Hook: Grab attention from both followers
and newcomers, perhaps even with a joke or thought provoking question.
Does anybody have a joke or thought provoking question?
Yeah, you got a joke?
My ideas are as small as the budget for brilliant diamond and shiny Pearl.
Dang, that's not a joke.
It's just facts.
All right, hook done.
Now people are engaged.
Pathetic.
The surveys and spreadsheets are finally finished.
Save for the 32 people who have to fill those out,
you know who you are.
(Come on now.) Including the second wave,
all the missing info like shirt sizes, along with a reminder that our discord
and Reddit hubs exist, leading lots of folks to come and join us.
Over the past couple of months,
we've personally met with accountants learning a bunch of valuable info on how
this whole "running a software business thing" works.
Getting a hold of them was pretty tricky,
with quarterly taxes being due around the same time we were originally searching
for them, so lots of the "bigger firms" were booked.
But stacking up those free consultations and asking more and more of those burning
questions has added a few useful wrinkles to our young Game Dev brains.
Now we'll be getting into things like more
structured and documented expense tracking, Dev time tracking,
and generally keeping everything business related, nice and tidy.
Also, we spent a lot of quality time with our extensive bug list.
All focus on our core development for now,
postponing our next big set of bug crushing until January.
But of course, we'll be fixing any critical issues along
the way, just like we did this month with the combat overhaul hotfix
that resolved class matchups not working anymore.
(That was a big oopsie.) Or the follow up hot
fix to fix the issues from updating the previous hot fix and then the follow
up hot fix after that because some of the changes got reverted and then
the one after that because the wrong version number was there and then a hot
fixed out to fix that and then a hot fix out to fix that!
And it had this small time of just sort of spiraling into hotfix Tartarus.
If I'm allowed to say that. Tartarus is a pony term.
Yeah, okay, it's pronounced "Tartarus", hotfix Tartarus.
That sounds weird.
They'll figure it out.
So that was interesting in itself,
and that burned a lot of time and we learned a little bit of how we want
to manage hot fixes in the future, and we hope to be better with that.
A stable build is up now and anyone can play it.
Any bugs you find in there has probably been written down.
Feel free to tell us about whatever you find anyways.
Just in case, a lot of the challenges that I've faced
over the past couple of months have been in the overworld.
For anyone who follows the daily nays
updates, you will see that I've been doing a lot of updates to our overworld so
at first I made an assumption that I would sort of just be able to go in there
and link up current overworld to all the new stuff that we were using
in battle, that things could be synced with all the player information.
But from the last catastrophe that caused us to reset the game,
not everything was rebuilt in the way that I was sort of anticipating.
So once I got in there,
I noticed there was a lot of missing pieces, and I ended up having to rebuild
a lot of the functionality, like things like making buttons work or
using items in the overworld for, like, three weeks.
I spent a lot of time fixing up all those little things.
It's not perfect, but all the menus are functionally working.
So for us, that's a really good step in the right direction because we can
always spend time polishing or making the user experience better.
But while doing that,
there were some other issues with an overworld that became more apparent.
Movement was sort of a big one.
The main character would walk through walls, or would just keep walking off
into the infinite void if you were holding down a button when you change scenes.
So I started finding these little issues
here and there and started fixing them one at a time.
A lot of them had to do with this little
thing that we have called a probe, which sort of checks the next square we
want to walk into, and if we're allowed to walk into it or not.
So once I sort of tackled all those issues, the movements became a lot better,
along with all of those other little like the actual updates to the gameplay.
When we went in,
we reviewed all of the configuration tools that we had previously built before.
A lot of these tools used a lot
of terminology that was catered toward more of a developer,
and it made it a little more harder for our designers to get in and sort
of build the level, our designers being well, Yotes, we reviewed all of those
little widgets, and we determined that we wanted to change some of the naming to be
more descriptive, or we wanted things to be color coded so that they worked right.
And we even found some opportunities
to use Gizmos, which is a feature in Unity that lets you sort of draw in the editor
instead of in the game to do simple things like linking up a door to a spawn point.
These quality of life changes will make
the development process faster and just easier on the developers.
