BGP Pre-Alpha Task List (Stuff For Demo V2)

     At a loss on what to post since I'm working on everything besides the game this week (homework, tests, extra credit presentations, and trying Mewtwo in Smash). To put what's on my mind out into the world I decided to share my big ol' To-Do List that needs to be cleared before releasing my first BGP update over the internet. It's all copied straight from my iPod Notes app, separated by what I think I can accomplish in one sitting.

Check out the list of things to do 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.

Dragon Souls Prologue Status Report #2 (Setting Up)

     Development is underway! I am seeing the pieces come together as I try new techniques I want to perfect in future games. Things like smaller/sharper sprites, smooth controls, and clean general organization.

Check out some sales data below!

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.

Learning Lightworks Movie Editor

     The picture about is chaos, but it works. I'm using Lightworks to put together the last two development videos for Unicorn Training (some gameplay and the trailer). It's messy, but everything does what it's supposed to and the tools I serch for are where I'd expect them to be. I can tell I'll get comfortable with it as I play around more today and tomorrow. It looks messy because I don't know the best optimization yet as I do with Unity. Once I figure out what everything does and which tools I like the most the windows will be streamlined to my needs and the videos I produce will get better and better. Heck, I'm just glad to have footage that isn't blurry or muffled for once.

Expect a gameplay video tomorrow!
(Watch the tutorial I'm going by here.)

Unicorn Training Is In Beta!

     I finally did it!! My dev task list is clear of additional features and bugs to fix! Unicorn Training is effectively done being "developed" and only needs to be tested on some actual devices over the week. I guess this is what you'd call beta. Unicorn Training is in BETA!! Which means the launch is bound to come next week and I couldn't be any more excited/relieved/proud/victorious.

    I'll be working on trailer footage and putting a gameplay reel together for tomorrow. After those I'll do some final testing on multiple devices before wrapping this up, making a free version, testing that, then sending both versions out for review to be put on as many android appstores as I can reach. For those of you who stuck around for the whole ride, thanks.

    I've been at this for about a year now. Th idea came to me during DragCore's development but I didn't get started until February when I wrote the announcement post. I remember how excited I was to make my first RPG adventure, and it was every bit as challenging as I expected. What I didn't see coming were the cutbacks I had to pull to finish this thing, but in the end, I'm better at this than ever and I'm ready to start fresh and get it right.

    Clover's training is almost over and so is mine. Let's see what I can do with this title under my belt! I aim to get this out by next Friday, November 14th!

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.

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: Intro & Ending Text Scenes

     One of the last additions to the game are these black screens with white text that appear only once per save file after first starting and when all dungeons are beaten. The intro ones are about Clover longing to explore and the ending is the message above foreshadowing the Unicorn Quest game to come. As I said when this whole redesign got started, the game mirrors my desire to get started on something grand and fantastic but is held back because there's still some training to do before handling an adventure across Equica.

    There's not much else to post about because a lot of my time this week has been eaten by exams, homework, and fixing game breaking bugs. If I keep it up I know I can power through and get this game out soon. For now, it's back to grinding away.

Unicorn Training: Open House Crunch Time!

     Open House is coming up this Sunday and I want Unicorn Training's beta to be playable! It's super crunch time as I try to get as much done as I can so I can upload the beta to Google play and have it on my tablet for Penn College guests to play. I'm especially excited to see more kids play the game now that all the flashy stuff has been added to it. I'll finally get to see just how pick-up-and-playable my first adventure really is.

     There's tons of bugs to fix and loose ends i=to tie so I'm just going to get to it now. Expect details on how it went next week!

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.

Unicorn Training Development Video #18 (Alpha 2.0)

     I could spend a couple paragraphs explaining all the details and things I added to the game overnight, but I think a gameplay video will work better.

     This video is actually a recording of an edited project in Windows Live Movie Maker so there are a lot of skips, blurry visuals, and some lag throughout. If I can get the file to compile into an uploadable form without Movie Maker crashing I'll reupload a higher quality version. Until then...

Here's a tour of the populated world of Unicorn Training! 

(Click YouTube Link!)

Unicorn Training: (Load & Save) File Select Menu

     A file select screen exists! Players can have their save data occupy one or all of the available slots. Player will select a file then push the forward arrow to act or push the back button to return to the previous screen. In the end, it's a lot more elegant than what I had in mind a few weeks ago. I scrapped the idea of custom file names to save time on a virtual keyboard even though my school maze project had me make a keypad with similar behaviors.

Unicorn Training Dungeon Selector

     I finished up another pretty big piece of the game, the way players choose which dungeon to play through. Now the global variables that control that stuff are accessible in game. I added the ability to quit and be taken back to home from the pause menu or death menu.

     When players approach the crystal ball the action icon changes and pressing it brings up the choices of Dungeons, Bosses, and Random. Dungeons brings up all the dungeons you can play in any order, bosses brings up the boss fights you can do again, and Random makes it so that each dungeon room you enter is randomized based on ones you've beaten before.

     The diamonds are colored in for the dungeons you already beat while the others are grey. Pushing the page buttons shifts between the 9 dungeons so players can choose to play any level they want from the start.

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.

Unicorn Training: Enemy Behavior & Electric Gates

     Saturdays are my day off so I didn't get much done lately. What I was able to do after class on Friday was code how enemies behave in the overworld (basically don't shoot and only move horizontally instead of roam) and make certain electric gates alternate between yellow and blue automatically. It's Sunday now which is a day completely dedicated to gamedev so lot's of progress is sure to be made by bedtime. I want to be as close to the finish line as possible by the end of the upcoming 3-day weekend.

Status Report #59 (Prefabs Placed & Live Spriting Session)

     This week's distractions include Smash Bros, a school mini-carnival (free for students), and tons of incredibly frustrating homework. Despite it all I made tons of progress with Unicorn Training and have a world full of enemies and items! Next week is a 3-day weekend too, so I'll have tons of dev time then. I might even get everything but music done!

Look at this week in review below!

Unicorn Training: Populated Game World

     That's it. The final room now has living things in it. The game world is finally alive! I feel like Farore finishing off a world's creation and leaving a triforce behind (I apologize to any readers who find that really nerdy). Every room is filled with the right enemies, treasure chests have items in them, gems are in cave walls, boulders block certain paths, and I even tweaked teleporting a bit to fix some glitches I noticed.

     These next few weeks are going to feel like a roller coaster ride as I rush to finish this game once and for all! It's crunch time baby!

Unicorn Training: Prefabs Being Placed!

     With my homework done for the day I had tons of free time last night to work on Unicorn Training. I finished up the final game object, a breakable boulder, and placed enemy, object, and boss prefabs in the game's overworld so the player can encounter them. Everything for the forest and 1st dungeon is done and I should be able to knock out the other 8 dungeons during the school week. I also coded all the stat boosting items so buffs work in battle now too.

     This has brought my game to a new level of feeling real and all that's left is the small stuff and a bunch of balancing. Expect a tour video later this week if I get time to record one. The hardest coding stuff is done and the end is in sight. It took about 5 years but I'm finally going to finish an RPG!