Next Game: Battle Gem Ponies (Competitive Turn-Based RPG Adventure)

     It's finally time to start this... I've been wanting to make this game for so many years and now I'm free to give it my all! Battle Gem Ponies is the name of the game and it's about making little super-powered horses with gemstones on their chests fight each other for sport. I plan on releasing it before I graduate college in Spring 2016 and having it available on Mobile and PC platforms for $4.99.

     This is the dream game I've wanted to make for years. The success of this game will determine if I'm cut-out for a career in indie game development so I'll be putting everything I've got into making it the most awesome game it can be.

Get a full description of the game and a bunch of details below.

Dragon Souls Prologue Status Report #1 (Ideas)

     Unicorn Training released a week ago (Get it here!) and another project is already underway! It's full steam ahead as I try to make another game before app stores close for the Holiday frenzy. This is also the beginning of my new blogging schedule where I only post twice a week (Tuesdays and Fridays). I want to do Status Reports on Tuesdays so I can show weekend sales (which I assume are more interesting) and I'll do weekly posts on Friday showing the most interesting developments on whatever my current project is. This report will stand in place for this Tuesday's so don't expect any updates until this upcoming Friday.

Here's week one of Dragon Souls Prologue and a new Yotes Games!
Check out Unicorn Training sales data below!

Next Project: Dragon Souls Prologue (Arcade Hack n' Slash)

Dusty old doc from before Unicorn Training...

    It's finally time to talk about this thing. This game I've been trying to make since I first learned C++ in high school. Back then it was called Dragon's Flux, but now... Dragon Souls. Trademarked. Actually, I'm just holding onto the trademark since it isn't set in stone unless I provide proof of use in commerce within the next 4 months. It was a really good name that describes the theme perfectly and before Yotes Games was even a thing I saved up to buy the name "Dragon Souls" as the name of my own video game series.

     Sadly, like Unicorn Quest, I'm not able to make this huge RPG adventure just yet. Especially with school in the way. Instead I'll be pseudo-introducing the game's protagonist and world rules. I say "pseudo" because unlike with Unicorn Training it's going to be very unrelated to the actual game series in terms of gameplay. This is a fast-paced action title with one mode and one rule: Survive.

Crunch Time To Get A Quick Game Out

     The race is on to get started on my next game jam style project. I want a free smaller game finished before appstores shut down for winter holidays. That means it has to be up before the 20th since they usually stop accepting and reviewing submissions around the 22nd. If I want to ensure my place when most companies are rushing out Christmas apps, I need to be completely done with my game done and submitted by December 10th to get on stores like amazon, Samsung, and GetJar. Google Play lets you upload whenever you want, but may still close off uploading for Christmas.

Unicorn Training: Last Week of Development! (Birthday Goal)

     The Unicorn Training project is coming to an end and I'm predicting this to be the last week I spend adding things to the game. Next week will be all testing and I can have this thing out weeks before going home for Thanksgiving break. It's been a wild ride and really helpful for me to realize the importance of thinking design decisions through instead of having them just to have them.

I turned 21 today and I absolutely feel like a much smarter person than I was a year ago. 

     As for what's on the horizon, I'm waiting for my Gaming & Simulation instructor to return fro a trip to ask if I'm allowed to combine my Mobile Gaming class project with my senior Capstone class one in order to have an extra semester's worth of concentration. If all goes well the stars will have aligned to allow me to make the best game I'm capable of producing.

     This upcoming RPG means the world to me and its success will determine if independent game development is a career path I'm capable of following. I'll be giving it every bit of energy I can to ensure it does more than well.

Spring 2014: Extra Time To Focus

     With this project wrapping up and the spring semester approaching I find myself daydreaming about dedicating a year to my mobile project. My schedule was thrown out of whack but I can make the most of it. I was planning on having a really easy semester as my last at school but thanks to my rewrite I'll be doing most of that this spring instead. I was planning on dedicating lots of time to a certain couple classes I'm dreading but I can use the free time to get my next game out faster instead.

    I have a feeling that once I start my turn-based RPG I'll rocket through development on passion fuel. I've been itching to do it for a year now, even years if you count my first attempt at making a game (a dead project called Pokemon Adventure written in C++). If I'm as productive as I'm predicting I can have it out late November of next year at the earliest.

