Adventures in Equica: The 2nd Milestone Due Date

     I need to have a mildly impressive gameplay video of Unicorn Quest by May 10 (the last day of school). Reasons being I want a nice place to start working all summer and I want to get my game in the public eye. Often the hardest part about selling a game is getting people to know it exists. The success of Unicorn Quest could skyrocket if I can get it in front of the target audience of people who like ponies and video games.

     Two extremely popular blogs have captivated and gathered exactly that audience and I want to show my game there. Unicorn Quest was featured on Equestria Gaming and mentioned twice in Equestria Daily's Nightly-Roundup posts which brought a lot of people here. I want to do that again, but this time with a gameplay video where spells work and there's a basic enemy to shoot them at.

     I essentially have 3 weeks to make a Phoenix Wright sub-game, add an enemy to Unicorn Quest, finish all the spells, and do all the finals week related schoolwork...  Yeah, that's a stupid amount of too much.

     I may just focus on getting all the spells to work and make a video featuring an enemy later. I just want to have something to show off when the page views of those two blogs peak. The Friendship is Magic Season 4 finale is May 10 and I want Adventures in Equica out there when thousands of excited people are looking for the finale online and talking about it afterwards.

     Getting attention at the start of summer will be a perfect way to launch myself into crazy rapid and focused development. Having extra eyes on me really keeps me motivated to continue working as hard as I do. You reading this right now is what helps me sleep at night. It makes what I do matter. It's a great feeling when you accomplish a goal, make a new one, and somebody cares.

Thank you. So very much.

Finding a Conversation Text Box System

     I'm trying to find something that will make RPG-style speech text easy to do (for free or within $20). I can use it for my forensics project and in Unicorn Quest. I haven't finished looking into it yet, but so far Dialoguer does a good job of simplifying branching dialogue trees and NPC Shop, Chat, and Dialogue Framework looks like it will wrap my text according to box size just the way I want it to.

     You know how text boxes in RPGs pop up and letters appear quickly one at a time and can sometimes be colored differently and word-wrapped so they don't go off the edges of the box? I want that.

     It's amazing how so many games have that feature but so few tutorials and programs are available for it. Most things I find are expensive RPG kits or engines with the text thing included. I'm ready to program it myself if it comes to that but if there's a cheap tool out there that does it easily why bother reinventing the wheel? I'll keep searching and experimenting today until I find something that works.

Status Report #34

     Making games and all that jazz. School is always a pain towards the end of a semester. There's three games on my development plate right now and there's nothing to do but crackdown and bust 'em out. It's a short status report this this week.

Slow Progress Just Got Slower

     Development time has really reached a standstill this week and I can see that continuing for another couple of weeks. I have to end the school year strong and final exams and projects are rearing up. With summer approaching I can hang in there until I can finally go back to my 9-10 hour schedule vs. my current 1 hour or less one. I still have lots of spells to do, but combining my research for my forensics game with my needs for Adventures in Equica I can sleep well knowing I'm progressing.