Battle Gem Ponies: Breakdown | Making Our Own RPG Combat Formula

 

See what's up with the numbers behind our Combat System in our new Breakdown series video! ⭐ (Making Our Own RPG Combat Formula)

The team has been slaving away on this one. Trying to level up the quality of our videos going forward!

Battle Gem Ponies Combat Demo Tour

 

Made a walkthrough video going over the game's development history and unique mechanics. (Timestamps included)

Showing how a Pokemon Uranium inspired MLP mashup turned into a fully-fledged commercial indie effort. As well as all the special little touches that makes BGP an interesting take on the Monster Tamer genre. Check it out and give our YouTube channel a Subscribe while you're at it.

We're gonna start posting a lot more content very soon.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #176 (Summer Makeover)

     Notice a bit of a facelift? I worked on some of the Ultra Pony designs this week, just filling in those gaps in design I was drawing a blank on for the longest while. Now I can say I'm satisfied with how everypony looks and can clearly see them animated in my head.

     Actually animating the sprites is a step to come much later in development, but I can roll with these for now. 

BGP's Patreon Budget (Choosing a Bank & Shopping for Unity Assets)

First month on Patreon! Not too shabby.
Now I gotta buy gamedev stuff with it.

     Let's talk money. So Patreon charges patrons on the 1st of each month, then transfers the money to the creators on the 5th. That all went down this week, so now that it's in my hands, I can show how all this crowdfunding stuff works and explain exactly where the money's going.

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.

Learning FamiTracker & Mixcraft (Eventually)

FamiTracker. Make 8-Bit tunes with this!

     Amid feelings of uncertainty in my ability to maintain a game studio alone I considered forcing myself to adapt to one aspect of game development I never truly tried before. I already learned programming, got a feel for good design practices, and practiced pixel art so what if I can do music on my own too? It may take a dedicated very long time to get any good at it, but it might be a worthwhile investment at some point.

Missing Tiles (Lesson Learned)

     I'm still making maps today and I'm noticing a few slip ups on my tile sheet design. It's all fine and really just minor detail stuff, but I really should have made a few extra pieces that accommodate singe spaces and those rare corner pieces that can link perpendicular angles together. I also had some redundancy issues in that 2D Toolkit allows for flipping and turning sprites which made doing that for some tiles on the sheet pointless. The 3x4 arrangements shown above really aren't enough and I'll more likely need 12 tiles per terrain instead of 9.

    For now I'll just work around these limits but in the future I'll need to be sure I have tiles filling in 1x1,4x4, and corner positions. I'll also need to separate each sheet my tileset so I can easily reach all the tiles I could need for a particular area. I should also keep in mind how I could save time by having all the commonly used tiles in different variants(snow version, desert version, grass version) placed in the same position. That way I can swap out the Tile Sheet component and the map editor will automatically switch mapped tiles to match the ones on the replacement sheet.

Found Extra App Stores

     Gamasutra always has something new to show me and my latest discovery is this handy list of other appstores I can put my games on. I've only used Samsung, Amazon, Google Play, and iTunes so far. If my experience on Samsung proves anything, getting featured on a less crowded appstore can go really well. Even if only 15K people use a particular store, that's 15K people who didn't know about my games.

   I'll wait until Unicorn Training is done and in that break time between school semesters I can put all my other apps everywhere at once. Just in time for the holidays. I don't really feel like spending a whole day preparing for these markets just yet. I'd feel better if my first RPG went up when I join this new network. I'm not expecting any revenue from the things I have so far anyway.

Facebook Ad Test Ends

     The Facebook ad has come to a close. The wallet stated to empty out and people stopped clicking so I pulled the plug to save a little juice for another test later. Basically, $35 bucks got me 17 clicks. I'm still a small name so seeing my stuff doesn't mean much yet. I'm glad I got to show an extra thousand people who I am (in ad form) and I appreciate the 17 people who thought to give me a look. I plan to keep you all entertained with up to date game dev stuff for years to come. 

Get some details and reports below.

2D Toolkit Tile Map Research

     I curious about how tile maps worked so I looked it up while eating breakfast to at least get the idea running in my head. That way, when the time comes to make my next game I can go into it with the knowledge of how level building is going to work. Once again Unity (paired with the 2D Toolkit) floored me with it's simplicity. Here I was ready to take notes and review the tutorial multiple times and it turns out to be as easy as every other aspect I've used.

    Like Game Maker I just make a sprite sheet, create the game object, and edit a tile map. I can even easily make Day/Sunset/Night versions of each map for my Pony RPG which I thought I wouldn't be able to do! It really is that much easier than the hard-coded stuff I'm used to.

    This is the tutorial I read and this is the tutorial I watched (to see it in action). I feel pretty silly about the way I'm going with Unicorn Training's level building but like I said, there's no stopping this train now. I'll just take everything I just learned into account and make grid based worlds from now on. Fewer collision problems, a more neatly designed world, more efficient space usage, leading to bigger games.

