The Big Rebrand: Yotes Games is Now YotesMark

Some people have been wondering what's up with the name change, so why not answer it here?

To keep it concise, it's about looking way into the future. Beyond making games alone. Could be shows, movies, toys, board games, conventions, anything involving delivering people a good time. As well as any number of other business ventures to keep this thing independent and afloat as we strive to create the best of the best in entertainment.

We could talk at length about this and the overall vision for hours on end someday, but perhaps for now it's best to be vague and just focus on getting the immense amount of work to be done out of the way so everyone can just see what we mean.

The past 10 years have basically just been practice for what's to come. And we look forward to having the YotesMark name really mean something to millions of people someday.

Patreon Update! (Kickstarter Latecomers, Welcome!)

Updated our Patreon Description, Goals, Rewards! A 2nd chance for anyone who missed out on the Kickstarter Hype 🚂

We now have the funds to make the game, but let's see if we can grow the studio over time and make bigger/better things. 📈

Join in on the journey (or maybe just grab yourself a T-Shirt on the house) on our Patreon.

Battle Gem Ponies Kickstarter: COMPLETE!! 🎊🥳 (138% Funded!)

The Battle Gem Ponies Kickstarter has ended with 414 Backers that pledged $34,695.50!!

Battle Gem Ponies (June/July DevLog): Pre-Kickstarter Madness!

The long overdue June/July Devlog is here! (And in video form!)

From now on we'll be doing these instead of the usual monthly writeups on the Yotes Games blog since its more fun & easy to watch/listen than navigate to a particular website and read. So subscribing to our YouTube channel will keep you up to speed on everything!
Plus you get to hear all our voices on this rotating cast of devs in these short podcast style updates.

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.

April Progress Report (Growth & Prep)

 

This past week we've welcomed a new member to the scrappy Yotes Games team! 

ConfidentCow will be helping us with graphic design work to take some things off the overwhelming plate that is making this game look nicer.

He's an old friend who's been at this professionally for a few years now, ready to take on something new and exciting in his spare time. A pandemic side-hustle!

@Confident_Cow's gonna help us make trailers, YouTube content, promotional artwork, capture game footage, make a press-friendly website, redesign interfaces, plan out interfaces we haven't made yet, and polish up the attack graphics starting in May once he's all set to pursue his streaming & game development dreams. So give him some love and wish him luck!

Check out more of what we've been up to lately after the break.

Battle Gem Ponies (October DevLog): A New Frontier!

The Yotes Games "office" (October 2020)

We're entering November with an all-new team setup, changed plans (for the better), a miles long checklist of finished tasks, a new potential source of funding, and cute little pony sprites you have to come see!

Time to show off what a couple weeks of hardcore indie development will getcha in this spooky good October devlog! 

Battle Gem Ponies (June DevLog): Spare No Spritework Setup!

It's been a colorful month of new discoveries and a bunch of mouse-hand cramps. Gearing up the BGP cast for more efficient animating and coloring as well as crossing off some long-procrastinated tasks like "DESIGN THE LEGENDARY PONIES ON THE TITLE SCREEN". Which was fun!

     Along with a million other tiny things (gamedev or otherwise) that made this month... Interesting? Yeah, interesting.

Get the full deets below if you're curious.

Battle Gem Ponies (April DevLog): The World is on FIRE!!

We're mid-apocalypse as showtime approaches! I'm sure April 2020 has been rough for pretty much everyone. And the team here at Yotes Games is no exception. 

Spritework, cut budgets, major losses, and hard lessons finally learned. It's been pretty busy.

Get a full update on the new decade's most destructive month yet as it relates to Battle Gem Ponies and see how we plan to rise from the ashes, developers reborn!

Battle Gem Ponies (March DevLog): Corona Con Cancellation Craze

Some crazy new decade we're having, huh? Should come as no surprise now that delays and scrapped plans are happening left and right, even here at little ol' Yotes Games, thanks to ya homeboy COVID-19.

Get some details on how we're handling the situation below.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog (January: Foundation Framework)

     Itching to kickoff the new year with great progress on Battle Gem Ponies! Gotta admit, I'm sorta stumbling out the gate in this race here, but I'm getting a rhythm down now.