     As you can see above I've kept all the leftovers from my first Pokemon project and saved anything inspiring me for the new one. That includes a few mock ups I put together when I couldn't contain myself. I'm really eager to put everything I have into it as soon as Unicorn Training is done for good.

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.

Ideas For Building Characters (Mobile RPG)

     I spent a lot of time looking at a bunch of Pokemon theories (non-creepypasta ones) that explained a lot of logic games in the game's world. things like how the world came into existence, how one monster can become another through generations of breeding/mutation, and why there is a limit to how many moves can be used. It's a way to get me thinking about how to make my own world full of characters that don't feel like generic stand-ins.

    You can see a few standout videos I saw on Gnoggin's YouTube channel and catch what I took away from the experience as a gamedev below the break.

Improving Coding Skills

     One big thing that keeps popping up as I work is how much more organized I'll have to be for the next project. After every project I learn to prepare the next to take some concept into consideration when making connected scripts and folder hierarchies. Every code library is neater than the last and now that I've had practice with an RPG scale game's code, I can make a much more organized workspace.

     This is a big deal because Unicorn Training is currently a mess behind the scenes. Debugging is tedious because I have to alter every instance of copy/pasted code when I should have central scripts multiple objects can point to. I should have been more careful about the variable names and comments because now when I go to fix a script from 6 months ago I can't tell what all the pieces do.

     I had to Frankenstein a bunch of code together and patch on tons of fixes I never thought of. I will have a better start next time if I keep all these things in mind. In some ways my code is better than ever, but in others it's atrocious and needs to be improved. It's that constant drive to always do better.

Status Report #53 (Sprite Outlines & Homework Galore)

     Sprites are all done and just need to be animated! This is the fun part of sprite making where I can see them in action. I also have to worry about mixing and matching certain sprite pieces for the more complex looking baddies. I'm also gearing up toward running a game development club at school.

This week in game dev can be found below!

The Musician Search Ends

     The dust has settled and I have finally found the help I've been looking for. Stuntddude and Ai-shi-ter-u will be helping me out on the audio side of things for my upcoming RPG. I had them send me a test track each to see if they can get the feel down and produce something in a reasonable time. I was surprised when I got a sample track back the very next time I checked my email. It only took Ai-shi-ter-u 2 hours to make and sounded like a fantastic start!

     I can finally relax knowing that I'm in good hands on that side of things. I can even look forward to growing alongside someone else and having us all climb to ever greater heights. Like I said, 100% of the OST profit will go to the composers as payment, and when I become financially stable these guys will be the first ones I go to with payment upfront in addition to OST sales.

     You can find to those guys on SoundCloud to listen to stuff they made before.

Finished White Outlines (NEVER DOING THIS AGAIN!!)

     The time consuming process of outlining each up-scaled sprite is finally over. I am ready to cut out each sprite box and drag them all into Unity. It's a big relief to be done drawing everything and soon I'll be making code that turns these pixel monsters into living creatures. Like I've mentioned before, I don't plan on ever ding this stuff again. I'll keep my sprites small, manageable, and outline-free. I can focus more on color contrasting and non-black borders to make things stick out.

Junior Year Plan

My programming teacher talking to parents at a recent Open House.

     Making collisions for Unicorn Training maps is taking longer than expected. A 2 day assignment has become a week-long event.  A miscalculation from inexperience that won't happen again. I may have been done quicker if I mapped collision boxes to the tileset beforehand but I wanted to make more dynamic shapes with them so I did it the way I'm used to. Silly rookie me.

    To fill up the time I should restate my slightly altered plans for the upcoming Junior year of college I'll be suffering through attending. I'll be finishing Unicorn Training in the fall then immediately doing a quick arcade title before winter break. Over the vacation I'll be in pre-production for my Mobile Development class project which I couldn't be any more hyped to do. Get a lot more details on these upcoming projects and this semester's plans 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.

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.

