Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #8 (Maladies & Battle Interface)

     This week is going to be a productive one. I'm determined to get to a point where the ponies can use moves and hit each other. No fancy animations just yet, only functionality. Messing around with ideas for this has gotten me to dress up the menus again, giving a nice polished feel to everything.

Check out this week in gamedev below the break!

BGP Malady & Weather Conditions

     Maladies are afflictions (primarily caused by other ponies) that weaken a pony in some way. Things like poison, paralysis, burns, and freezing are maladies. Curses, shrinking, and being dazed are sub-maladies. Maladies should not be confused with lowering stats, which involves decreasing the numbers of a pony's stats like speed, attack, defense, etc.

     Weather is an important factor in combat because it affects different classes. Some weather boosts the power of some classes while weakening others. However, no matter what the weather is, Chaos class ponies always get a slight boost because of the way they thrive in havoc.

You can find details on how both of these mechanics work in Battle Gem Ponies below.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #7 (Bug Fixes & Recognition)

     This week has been a pretty busy one. There were spotlight features, convention updates, contests entries, bug fixes, revised designs, renamed mechanics, new sales data, and more blog comments than ever! It's gamedev to the max here at Yotes Games and I'm only just getting started.

     Things are finally in place and I can really start getting into adding features to Battle Gem Ponies. I have the action camera up and running, menus planned out, and a basic idea of how battle calculations will be made. It's just a matter of building up the game one layer at a time.

Check out what layers got in just this week below the break.

Dual Class Moves In BGP

     A big feature of Battle Gem Ponies are the moves with two elemental classes rather than the usual one you'd see in games like Pokemon or Final Fantasy. Some attacks are twice as weak against one class, but twice as strong against another. You also have to consider moves that match both the primary and secondary class of the user, leading to attacks dealing serious game-changing damage.

     Moves like Steam Burst (Aqua/Fire) and Wing Blade (Air/Steel) used by ponies with dual classes themselves makes players approach combat in new ways and possibly stand a chance against opponents that would normally have a class advantage.

(Note: This was going to be a much bigger post before I realized most of what I want to explain has been said in other posts or is in a weird state of changing as I keep rebalancing things. Next week's post will be about something new, for now, I really just want to get back to work so I have cool things to show you on Tuesday.)