See what I'm talking about below the break.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #188 (Working Man By Day, Indie Dev By Night)

     Finally scored that gosh-dang job after months of chaos!

     The publisher hunt is over... The job hunt is over... The storm is finally settling and I can start making a game plan. Not a literal game design plan, but you know. An adjusted 5 year plan with branching paths and failsafes sort of thing.

     October is around the corner, and I can't stall any longer for these 50/50 chances in tech cities across the country making sweet sounding proposals but taking weeks at a time to get back to me. 

     I got a software engineering offer from a place within driving distance where I'll have a chance to learn, a chance to excel, the ability to satisfy all my financial objectives, the ability to start as soon as Monday morning, AND it allows me to still live close to my friends and family as well as the growing Orlando gamedev community!

     Excited for this next chapter in my journey, doing the common indie thing of kicking ass at a day job to earn enough money to live on, enough to kill debt, and enough to save for the long term. Burning midnight oil to bring a dream project to life, no matter how many months / years / decades / centuries it takes.

     So here's one last devlog where no progress on BGP is made, but lots of things to reflect on about these past 2 transformative months.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #184 (A Mad Scramble)

     It's been one hectic week. Job searches, contract work researching, phone interviews, resume remakes, documents galore, and listing a whole lot of things that'll cost a whole lot of money over the next year. Current mission status? I'm looking for a publisher to finance the upcoming breakout hit of Yotes Games, LLC. That's right, Yotes Games just became a real-deal company! 

     It's as official as it gets. And it'll make contracts and legal protection a lot less risky for me and a lot more straightforward for anyone I strike a deal with. I made a list of compatible publisher options and I'm pitching the game to them one-by-one. Someone says no, too bad, next in line. I figure out of the 20 of em I narrowed the list down to, one will agree I'm a perfect fit and give Battle Gem Ponies the budget needed to carry on to Launch Day!

Get yourself a whole buncha hoopla and gamedev news below!

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #183 (Patron Palooza)

     I got an itchy twitch finger and put up the new Patreon ideas immediately. Still eager for feedback and willing to add any new ideas or mix things around, but I really felt like kicking off August with the new revamp and just having that ready to go as soon as my first couple YouTube videos go up.

    And new videos will be popping up twice a week at least for the next little while, just to build some momentum. It's all really exciting stuff and I can't wait to see how it grows. 

Now then... Onto to the devlog!

Yotes Games Has a Patreon!

Support Battle Gem Ponies on Patreon!

     After tons of internal debating on whether I should do it or not, on a whim, I decided to create a Patreon today. To celebrate being over 150 weeks into development and on the verge of an Alpha build, I wanted to have some sort of morale boosting driving force to push me and the music team through the rest of development. I gotta imagine this is similar to how other devs feel when they launch a crowdfunding campaign. Only this one is entirely optional.

     It took all day to make and I think it turned out pretty nice. Colorful, detailed, yet concise, and with language conveying both lightheartedness and sincerity. Yes... I'm actually pretty proud of this. I just hope it's successful.

     If you could be so inclined, feel free to take a look around and consider becoming a patron to Yotes Games.


     Or just keep an eye out for one of these...

Become a Patron!

So, About BGP's New Look and Copyright...

     This is a post about clearing the air of any C&D worries. I wanted to break down just how legally safe this all is once and for all since the majority of comments I see for this game revolve around conversations of "this will be taken down because X looks like Y".

     Hopefully some explanation combined with the game's recent graphical update on Steam Greenlight will put those Cease & Desist concerns to rest.

Making 2017 My Year

     This is it. Go For Broke! 2017 has to be the year Yotes Games either becomes a respected name in the industry, or I find out Battle Gem Ponies was a miserable failure. Either I release a successful game and finally move into a home of my own, or sweep up the pieces of my shattered pride and find a job as an entry-level designer somewhere.

     I'm kicking the year off fanfare by releasing Battle Gem Ponies on Steam Greenlight at 10:00am January 1st. All hope lies on that getting some games media attention and giving me some indication that the 25K minimum customer count is possible.

