Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #74 (BronyCon on the Horizon)

     I know I announced it a month ago, but I'm still so hyped that BGP is confirmed for BronyCon and FillyCon! That certainty should light a nice hot fire under my butt to get things done in two month's time. In addition to that, the big Demo 5 release should be done next month. With no college slowing me down I have entire days to work with now.

    So, so, SO much work is getting done this week it's incredible. It feels like everything I do for the game matters more than it ever has. I don't have to worry about dropping ideas or holding off on designing something to focus on upcoming schoolwork. I can just hammer out ideas and concentrate on coding features uninterrupted! For an example of what can get done in just one week of summer, look 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.

Status Report #57 (Fish Feaster's Retirement, Finished Enemy Scripts, & Unicorn Quest Brainstorm)

     This week was hectic! School is going nuts with the workload as we approach midterms and PCT GameDevs is really on the school's radar now. In-between all the madness I've been trying to get as much Unicorn Training work done as I can. I also managed to fix the problems I've been having with Unity Web Player builds of my games so people can play my stuff online. Hopefully things can calm down next week so I can get more game development done. But right now there's stuff to do!

     My school's Comic-Con started at 8:30 this morning so I'm very late with posting duty today! Expect a write-up like last year's sometime in the coming week. In the meantime, you can enjoy a status report!

RIP Fish Feaster...

     My iOS Developer's license has expired and Fish Feaster, along with Fish Feaster Free and TriGrid, have been removed from the app store. Fish Feaster was my first game to reach over 500 downloads, a number only surpassed by Feed The Plant. Most of my games only have around 200 downloads to date. Thanks to anyone who has downloaded my first video game ever. It holds a special place in my heart as the game that got me on the right track of just finishing something for once.

     It may return once I get a new dev license, but that won't be until I make enough money to buy a Mac computer. This is also why Unicorn Training will only be available on Android for a while. My heart goes out to any iOS players following me, and I hope to have my games available for you all to play someday soon.

It died at around 725 total downloads over about 15 months.

Status Report #56 (Enemies, PCT GameDevs, & Surviving the Common Cold)

     Bidding farewell to Fish Feaster, my very first game. I don't think I ever learned so much about game development at once. I made mistake after mistake and put all the skills I got from my pet projects to work. I went from a dropped Dragon Ball Z RPG, to a joke pony app, to an unfinished DragCore prototype (which was lost in my first Macbook breakdown). I made a bunch of posts a while back chronicling the Making of Fish Feaster along with a bunch of other related things.

    The more I think about it, the more the game means to me. Every project means a lot to me. Each one taught me so many new things and are helping me grow into the developer I still dream of being. As for anyone following me from the beginning, I hope you can remember these milestones along with me into the future.

Disappearing iOS Apps Reminder!

     On September 24th my iOS games will be pulled from the appstore! If you're curious about my first completed game project, Fish Feaster, this will be your last chance to get it! I know I'll be treasuring my app data for it as a reminder of how far I've come and how much I was able to accomplish even back then. I'll never forget the feeling of seeing my first game ever listed next to all the other official games that I once considered impossible for a novice like me to make.

    I've been Mac-less for what feels like a year now and it looks like Apple has changed a lot of things on the developer's side. Hopefully they make things easier/approachable the way Google does by the time I get another Mac so I can publish games for iOS faster next year. It's a shame I can't really show the PCT GameDevs how all the iTunes Connect stuff works from the inside. I guess I'll just save it for another time. It may even be easier to explain if the process gets more straightforward anytime soon.

My Candy Catch test app vanished when I moved data to my new iPod.
It no longer exists on iOS in a playable form.

iOS Games Disappearing (For Real This Time)

Last chance to get my iOS games like Fish Feaster!

     I thought I already went through this a long while back but noticed something was off when I still had Fish Feaster Free downloads throughout the next few weeks after my expiration date. Now I remember the extension I got during a time last year when Apple's Development Portal had issues and blocked lots of developers out. To make up for it, Apple added some time to people's dev licenses. Apple requires $100 a year to keep your games on the app store and publish new ones. If people already downloaded them, they won't disappear, but there won't be any patches coming.

    That extra time helped me get my first game to a few more people so I'm grateful for that. Now it's time to watch them go again. I still have my apps on my iPod and I have the dev files on a hard drive so they won't really be gone forever. I'm just thinking now is a good time to get ready to pull my stuff down and prepare for a new age of quality control. My old works will always exist in the Games Page but as new releases come I'd like to start marking off the practice games. I want to be known for the RPGs to come, not the amateur arcade stuff. Once the app icons at the top of my blog fill up I'll be putting only my most popular games there. Apps that get taken down will just redirect to the Games Page.

iOS Distribution Certificate Expires Tomorrow

     This is the last chance to get my iOS games for a while. My distribution certificate expires tomorrow and my apps will be removed from the app store. Until I get enough money for a new Mac they won't be coming back. Hopefully I can get one in 2016 and bring my newer apps to iTunes when I renew my developer license.

