prefer Working With Grids & Tiles

     You know how in games like Pokemon you can only move along a grid of squares? How you can count each step and know where you'll end up? I think I'll be working that into my RPGs in the future. Collision boxes are always a headache and especially so with Unicorn Training. It's a good lesson and experience but I really want to work with something simpler to code. Most of my bugs come from collider box issues and it's what I've spent a large amount of time working on. I'd rather put that care into adding new things instead of fixing the simplest of features (the ability to walk around and not go through walls).

     Like TriGrid, I can just keep track of all the squares around an object and know if it's okay to move an exact amount of pixels each step. I can even snap to the next position with a little algorithm. Unicorn Training depends on free movement for it's arcade shooter style combat so there's no going back now, but it's really something I want for my future titles.