Teaching Myself LLC Banking

     I keep thinking more and more about what my life might be like in 4 years. I'm currently resting on the idea of working from my own house/apartment in a dedicated room or corner for game development. I can't pay for any assistance now so I'm alone on this journey. I can't guarantee I'll get help in the near future either so I think it's safer to plan with what I've got which is myself and whatever talent or connections I develop during my last 2 years at school.

     If I want to pay myself through Yotes Games LLC I'll need to figure out all the various tax info around single member LLCs, figure out which bank rips me off the least, find ways to dodge Uncle Sam's really intrusive hands, and calculate just how much profit will actually be for me and not just survival.

    Every morning I'm looking through Google for more information on this (like a Dad reading the newspaper) so I can be ready when real life hits me like a train in 2 years. You know, because school doesn't think it's worth being in the curriculum early on. Mastering trigonometry is more important than mastering your finances.

Making The Remaining Unicorn Training Enemies

     The game's development is coming to a close now and the first day of school is approaching so it's time to get the last really big task complete. Finishing the rest of the game's enemies and bosses. Spriting and coding them all may take over a week, but when that's done the game is basically in complete alpha shifting toward beta as I add in finishing touches and balance stuff.

    I plan on saving the more exotic and tricky designs  from the original document for the next game. I feel like I can make better use of them in a grid-based realtime combat system. These simple guys I sketched will get the job done and flesh out the game enough to entertain for a couple hours. They behave differently and will keep battles from feeling like a shooting gallery.

Unicorn Training Development Video #17 (Big Fat Video of Everything So Far)

     This one shows off the new ability to walk room to room and interact with things and ponies. Take a look at all the scenery and color palettes of the places you'll be exploring. It's a huge 10 minute video that shows a chunk of every interesting thing there is so far. It's basically everything from yesterday's post in video form so catch it on YouTube!

     The big thing to notice is the small number of enemies. I'll be making tons more to populate this ghost town of a world soon. This video took all day to make because I made so many recording mistakes and kept encountering bugs I needed  to fix immediately.

     Overall it was a good exercise in taking tons of footage and separating the interesting stuff from the filler and editing a video to keep you from wanting to skip ahead. If I want to make a trailer at some point I need to find a way to turn an hour of footage into 90 seconds that shows off every interesting bit. I think I'll make a practice trailer/sizzle reel of all the enemies in my next development video.

Status Report #50 (BronyCon 2014 and FINISHED COLLISION MAPS)

     It's an amazing feeling when all of that stuff you put into a game over a couple weeks suddenly just works. The game is somewhat playable now and I adore it. The towns have living NPCs, the walls are real, dark cave have the shadow effect you see above, lava dungeons have a more transparent red version of that, and the colors are as vibrant as I imagined the game would be back in the concept stage. Finishing this project quickly was a really good call because my love for it is getting stronger as I see it come together so suddenly.