Tony Yotes - College Graduate

     As of this moment I am officially a college graduate! I got the paper, did the walk and everything! No more classes, no more graded assignments, no more classes, no more boring lectures, and best of all, all the time in the world to work on building up Yotes Games!

     I've reached the point where school can be addressed in past tense. I can finally proudly proclaim that I have graduated in 2016 with a degree in Gaming & Simulation at the Pennsylvania College of Technology! This is the transition point where I become a legit adult with incredible freedom and backbreaking responsibility. I'll be tackling these life challenges similar to how I've always done before. With determination, critical thinking, and a reliable moral compass.

Once Battle Gem Ponies is out, I can take that next big step toward the happy life I imagined since high school... Saving up for a place of my own.

Last Day of School... - [ EVER!!! ] -

     I-I'm free to go... ? Is it really over?

     Goodness... I never thought this day would come. I never have to force myself to sit through class again! No more exams! I can dump all the random trivia I've been memorizing and start applying the stuff that's relevant! Look at all this free time! It's spilling everywhere! I can't believe this...

YES!! SCHOOL IS OUT!!! FOREVER!!!!

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #68 (Miitomo, Con Plans, & BYOC)

     I learned a lot of things this week. Much of it was research, some of it was experiencing another live demo showcase, and I got to think about where I want to be in a few years a bit more. My first big spend in a while was the Rewired Unity plugin that easily allows for controller and keyboard input, eliminating one of the game's fussiest problems for the price of $45.

     In terms of big news the crazy fun Penn College BYOC happened on Saturday, I'm excited to graduate in less than a month, and I plan to attend BronyCon in July, FillyCon in August, and Magfest in January before launching my Steam Greenlight campaign.

Lots of planning for the future and this hectic week in review below the break!

1st Senior Semester Complete (Winter Break Crunch)

     School is finally over... For now. I survived these finals, but they were easy compared to what's next. One last semester with 6 more classes to tackle, then I'm home free. No more of this school stuff slowing me down. I'll be starting my full-time development schedule and keep it going until I return to school in January.

Look out for some cool stuff on the Yotes Games Twitter and Facebook as I ramp up development throughout December.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #47 (Game Jam & RoShamBo Complete!)

The Game Jam theme was "Uninteresting Jobs"
So I made one about watching paint dry.

     The big game jam I was looking forward to all week finally happened! It was nice to put my energy into a cute little project since Battle Gem Ponies can get pretty overwhelming sometimes. The theme was "Uninteresting Jobs" so after a lot of doodles and pitching to myself I came up with a two button game about goofing off at work.

Get some details on that and other happenings below the break.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #46 (Finishing RoShamBo)

     It's coming along now but still not done! My senior capstone demonstration got pushed back by a week so I need a build by next Monday instead of yesterday. A simplified overworld with battle encounters, game analytics, and online play. All feasible stuff. Polishing it all up for a real BGP demo release... I'm thinking it won't be done until Christmas. Everyone will be playing Fallout 4 anyway. Heck, I'd be surprised if anyone's taking time to read this when that game is out today.

Get more gamedev below.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #36 (RoShamBo & Top Secret Sprites)

     So things are settling down now as an idea has been chosen and pitched for my senior capstone class. I'm going with a simple Rock, Paper, Scissors RPG that will require me to make all the overworld assets needed for Battle Gem Ponies in order to get 2 things done at once.

Shifting into high gear this week in gamedev. Check out the details below.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #35 (Capstone Chaos)

     Time to focus on the overworld for a bit. I still plan to add the necessary updates to the battle system, but I'll need to get a decent start on the overworld portion of the game to satisfy my school requirements. After testing out my schedule last week I found that there's plenty of time for me to develop the game during the week. I can squeeze in a solid 4 hours a day and all of Sunday.

Revised Senior Capstone Plans

     I won't be able to continue working on Battle Gem Ponies as my Senior Capstone project. At least, not in a straightforward way. All non-design document development up to this point has been for the battle system that was shown at my BronyCon panel a couple weeks ago. The capstone is a school supervised project that needs to be a significantly unique product. I can't just take my battle system and add more depth to it. It needs to be distinct from the thing I've been showing everyone.

     When I met with the professor in charge of this project on Tuesday, I couldn't even start my pitch before hearing a definite "No" (talk about a shutdown).  We aren't allowed to start working on anything pertaining to our chosen project until our formal project plan has been approved by the professor. Since I already started BGP, I can't continue to develop it in-class.

     If I did continue my summer's work as school work, higher-ups would question how I accomplished so much in such a short amount of time, or look into my digital past more to discover I actually started making this RPG way back in December. That's academic dishonesty and an unfair advantage against my graduating class for this piece of portfolio work.

     To do this right I need to piece this off into it's own thing for this semester. That means I'll have to work on the overworld separately then combine it with the combat later.


      I can continue developing the battle system for a different class focused on researching an advanced development skill (i.e. online play, analytics, achievements, etc.). By balancing things this way, I can stay on track with my task list while passing these major classes that I need to graduate on time.

     My capstone will be a short overworld-based adventure where I can test out all the mechanics I'll need for BGP. Day/Night cycles, pathfinding, collision maps, and so on. Basically just make a BGP demo without battles, then add battles and release it as a pre-alpha adventure demo.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #34 (Final Year of School)

The V2 build exists on my iPod now. Looks nice lined up with the others.

     I'm back at school now and my very first class was Gaming & Simulation Capstone. I'll be talking with my professor later to see if I can work on BGP as my capstone. If not, I'll have to make up an unrelated game with pieces I can place back into the BGP game when the class comes to an end.

     Go get a full game development status report below!

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #20 (School's Out! GameDev Time!)