     This stands as an example of how I learn things and why I don't like how schools charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach things that may come in handy while I'd need to go out and find immediately useful information on my own like I always have. I won't get too into rant mode now, but I just learned something very useful and it took 30 minutes. I can now make better, more efficient games.

Unicorn Quest: Making An RPG Town Scene - From Gimp To Unity

    With my world map charted out it's time to start putting my plans into practice. I'm using the techniques I used to create the battle scene. I start with colored blocks indicating walls, land, and obstacles. Next I do some sprite work to have things to fill space with. After I have blueprints and pieces I line everything up and put it into Unity so I can add collision boxes where they're needed.

    See a more detailed breakdown of making the game's forest town, Timber Grove, from sketch to in-game (along with some pictures) below the break.

Advertising Yotes Games on Facebook

     This was my very first time paying for an advertisement. It got me familiar with it's workings and I have a better grasp of what's going on now. My GoDaddy account net me a bunch of advertising credit on Google AdWords and Facebook so I decided to use it as a learning experience rather than risk having the coupons expire. This gives me a hint at what I'll be in for when I get an advertising budget.

Have a look at what I saw and what I learned below.

Making New Text Lines Work

    I'm onto something here. To make the text lines know when they reached the edge, I can have 2 box colliders waiting to signal when overlapping. One stays on the edge where words should never pass, the other is at where the first word appears and increases its width by 3 every time a new letter appears. Because the boxes are centered in the middle, I have to make sure only the right side of the box is the one detecting anything and let the left side go off screen.

    This is much easier than the letter-by-letter or one word at a time methods I was trying to force earlier.

Colored, Bold, Etc. Text Made Easy!

     Did you know about this? Well I didn't! Apparently Unity isn't done surprising me with it's ease of use! I finally learned what the Rich Text check box does and boy does it make my life easier. Here I was about to code up a system similar to HTML's text modifiers and as I'm googling to see if someone else has already invented that wheel I stumble across this! Unity had that stuff in it all along! Just add "<b>words here</b>" or something similar for fantastic results!

     Now I can highlight words mid-sentence with no trouble! I'm not even limited to certain colors or sizes either. It basically works like HTML. I can probably do varied word sizes too which would allow me to fill the text box with screams of "NOOO!!!" if I want to. All this stuff is really great and further proves to me that I still have a world's worth of knowledge to learn.

New OBS Video Recording Software

     After putting out a call for help on the development video side of things my buddy Cybermagus showed me Open Broadcaster Software. It's an open source tool made for livestreams and Let's Plays and it works like a dream! It records just the computer audio and ignores the mic input just like I wanted and comes with an adjustable screen resolution and window size adjuster. In addition there' tons of customizable options that will let me do much nicer development videos and even game trailers in the future!

    See a Recording Test Video I made for it on YouTube!

Preparing Achievements and Leaderboards

     My last hurdle with DragCore is getting the Game Center / Google Play Game Services functionality working. Every time I try to activate achievements o leaderboards the game crashes. A very annoying type of roadblock. Today I'll be re-watching setup tutorials and tracing my steps to make sure I'm not overlooking something. 

     Something I can talk about here though is how I prepared achievements and leaderboards for the first time. It was an interesting experience and I hope to better take advantage of these tools in the future. Details are below the page break.

DragCore: How the Grid Works

    The electric grid in DragCore is how you attack enemies and kill them with intense electrical fury. You drag your finger across the screen to create a box. Enemies that touch it die instantly, or at least most of them. Some enemies are a bit trickier than that. Here is a look at how the attack grids work.

Review Request Email Templates

     Getting reviews is endlessly important, but you need to contact people to get them to see your stuff. Even when you do there's only a 1% chance they'll even notice you unless you have something mind-blowing to show off. When requesting reviews it's important to provide all the info reviewers would need, along with some spare download codes if necessary. Instead of giving friends & family freebies, this is where your free copies should be given out.

     I follow a basic structure just barely under the character limit. I try to keep it polite, humble, and easy to read. I'm  no gaming giant so I assume my emails merit an eye-roll when someone first sees my request. I really am just some kid submitting one out of a thousand apps that day. Someone has to sift through all those emails and I want mine to leave a good impression. Take a look at what I send out to people. It might give you a starting point or something to compare with.

Shooting Particles

     For shooter mode in TriGrid, bullet sprites just didn't cut it. They were boring crystal sprites that shattered on impact. I needed something with more flare. More Geometry Wars like. I started messing with Unity's particle systems and discovered how to make a little fire ball. One color change and explosion effect later I had the shooting effect I wanted. Here is how I got those "pew pew" thingies to work.

TriGrid Collision

     Getting triangles to crash into each other was a bit trickier than I thought. I tried polygon collision boxes, turn-based movement, raycasts, and vision cones. In the end, simple boxes worked best but there was still the problem of objects colliding while facing certain directions. Here's how I used Unity's 2D Toolkit plugin to make sprites collide in my first Unity game: TriGrid.