Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #24 (Animations Done, Unicorn Training Submitted)

     A busy week with a lot of sprite making and home distractions. I'll be spending next week moving over to Florida for the rest of the summer (before coming back to Pennsylvania in August) and I'll also be catching up on E3 2015 a few days behind (praying nothing gets spoiled since I love to watch the conferences).

     Don't expect much progress until all the dust settles. Once it does, I'll be sprinting to finish the public BGP demo before July rolls around.

Battle Gem Ponies Delayed (Releases Spring/Summer 2016)

     It takes 1 day to fully animate a single pony. There has to be at least 50 ponies for the game to feel interesting enough. I'd like for there to be 100 ponies for this first game to stay competitive with the others on the app store. Each pony has an ultra form that will require it's own animation set. That's about 7 months of just drawing all the characters.

    Bugs can (and will) pop up and often set me back 2 days. I'll need about a month before launch for a final beta test and marketing hype. I have yet to even start the process of combat balancing which could take weeks longer than I think it will since I've never done it at this scale before. I'm almost guaranteed to run into issues with the online features.

     At this rate, Battle Gem Ponies is almost certainly being pushed back to a May 2016 release. I'm kidding myself if I think it could live up to the vision by November. Since it won't, I refuse to force it to. I'm going to restructure plans to take all the extra time I'll need into account. Battle Gem Ponies should be truly ready for launch by the summer of next year. 

Check below the break for an updated demo release schedule.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #23 (Gamepads, Google Play, & iOS Setup)

Ran into a bunch of hiccups today, but Unicorn 
Training should be available on iOS very soon.

     As of yesterday I am an iOS Developer once more. Most of my early works won't make it over since I don't even have access to the original code. But you won't need them with the best version of Unicorn Training on the way!

     In addition to all that, tons of craziness happened on Google Play as they reorganized their app store and pushed me up in a completely new category. I also have controllers now so my future games can support gamepads! This week has been a busy one, so I'll leave the rest out of the header.

Get all the juicy gamedev details below the break!

Animating Battle Gem Ponies

     I have about a hundred ponies to put in the game and only a few months to do it. I also want each of those ponies to have at least 10 animations each. That's a lot to swallow for a beginner dev like me. To make drawing all these pixel horses possible, I needed to break it down to an efficient process. I need to establish a large "pony parts library" to avoid having to redraw poses I've done before, decide on common poses and frame counts, and limit each pony with 5 frames per animation (with few rare exceptions that have 6-7 frames).

     After taking my time building up a library of wings, bodies, tails, and idle bobbing, I can start using them to make the ponies move in-game. A good thing about limiting the designs to equines is having all the similar body shapes be so easy to animate. I'm still in the process of animating the last 3 ponies today (Orscina, Vinerva, and Sweet-Bot) and once they're done I can tidy up the battle system and draw attacks. Things are behind schedule, but they're still looking great.