     Ready to shift into MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE!! I'm all settled in at home and cracking down on my development task list. With the BronyCon panel fueling me, I have all the motivation in the world to get down to business. Every cent I've saved so far is about to be put to use as I get more supplies that allow me to launch Battle Gem Ponies on more and more platforms.

For details on the past week and what's to come, look no further than below the break.

Last Day Of Junior Year

     There's not much game development to report on today since I'm focused on finishing my last few tests then going home to start the biggest crunch ever. Progress is going to rocket on by starting next week so I hope you're looking forward to it. I want a playable PC version of Battle Gem Ponies out to the public by the first week of June.

When it's ready, you'll find it over on the Games Tab.

I dressed up the Games tab a bit.

12 Hour PCT Game Jam Results (Phantom Dungeons)

     I made a game called Phantom Dungeons for the 12 Hour PCT Game Jam 2015 competition. It was supposed to be a game where you select a hero, kill things with a boomerang that gets more awesome and explosive as you level up, collect gems to buy loot, and find secret shards hidden in destructible blocks that combine to unlock a character of your choice.

     I got as far as a basic game loop before running out of time. 12 hours was a lot shorter than I expected. I know to shoot for an even smaller scope next time though. Winners of the contest get Amazon gift cards of varying amounts and I'm not sure if I won a prize at all. Probably won't find out until the middle of finals week.

     I want to finish this game at some point and release it for a buck on Mobile and PC. I want this to be an experiment with game feel to practice for an action RPG I want to do down the line. The final version of Phantom Dungeons will be a lot prettier, have a lot more content, and feature either well thought out or randomly generated dungeons.

BGP Mobile Class Playtest

     My final project / test for my Mobile Game Design class was to playtest Battle Gem Ponies with a complete stranger who's not familiar with RPGs (and most games in general) and get valuable feedback on accessibility. This little session gave me a lot of ideas on how to make the game's presentation more clear on a pick-up-and-play level. I adjusted some menu elements and added a small bit of polish to my "extras" notes in the design document.

     In terms of readability improvements I'm going to have all clickable buttons shimmer every few seconds (like you see in match 4 games) and realign things in the class matchup menu to make it clear that there are 2 rows of classes to look at instead of 4.

     The playtester also gave me the idea of color theming the attacks to match that of their classes. For example, Scatter Bomb is a Surge/Fire move that looks like a bunch of tiny yellow orbs being tossed at the enemy's feet before exploding into red-orange flames. I was just going to have random things that looked cool, but this gives me a solid design place to start from.

     I'll be putting as many of these new readability features as I can into the first public demo.

Dragon Souls Paused For Finals Week (Huge Leaps In Progress From Now On)

     I've mostly been doing non-Dragon Souls stuff this week but since school is officially out for Christmas I have a whole month to focus on gamedev. Most of this week's progress has been me speaking with folks on social media and reading/watching as much stuff as I can about presenting at conventions (BronyCon in particular).

    My biggest  accomplishment for Dragon Souls was getting all the enemy sprites in and animating them all. Everything is looking good so far and it's time to start coding how everything behaves. I'm glad the scope is really small this time around because I still want to start my RPG project more than anything. My wish will be granted the very first day of class in January and I couldn't be any more excited.

     On a side note, I have a DeviantArt account so I can finally leave comments there and tell people how awesome they are. You can also find some of my high school bored-in-class drawings that got me where I am today.

Now it's time to get to work! I want a playable game by next Friday!

New Class Schedule (Project Schedule Change)

     I did my class scheduling on Thursday and the fact that I forgot about semester exclusivity existing threw my entire school plan into chaos. I was counting on all my senior year classes being the easy stuff but now a lot of ones I was planning to get over sooner rather than later are scattered over the next 3 semesters.

No Unicorn Training Progress (Distractions Galore)

     Work didn't get done yesterday as I discovered from a classmate there there were two different maze algorithms to code for programming class. Conveniently enough the one I didn't know about happens to be even more complex than the one I spent all Thursday doing. So while I try to figure out queues and stacks, Unicorn Training will have to wait at the sidelines.

    It seems like a bad week to expect much of anything with all the distractions popping up. I've got programming assignments, my usual amount of homework, PCT GameDevs meetings to plan, a pitch to the Gaming & Simulation professors to sweat over, I haven't been to the gym in a week so I need to get back in shape, and on top of it all I just got Smash Bros and desperately want to play more.

     We'll see how much I can push off early in the week so I can at least have the later half dedicated to wrapping up my first big game. School is a pain, but that's the price for job security these days right?

Charizard has become my new main. He's so perfect for my playstyle.

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.

Status Report #58 (Comic-Con, Bosses, Classwork Pitch)

     I can kiss a nice chunk of gamedev goodbye for a few weeks because smash bros hit yesterday and this series defines every console it's on for me. I still promise to hold true to my ideal (Sunday is 100% gamedev time) but as for weekdays & Saturday, I'll be super smashing until Pokemon comes out. That's when I'll be switching between the two and really getting nothing done.

    Sure hope I finish these last few things with Unicorn Training before then! Check out what I did during my last week of productivity below.

Change Current Classwork, Not the Whole Major

     At the PCT GameDevs meeting yesterday we went over Unity's free 2D features (instead of the $75 2D Toolkit plugin I use) then discussed changing the major to suit our needs. The day before this I briefly spoke with a classmate in the gym and he suggested not pitching a whole degree, but just sticking to fixing the current one. That got me thinking hard (mostly because I don't want to go to political war with the school) and I decided it would be best to just change what we do in our 4 given game design classes.

     This would be a much easier task to pull off than pitching a new major to the school and researching all the courses and financials. It will also put less workload on the two professors running the game courses. Two members and I plan to meet with both gaming instructors sometime in the coming week to discuss changes to classwork in game development courses.