We've recently adjusted the games music tracks to be a bit more,
even at a more civilized volume for your listening pleasure.
Additionally,
we've expanded the soundtrack scope, thanks to app size restrictions lifting.
Since BGP was first started long ago, every megabyte on your phone had to count,
but nowadays you can basically run a PlayStation 3 game on those things.
Now we can add in more songs.
We've been starting up conversations
with the teams and musicians about what the expanded soundtrack should sound like
as well as remind them of what they've done in the past.
So far, since it really has been a while
since they first made the songs, we're using general reaction.
I call it Artist Dissatisfaction Syndrome.
(Just coined that.) They hear their own work
from years and years ago and want to redo them with their new skills and tools or
they'll just go "yeah, that's an undeniable bop".
Over. On the YouTube side,
we recently uploaded a video called Making Our Own RPG Combat Formula.
The initial idea of the video was
concepted for a while, but from start to finish, it took about a month to make.
We first started with writing the script,
which took quite a bit of time considering the complexity of the topic.
After that side, did the voice recording
with Yotes and I being the directors, so to speak.
I know when I was recording my lines
there were many times where we had to go back and rerecord it because I sounded
like a teacher or I sounded like I was tired and we had to come up with these
little tactics to try to get me in a more casual mood.
And eventually it is what you see today.
I still see areas where I can prove,
but it is way better than the first takes of it.
I kind of wish we recorded those takes so we could show people,
but when recording these lines, I actually use something called FL Studio.
It's somewhat of a common program, but on a Mac, it sucks.
I would not use FL Studio. On a Mac.
It absorbs one whole screen and you can't
move it around and all the UI is like all squished.
I don't like it. Use Audacity.
Do you want to record audio?
Use Audacity.
Once the voice recordings were done,
it took about another two weeks to edit the video.
It was tricky making the video because I
needed to make visuals to reinforce the audio to a user who doesn't know
anything about the topic can fully understand it.
Also, while editing the video,
we had to rewrite and rerecord several parts, so the video flowed very smoothly.
I also held a stream about how the video was made, so if you want more information
and the details on the entire video editing process, you can check the VOD
over at my personal streaming channel over at Twitch TV/confidentcow if there's
interest, I might do more streams on video editing.
After making this video, we're starting to get the hang of the workflow.
In the future, we plan on turning out videos more quickly.
There's already tons of ideas and video series types in the works.
Now I know it's a darn shame, but we've had to cancel convention plans.
Last minute we were intending to make
an appearance at Magfest in January and even Babscon next April.
We've decided that the budget would be better spent on the game's development
for now and help buffer us from going over budget.
There's still an entire art team we need to get together.
After all, all those pony sparks aren't going to animate themselves.
I'd rather not do it all alone, and that humble game fund has been ghostly
silent, so we can't really rely on that working out.
But instead of dwelling on that,
just know we're considering a visit to Everfree Northwest again in late
August, hopefully overlapping nicely with our projected release date.
It gave a big boost to our Kickstarter.
So imagine what they could do a completed game, but either way,
there's lots of development to do between now and ten months from now.
So for the rest of the year, the main goals are to knock out all
the core features that would prevent us from creating the game.
When we get to that point, we should theoretically be able to make
the game in a very unwanted state, but it would be done.
And so from that point, we just all have to focus on Polish or
balancing or just user experience in general.
So by the end of the year,
if I complete all those features, which is the goal, then Y Ou will be able
to build the game, then for 2021, I will spend as much time as possible
fixing all the battle bugs that are being reported fixing overworld bugs,
adding little small updates to the overworld that just
make the experience overall better to play.
And I intend to get all the accounting,
planning and organization tasks out of the way.
So January forward can be focused
on implementation, art, story revisions, gameplay balance, and map.
Making. My goal for 2021 is to get more videos out
there and get into the flow of Biweekly turnarounds on them.
I will also be working on more UI elements for BGP DX in the future.
If you have any questions, feel free to comment below or join our community.
On Discord/Reddit
Thanks for stopping by and following the development of Battle Gem Ponies.
Bye now. Bye.