Arranging App Icons Atop Yotes Games

     You might have noticed how often I switch up how the app icons on the blog appear by now. I think I've finally settled on a good way to handle their ordering. Their original purpose was to display the apps I had in the pipeline. Now it's more of a list of the apps I've made so far. Right now I'm thinking that it's a good idea to keep it at an even 8. It represents the 8 games I made in college that got my career started. As time goes on I'll keep my 7 most popular apps listed here in order of release and save the last slot for the current work in progress.

     Either that or I'll have an odd number of apps more tightly packed together with the WIP in the middle. nine apps on display total? The biggest ones closest to the middle? We'll see how it all looks when I have more games under my belt to show. I'm far from done messing with these things.

Choosing A Pixel RPG Font

Here's how the textbox looks so far.

      I'm searching for just the right font for this game's pixel art style. I chose Myraid Web Pro Bold first because it looked best from my options in MS Paint. After looking at other RPGs and this game's style as a whole I'm thinking about changing all the fonts to a pixelated one of some kind. I'm considering the font on the 4th row in the picture above, 8BitOperator. It comes with lowercase letters, it squeezes characters together for more space, and its punctuation marks are equal in size to capital letters.

What I Want In A Text Box

       I need an efficient speech bubble system like you see in tons of RPGs for my games. Unfortunately there are not many templates for one floating out there (either that or I can't find them) so I need to make one for myself. I need to make something that separates text into 3 or 4 lines, allows for color coded words like you see above, and automatically extend the number of pages based on how many lines of text are required. I'd also like it to spit out each character one at a time with a beep matching either a male, female, really high, or really low pitch.

      I'm skipping out on certain things that seem really difficult to pull of for the time being like shaking letters, bold & italics, changing fonts, auto language adjustments, and varied font size. If I do this properly, I may be able to add those features in as I get better at this whole game development thing (or meet someone who's good at it and wants to work with me).

       It'll take up a large chunk of time but this is worth the effort. I can reuse and refine this textbox system for use in the absurd amount of games in my mind. I better be careful now to make a strong and cleanly coded foundation or else I risk making a mess for myself and any people I decide to work with.

Mobile Gaming Class Project Switch

     I woke up this morning and realized something pretty big. If I can get Unicorn Quest done by December, I'l be able to start my next RPG in the Spring 2015 semester. That's when I plan on taking my Mobile Game Development course. After talking with the professor of the class I found out that we are allowed to develop our games with Unity and even sell those projects on app stores with absolute ownership.

    Instead of making the platformer game I had in mind, I can work towards a working battle engine for my turn-based pony RPG. I can turn in a PvP focused version of the game for a grade and work on the story mode and balancing all of next summer. This is much more exciting for me than forcing myself to make a platformer when I'm clearly dying to start this RPG. Either I'll make the platformer later, or put it on my list of skipped projects.

     This switch has got me thinking about all the extra help I can get from the school by putting those resources to use in a project I'm feverishly passionate about. I'll be forced to do presentations for a grade and I'll be demonstrating the game at open house events. I'll get to show the game off at the next BYOC and I can do follow-up research on it for my Game Analysis course (and it's presentations) the semester afterwards. The more I think about it, the better it sounds.

    With all that to look forward to, it's important to go back to putting everything I've got into my current labor of love: Unicorn Quest. My next few games depend on the foundation I build with this one.

Why On Mobile?

     I was reading an article on Gamasutra a while back and it got me thinking about why I chose mobile as my primary platform in the first place. I basically want to help push expectations up. I know it's a niche but I believe there is a place for people who want deeper game experiences beyond minute to minute puzzles. I know the need exists because I know I've wanted that since I first bought an iPod Touch (9th grade). A big RPG adventure that's playable in small chunks.

     Day-by-day you spend minutes here and there trying to gather enough gold to restock potions and attempt a hard dungeon instead of collecting coins to keep crops alive. I'd rather have a tough Pokemon match than beat a level in Candy Crush when I'm on the toilet. It's possible for a single person to make a game with SNES quality in about a year thanks to the tools out there. I see the pocket sized mobile devices packing the power of PlayStation 2's and think this is a chance for really awesome games to come out, but the majority of what's out there isn't appealing to me.

     So in short, I'm making games that I wish existed. That's what most indies are after too right?