Animating Battle Gem Ponies

     I have about a hundred ponies to put in the game and only a few months to do it. I also want each of those ponies to have at least 10 animations each. That's a lot to swallow for a beginner dev like me. To make drawing all these pixel horses possible, I needed to break it down to an efficient process. I need to establish a large "pony parts library" to avoid having to redraw poses I've done before, decide on common poses and frame counts, and limit each pony with 5 frames per animation (with few rare exceptions that have 6-7 frames).

     After taking my time building up a library of wings, bodies, tails, and idle bobbing, I can start using them to make the ponies move in-game. A good thing about limiting the designs to equines is having all the similar body shapes be so easy to animate. I'm still in the process of animating the last 3 ponies today (Orscina, Vinerva, and Sweet-Bot) and once they're done I can tidy up the battle system and draw attacks. Things are behind schedule, but they're still looking great.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #22 (Macbook is Here! Menus Are Up!)

     Progress is steady and the menus are functional (just for the demo). Now it's time to play with animations! A huge step toward making the battles feel alive. This week be be all about getting the moving ponies to look right. Then I'll be doing flashy move animations so the attacks are finally cool. That's when the game I see in my head can be seen by anyone else.

The Pony Stats Menu

     This here is the Pony Stats menu. You can access it in the overworld and also in battle. It breaks down all the combat relevant info for whoever is in your party. You can see the moves, class weaknesses, abilities, augments, maladies, stats, classes, items, and nicknames of any of the 3 ponies you send into battle. You can also check how close you are to leveling up here.

     An additional feature coming later is the ability to customize your pony through a pop-up that let's you alter your stats, attacks, and equipment. Right now everything works on a basic level, but some details won't function until things like maladies are put in the game. 

     The background is temporary and it can't scroll until I figure out how that works in Unity. With some time and a lot of Googling I'll have it working well enough for early playtesting. This menu was a pain in the butt to make, but now I'm that much closer to releasing the Pre-Alpha V2 demo.

See the menu in action!

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #21 (A Week Into Things...)

Got some tweaking to do before menus are ready.

     This is the good kind of tired. The game is all I focus on these days and the complex things are being implemented now so that they're over with when time comes to crunch for release. My biggest holdup this week was the Stats and Caps menus which took up multiple days when I expected to finish them within 12 hours. Aside from that, I'm making room for more Unicorn Training time as I get ready to port to iOS this upcoming weekend. Expect more details soon.

You can find out what happened and what's to come by checking just below the break.