     Wow... My first game developer's license was for iTunes. I remember how awesome it felt to call my self a real game developer for the first time. I also remember how exciting it was working on my first app (a Friendship is Magic "Best Pony" Slideshow with random vectors) and Fish Feaster, a game I was actually going to finish. The moment I got a game running on my iPod where bunch of colorful rectangles with scribbled eyes to swim around a blue background and ate each other, I knew I was finally going to finish a game. Here I am about a year later taking baby steps to finishing games I always wanted to play.

Yotes Games is Leaving iOS (Temporarily) in One Month

     I got an email telling me the end of my iOS developer status is coming. My license expires a month from now I and won't be renewing it until I can afford a new Mac to develop iOS games on. Those things cost about $2000 and I don't plan to get one until Unicorn Quest is out and selling well. It has to be new because the reason my old one doesn't work is its inability to update the OSX past OSX 10. It's literally one year too old to update and the appstore will not allow apps to go to the store unless uploaded by a more recent computer. It's why DragCore never made it.

     The whole closed hardware/software and shopping cycle of Apple products are why I love Android and PC so much more. I'll be focusing on making the best Android games possible before porting to anything else in the near future.

This will be your last chance to get TriGrid and Fish Feaster on iOS for one or two years so download them now if you're an iPhone user and want to see what they're about.

Don't Sprite Too Hard

     I'm getting better with managing file sizes. I used gigantic sprite sheets for Fish Feaster, taking up many times more memory than I needed to. It's important to keep in mind how you can use scripts to manipulate sprites in order to have variant sizes, change directions, or even alter colors and transparency. The few lines of code you'll need to do that will be much easier on the memory load than countless sprite files way larger than than need to be.

      In the end, your game will run more smoothly, take up less space on users' devices, and make you feel like a game developer who works smarter, not harder. Making so many sprites by hand was my biggest mistake with my first game, and I never made it again. Now I try to find more ways to mess with sprites through code and my future games will be better because of it.

Fish Feaster Gets A Review?

     I got a confirmed review for Fish Feaster on the way from Best10Apps.com. I looked them up and it seems to be one of those review sites where you have to pay to be featured and reviewed. These types of sites should be avoided because you're only paying to be shown to the thousands of other developers visiting the site to get their own apps reviewed. Sites like this help get your app out there, but the wrong people are seeing it. If your game is worth reviewing, they will come for free in time. Although, for some apps, these shady artificial reviews could lead to genuine ones once enough people see your product out there.

     What surprised me about Best10Apps though, was them coming to me with not a offer for paid promotion, but just requesting information. They just wanted the description of my app to pair with a review. The negative side of me says they probably populate their homepage with random apps and descriptions altered slightly to resemble reviews, but the positive side of me is excited to have something out there focused on Fish Feaster. Whatever goes I suppose. I could use the Google hits and as long as it's free, any review site can have my app descriptions.

Take a look for yourself.

Making Fish Feaster - Part 3

     Once I had a game up and running all I needed to do was add some pretty fish and ambient sounds. I thought it would take me a few weeks at most. Maybe even a month, I did have a lot of fish to make after all. I also wanted to scale them all for each size the fish could possibly be. Pixel-by-pixel perfection. My game was going to be beautiful. Oh how foolish I was...

Making Fish Feaster - Part 2

     The first thing I did with Fish Feaster was make solid colored boxes in MS Paint to prototype. The actual fish graphics were made after I had the game working perfectly. It was a long and tedious process, and one I won't let myself fall victim to again, and I'm very pleased with the end result. A cute fish game that's fun to play. Find out how it came to be below the break.

Making Fish Feaster - Part 1

     Last August I set out to make my first iPhone game. It was going to be done quickly. It was going to be a port of a game I made in C++ with SDL. It was going to make thousands of dollars. It was going to rule the app store. Then reality came smashing down and smacked those expectations down to size. After having my first game erased, I started on what would have been my second project instead of enduring the frustration of starting the first one over. That second project was a game I called FisheatFish.

Fish Feaster Free Update 1.5: Now With Ads

     My first game now has working ads in it, courtesy of Google's AdMob service. Now my only game as of today with 500+ downloads will be at least microscopically profitable. It looks pretty good. Putting it into Xcode through Cocos2d was a bit of a pain but it turned out well in the end and only took a couple days. From now on, all this stuff will be handled by Unity and the AdMob plugins I got from Plato Evolved.

Images, Icons, and Banners of All Sizes

   When your game is ready to release you'll need a metric Butt Ton of images, icons, and banners that go everywhere so people on devices of all shapes and sizes can have a chance to see a pretty little image and give your game a try. Here's a look at the ones I made and a few tips on making your own quickly and easily.

Focus for Fish Feaster & TriGrid

   A few days ago I posted about writing a game focus. I can give a couple examples by posting the focuses of my first two mobile games: Fish Feaster and TriGrid.