Equica's Pixie Fountains On Hold

     I worked on sprites for the pixie fountain Clover will use to fast travel around Equica. I will be placing these things in key areas spread out to destinations players may visit often. They also double as healing centers and are small enough for me to squeeze indoors if I need to.

     In Equica, pixies have a unique teleportation magic. In exchange for their magic Unicorns have constructed these magical homes for them. Standing on the square will restore your health and pressing the action button there will bring up the warp menu so you can pick another discovered fountain to warp to.

     You unlock new fountains by finding them and offering a certain amount of gems of a certain kind. Pixies eat gems and will only teleport generous ponies who have fed them before. The healing is always free but unlocking a fountain for fast travel will cost you.

     Trouble is, I can't come up with their visual composition and it just looks off. I'm considering having them more edged (hexagonal?) in the front, making them gold instead of marble when activated but grayed out when not, tilting the standing pad to match building/stump angles, and layering on some moving water and tiny wandering pixie objects. I might even get rid of the warp pad entirely because the perspective is so weird. I don't know yet. I'll come back to this later.

     For now I'll just put this aside because there's a lot of stuff to work on that I do know how to handle and I bet the look will come to mind over time in a burst of creativity. Many things like this do.

Unicorn Quest: Making An RPG Town Scene - From Gimp To Unity

    With my world map charted out it's time to start putting my plans into practice. I'm using the techniques I used to create the battle scene. I start with colored blocks indicating walls, land, and obstacles. Next I do some sprite work to have things to fill space with. After I have blueprints and pieces I line everything up and put it into Unity so I can add collision boxes where they're needed.

    See a more detailed breakdown of making the game's forest town, Timber Grove, from sketch to in-game (along with some pictures) below the break.

I'm Back & Ready To Blitz Unicorn Quest Development!

     As of tonight I'm back at my post and more ready than ever to finish up Unicorn Quest's features before school starts in August. During my little vacation I got lots of rest, came up with lots of gameplay ideas to make my current and future projects even better, and was possessed by the urge to get Unicorn Quest done so I can officially have a really cool game under my belt. Visit this site throughout the week and you'll see a lot get made.

      I'm at the point where I can chart out the entire world map so I know exactly what I need to make for it. Before diving into the asset creation for that there are still some things I need to do like battle scenes, alternate costumes, and more enemy designs. If the fire in my chest lasts the rest of summer, I'll be at a point where I'm just placing game objects where they need to be by August 20th. I want everything done so I can conduct a beta in October to fish out bugs and get the game some popularity.

     If you want the status report charts missing from last Saturday, App Annie is having a 503 makeover tonight so I might as well just post my app stats on Saturday like normal. Going by my emails, the patterns have not changed much. Some days with 4 downloads, other days with zero.

Seeking Musicians For Unicorn Quest

         With all the things being done soon I'll need to get in touch with some musicians. I'll get started on a sizzle reel style video that makes the game look good so I can send that video out to other blogs and things to announce Unicorn Quest's existence and seek help from music makers.

        I'm looking for something that sounds like Super Lesbian Horse RPG's soundtrack (found here) so I might as well contact the people that made that fan project first. I'm interested in the way they went about monetizing it and I want to do something similar. They released a soundtrack alongside their game on iTunes and Bandcamp and made a bit of cash.

       In exchange for them making the soundtrack for Unicorn Quest I will give the artists 100% of the OST profits and credit in the game (and basically everywhere else I mention the music). Now I just have to convince them to get on board! Should that fail, I have a friend at school who offered to help and I'm sure I can find other musicians somewhere on the net willing to help me.