     Life is hard. Indie development is risky. The unknown future is scary. But I gotta go for it to get the good ending, you know? The year 2016 curb-stomped a lot of people, and I certainly haven't healed yet. And I'm certainly not the only one taking new year's resolutions seriously this time around. Things really need to change, and at the very core of it all, the best way I could improve my life is by getting the finished version of this game out there.

     So here's to the final sprint! One last crunch-tastic year to finishing Battle Gem Ponies once and for all! To finally putting my dream RPG out there for others to find, play, and love! To finally obtaining financial independence and living with the freedom I dreamt of for at least a decade now!

Here's to making the greatest super-powered pony RPG anyone's ever seen!

Demo 8 for Steam Greenlight?

     With the game's delayed development in mind (from one hell of a Summer to a very distracting Fall) I'm currently thinking of ways to still keep my "Coming to Greenlight in January" promise. The one I made for myself as well as anyone who'd listen. I wanted January because I heard that the early Mondays of that month were the perfect time to get press attention.

     So the plan was to blitz a bunch of press sites and forums the Monday after Magfest and get as many people to check out the latest build of BGP as possible. By the looks of things though, that build may be Demo 8.0 (the Pinto Island demo) and not the beginning segment of the game with tons of polish like I had wanted.

     With that, I may still be Greenlit with the help of the brony community, and could even catch the eye of gaming sites looking for Pokemon fan game related scoops just as Sun/Moon hype is on the decline and Pokemon GO winter updates are either released or proven to be rumors.

     Should things go swimmingly, I'd still like to have that big story update come out piece-by-piece. I'd like to release 3 different segments (one month at a time) showing off how great the final game will be. From the beginning to the end of the first forest, then a batpony hunt in a cave further along in the story, then a level where you confront the game's villains in a way that leaves you wanting to see what the rest of the game could be like.

     I'm hoping this course of action succeeds in drawing attention to the project. A launch that gets tens of thousands of people onboard in that first month is ideal. That's why I want the Greenlight campaign to rally up as many folks as possible. When BGP comes out, I want everyone to know it! By giving people a good demo and showing the game's improvement over time, I'm hoping people recognize this as a project from a developer who really cares.

     I am promising to make a game that is worth the average Pokemon fan's time as well as anyone else patient enough to give this unknown game from an unknown developer a quick look.

Yotes Games, Hopes, and Dreams (Birthday 2016)

     This is actually the last time for another 7 years that my birthday falls on a Friday so I should try to make the most of it with what I've got. Unfortunately, one of the things I don't have ready is a new BGP demo... Distractions got the best of me.

     By this time next year I'll be at Beach City Con with some of my very best friends relaxing on the beach at the peak of BGP's launch popularity. (Well actually, it'd be one week after that and I'll be mid post-con depression.) 

     If the launch is as successful as I wish it can be, I'll be house hunting and getting ready to establish a new base of operations for Yotes Games! Thoughts of my next birthday are really keeping me alive. Finishing BGP and getting it in front of every brony on Earth is my final challenge. The one last insanely difficult thing to do before I can take a well deserved break and plan out where I'd like my indie career to go.

     Should I fail, things may take a serious turn. Either selling my soul and busting my back just as hard to make someone else rich, or risking it all on a Kickstarter push for BGP2 to fix whatever kept it from selling well. All I have to do is sell 25,000 copies to justify this career choice. But I know this game has more potential than that. Pokemon Uranium just proved that there's an audience for this stuff. Indie passion projects from real Pokemon fans that gets the little things right.

     Today I turn 23, and I promised myself that I'd become the Tony Yotes I envisioned by age 24. The same age Toby Fox and John Boyega hit their prime accomplishments. In one year's time I'll have a notable game to my name. Hopefully one that brings excitement and smiles to tens of thousands of people across the globe.

Challenges Ahead for Demo 6

     Sorry I haven't been posting on Fridays for so long. Some of you may remember me saying I'd lay of these weekend posts when there's nothing to talk about, but the rest of you probably feel left in the dark. Thing is, BGP is currently at that boring stage of development where most of the weekly accomplishments are getting basic features to work, fixing bugs, improving organization, rewriting ideas, and trying to figure out how to toss numbers around to program new features at all.

     I thought I'd take a minute this week to talk about some of the upcoming obstacles I need to navigate in order to get BGP V6.0  out in time for Halloween weekend.