Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #96 (Don't Let It Keep You Down)

New birthday fan art by FadedSketch I'm currently in love with.

BGP's first pixelated fan work!

     With spooky season behind us, it's time to move onto the Great Greenlight Crunch. I put myself about a month behind schedule doing all this Orlando networking stuff and I need BGP's Greenlight to be a success if I truly what life to get any better. So it's time to buckle down, and whittle away at that to-do list of mine.

Yotes Games, Hopes, and Dreams (Birthday 2016)

     This is actually the last time for another 7 years that my birthday falls on a Friday so I should try to make the most of it with what I've got. Unfortunately, one of the things I don't have ready is a new BGP demo... Distractions got the best of me.

     By this time next year I'll be at Beach City Con with some of my very best friends relaxing on the beach at the peak of BGP's launch popularity. (Well actually, it'd be one week after that and I'll be mid post-con depression.) 

     If the launch is as successful as I wish it can be, I'll be house hunting and getting ready to establish a new base of operations for Yotes Games! Thoughts of my next birthday are really keeping me alive. Finishing BGP and getting it in front of every brony on Earth is my final challenge. The one last insanely difficult thing to do before I can take a well deserved break and plan out where I'd like my indie career to go.

     Should I fail, things may take a serious turn. Either selling my soul and busting my back just as hard to make someone else rich, or risking it all on a Kickstarter push for BGP2 to fix whatever kept it from selling well. All I have to do is sell 25,000 copies to justify this career choice. But I know this game has more potential than that. Pokemon Uranium just proved that there's an audience for this stuff. Indie passion projects from real Pokemon fans that gets the little things right.

     Today I turn 23, and I promised myself that I'd become the Tony Yotes I envisioned by age 24. The same age Toby Fox and John Boyega hit their prime accomplishments. In one year's time I'll have a notable game to my name. Hopefully one that brings excitement and smiles to tens of thousands of people across the globe.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #95 (Birthday Week)

     A new fire is lit under my butt as I realize the value of getting another demo out before Pokemon Sun & Moon launch. Let's Players will be eager for new Pokemon gameplay but have nothing to do in the couple weeks leading up to the 18th. Gotta put BGP in the hands of some bronies before then and maybe try to reach a few of the small-fry Pokemon channels to sort of get my foot in the door.

Check out this week's progress below.

BGP Development: Some Quick Spritework

     Just animating some moves at the moment. Then I'll be doing 3 new sets of pony animations. Getting sprites out of the way while I wait to see if Unity ever fixes these annoying editor bugs where the gameplay or scene windows randomly disappear only on Mac OSX. It makes debugging rather difficult and people have been complaining on the Unity forums for weeks, if not months now.

     So I'm grinding along making what progress I can.