Status Report #41

     At this rate, I plan on having all the major pieces working around July 13th. If I  take a week off to visit my girlfriend that gives me 4 weeks to make all the pieces work together in a basic alpha of Unicorn Quest before school starts. That's exactly where I want to be. When school comes around and throws my schedule off, I want to only have minor things left to do. Things like tweaking enemies, storyline changes, bug fixes. I want an alpha by late August. That way, I can start recruiting testers...

Finished Unicorn Quest Item Sprites

      A lot of distractions and favors kept me busy yesterday so not much work got done. I managed to do all this though.

      With all these sprites done I can start coding them now. I'll spend today getting each one to work in-game. There's cupcakes, tonics, rings, pendants, and horseshoes. The latter three are all equips you can put on to power up Clover in some way. Horseshoes affect health and speed, rings affect your magic, and pendants affect your luck. I'll put chests in the overworld and test out taking items out of them. I'll even try to do a think where Clover holds up what's inside like Link.

Making Item Sprites

    I've been chipping away at these things all day. I still have a bunch more to go (pendants & horseshoes) so fun's not over yet. Cupcakes heal health and status effects while tonics restore or boost magic. There's also some Zelda style chests for players to plunder. Each sprite does something different and match an item in the design document. With these all ready, I'll start coding the item system next.

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.