Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #172 (Map Mastery)

Turning every single one of those blocks into it's own button somehow took up a whole day.

     The Map System I've been subconsciously dreading has finally been implemented and the rest of the menus are coming together bit-by-bit as I program all the pieces separately and connect them together (instead of cramming everything I could into one giant, unreadable script like before). The results?

     Still not done, and being behind schedule is really bugging me. The game should really have been in alpha by now and I gotta admit that's depressing me. But every night I go to bed knowing my game has 24 more hours worth of love pumped into it, you know? It's coming along, but too slowly.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #171 (Cleaning Up & Keeping Up)

     Feels like every day now I'm discovering some new and better way of doing things. The project is crawling towards a point where all systems exist and are easy to tweak. So good news is I can both feel and see myself becoming a better game developer. Bad news: I'm already a week behind schedule. Again. That won't fly. Time to crunch up and catch up. 

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #170 (Re-Coding)

     Once again, starting from scratch. But this time it's in regard to how I code things. Going forward I'll be using new organization tricks to make sure I understand how the entire game works inside and out. No more endless bug hunts because I'll know exactly where they are and what that line of code interacts with, all to better help me deduce the cause of any problems. 

     Also took a stab at rearranging the development schedule to aim for a July 25th release. The path is laid out, but the main factor determining if I can make it is getting to that Alpha build I've been yapping about for years now.

     All this reorganization stuff should help with that, because things will be more efficient than ever. No more hardcoding, no more just copy/pasting from solution forums, and no more being stingy with line spacing, name lengths, or comments.

Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #169 (May 2018...)

Believe it or not, this organized chaos is way easier for me to understand & navigate than the version from a month ago.

     Can't believe I'm still working on recreating the menus. Haven't even touched core gameplay code yet! I feel horrible for taking so much longer than I keep thinking and promising out loud, but I can feel in my bones that this is the right thing to do. Taking the time to make sure my game is the high quality super-polished RPG I see in my head is sure to be rewarded. I don't want to just make a passable game, I want to blow people away!

     Taking steps to make a serious contender for mobile game of the year. Get this week's development news below.