[Alpha2 Backer Playtest is Now Available] | All Backers can get it on Itch!
- Fixed some game breaking bugs and prettied things up a bit.
- And there's an Android version this time.
- Lots more to come in a few weeks!
#BattleGemPonies
The player characters are looking so lively today thanks to some new animations! #BattleGemPonies #PixelArt #ScreenshotSaturday
This single stadium building took 3 days to make. The mission was "a landmark you could see from space!"
It was the hardest building to draw by far and took many different drafts. (Then came dressing up the tiled areas around it.)
This is what we're talking about when we say "we need time to polish"! ✨ We're at the stage where placeholders get gorgeous makeovers and the world starts to look and feel official. #pixelart #monstertaming #indiegame
Customize these options to your heart's content! We're always listening for feedback and will keep adding features that make the game more comfy and convenient to play. #gamedev #indierpg
(There's already at least 4 more of these that weren't around when the game first launched.)
It's migration season! Monarch butterflies travel over 4,000 km to winter in Mexico's stunning oyamel forests. Witness the beauty of nature's incredible journey.
Friends flew out to see this together and the Peach Oreo cookies one brought were magnificent.
I love these popcorn bucket Lumas too much! I got the orange one and my roommate got the green and a Yoshi
🥚🌟#MarioGalaxyMovie
The programming team says Unreal looks promising and is the industry standard for a reason. But Godot looks like the best fit for any future simple 2D games.
On the Alpha Playtest side, we've narrowed the list of bugs down to the last 30ish tricky ones which should be fixed in about a couple weeks
We also cleaned out the bug backlog and combined the issues that were coming from the same place. Then spent weeks fixing them while actively researching & testing other game engines to hopefully avoid such problems and frustrating limitations on our end in future games.
[APRIL FOOLS!!] But for real tho, the Alpha playtest is going great!
On the dev side of things we switched from ClickUp to Trello and trimmed off a bunch of unnecessary fluff from the development timeline so we can ensure Act 3 is actually finished in 2026.
Recently, Fangamer asked me to make a post in Japanese regarding the translation of OFF. Well...in the responses to that post, I noticed some frustration from Latin American fans. Let me address a few of those issues now. 1. There is an officially licensed UNDERTALE concert series that unfortunately has no shows planned in Latin America. I did retweet its schedule on request, but I have hardly any involvement with the concert series and no input on where they perform. But, the organizers have heard the enthusiasm from Latin America, and I personally think it would be great to have performances there. I hope it works out! 2. Fangamer’s shipping costs to Latin America are prohibitively expensive. As just one of Fangamer’s clients, I am aware of this problem and I’ve asked them about possible solutions before. I think it would be amazing if they could find affordable shipping to Latin America (and other affected regions), but they have expressed that it’s a huge logistical hurdle. The other shipping methods they’ve tried had a lost package rate of over 50%… Still, I think Fangamer is interested in finding solutions, so I hope that we can figure out some way to get affordable merch to Latin American fans. Fangamer is very easy to work with and truly passionate about the things they make. I really trust them and would prefer to collaborate exclusively with them on merch.
3. Unfortunately, there are no translations for UNDERTALE into other languages besides Japanese. That includes Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, but also every other language – Chinese, Korean, Russian, French, German, Italian, and more. I know it sucks that there are no other official translations for UNDERTALE. But I want to make it clear that this isn’t because I have a grudge against other countries. It’s because, if I release something official, I want it to match my vision. I was only able to do this for the Japanese version because I know Japanese myself, and I worked very closely with our brilliant translator to thoroughly check the text. I am not against official translations for other languages if we could make it work the same way… In the past I have looked into various options with my publisher, 8-4, but nothing has come of that yet. Maybe I should try a different approach. I’m very happy that there are unofficial translations on PC. Considering I don’t understand other languages, letting fans interpret the game without the burden of being “officially” perfect is amazingly helpful. As for DELTARUNE, it’s just not feasible from a development standpoint to support other languages right now, since it would make the game take longer to come out... --- I’m honored to have many fans across the world, and of course that means Latin America too. I don’t want anyone to feel left out. I’m sorry if my silence made me seem like I was ignoring anyone.
A message for my fans in Latin America.
(plain text is in the image alt-text if you need it for translation.)
We'll be utilizing the code stability of the Unreal Engine so that we never have to experience a backlog of 400+ errors again.⚙️
Thank you for your support and understanding. 💜
Due to the excessive amount of bugs found in the latest build that took many years to create, we have henceforth decided to abandon the Battle Gem Ponies project in favor of starting a new clean-slate project featuring cybernetic bumblebees at war. 🐝
This editor did some deep research, summing up the decade long development story (with details even I was beginning to forget!)
Someone wrote an article chronicling the development of my ponymon game #BattleGemPonies! 📰
Such a strange nostalgic feeling to see the past #gamedev decade summed up like this.
totalapexentertainment.com/gaming/battl...
Liking the cozy couple interiors of the area too.
Route Quartz is by far the laggiest map in the Unity editor. Some chunks of it refuse to load for a minute. Which is weird, since it's not even one of our biggest & busiest maps!
We'll need to determine the verdict on how it runs on a variety of devices during the ongoing Alpha playtest right now.
Got a lot of mileage out of it in a school presentation and a game development convention panel as well.
2015 Overworld Dreams:
This is the PowerPoint slide I made to hype myself up when dreaming about turning my little #BattleGemPonies fangame prototype into a fully explorable world.
Looking back, I can confirm, the game has all those biomes in a playable state right now.
Thanks Alpha Testers! So crazy to finally be exploring the world I dreamed up as a child.
MY "Pokémon" region. ♡🗺️♡
Can't believe I drew this Pokémon fangame map on graph paper in high school instead of paying attention in class... And now, over a decade later, it's the region for my indie game #BattleGemPonies with actual players running around on their own adventures!
Gather around, everyone! 💎
The #BattleGemPonies Act1 Alpha Playtest Build is LIVE on Itch!
So if you're a Patreon member and a fan of playing early builds of games full of fun new places to explore (and bugs) then there's a new build with your name on it! 🌟
Turns out at some point during tons of copy/pasting updated assets into Unity, there was an unnoticed Paste where a Copy should have been, and this threw the entire project into chaos at 2am after a day long crunch trying to get a stable playable build for the next morning. ✂️📋
