Monthly Archives: April 2014

Equestrian Dreamers: The Classified Files Part 4

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Today, we spotlight a dedicated and wonderful vector artist of the team, TehJadeh! Before she departs from the team for now, I want to say how much of a pleasure she was to work with for the past 2 years. Gabu, I, and the rest of the team will not forget her contributions to this project, and thus, we’ll be creating a new section in the “The Team” tab honoring all former team members. More names of members leaving the team will be posted as the days go by, so stayed tuned to that.

And without further ado, take it away, TehJadeh!

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Case 2 recruitment is now open!

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Hello, everyone!

I have exciting news to relay to you all: as of this moment, recruitment for positions for case 2 is officially open! I know that quite a few people have been antsy to join our team and lend their talents to making MLI as good as it can be, so here’s your chance! We have a number of positions open, so I hope that everyone can find something that they can do. 🙂

Here’s what we have open – information about the positions and instructions on how to apply can be found on each page (click the headers to go to the page):

Visual artists

Vector artist
Animator
Cutscene artist

Music & sound design

Audio engineer

Voice actors

(Explanation of each role can be found by clicking the link above.)

Female roles

Larger roles

Applejack
Trixie
Sapphire Shores
Lyrica Lilac
Royal Ribbon

Smaller roles

Fluttershy
Princess Celestia
Aunt Orange
Masquerade
Jenny Juniper (OC)

Male or female roles

Smaller roles

Spike

Male roles

Larger roles

Philo Reed (OC)

Smaller roles

Uncle Orange
Gustave le Grand
Caesar
Dim Delite (OC)

As stated in the recruitment pages, we’re accepting applications until May 23 (May 16 for voice actor roles). Best of luck to you all!

A few words

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Hi, all!

Now that the dust has settled a little bit following the release of case 1, we’ll be opening up recruitment for case 2 very soon – so be on the lookout for that! However, before that goes live, I wanted to just say a few things in reflection before we move forward.

As of this writing, the first case of MLI has been downloaded over 14,000 times. The soundtrack has been downloaded over 2,000 times, and a number of contributions from multiple people have been made in our GitHub source repository to date. It’s been reviewed well by both Equestria Daily and Equestria Gaming, and have received countless amounts of feedback from fans, the vast majority of it overwhelmingly positive. It’s safe to say that people are really enjoying MLI, and that’s really been awesome to see.

Being able to work on MLI has been a dream come true for me. That’s not something I say lightly; being able to work on a video game has been a dream of mine since I was basically six years old. So, I’d really like to thank several people for this wonderful opportunity before we carry on.

First, I’d like to thank ZeusAssassin, who’s been my wingman on this project for years now. It’s safe to say that this project wouldn’t exist today if it weren’t for everything he’s done for it. He’s always an awesome sounding board with whom I can always reliably bounce ideas off of; he keeps the team running smoothly like a well-oiled machine; and he’s always a great motivating factor no matter what.

Second, I’d like to thank Equestria Daily, who’ve supported this project since day 1. It’s safe to say that this project also wouldn’t exist today if it weren’t for that support, either – without the exposure that they’ve graciously provided to MLI, it almost certainly would’ve just faded away, as I never expected it to grow to the scale that it is today when I initially started work on it.

Third, I’d like to thank dawnmew, who was a huge technical help early on in the project. She made it pretty clear that I didn’t really have much of an idea what I was doing, and was instrumental in helping getting both the coding framework and the case storage to a sane state of affairs. MLI might’ve existed without her, but it certainly would’ve been way worse.

Fourth, I’d like to thank the team of incredibly talented individuals who helped turn this project from just an idea written down in text into what it is today. From the visual side, that’s WarpOut, HallowGazer, TehJadeh, Abion47, Pony Tim, PonyArtist, and Rautakoura; from the audio side, that’s Trot Pilgrim and X-Trav; and from the voice acting side, that’s PrincessRil, LoveKiku, BreeFaith, DivinexRose, Flootershai, ThatCanadianDude, and HoodedYellowPony. Every one of you should be so proud of what you’ve done for this project.

And fifth, I’d like to thank you – you, reading this post. Without an audience to play this game and enjoy it, it’d be really hard to keep going. Seeing people enjoying this game so much makes it really easy to know 100% that all the effort put into it was completely and totally worthwhile.

Thank you, all of you. You’re all amazing, and I love you all. 🙂

OK, that’s it for my spiel. Thanks for reading. See you all when we kick off our case 2 recruitment!

Regarding translations

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We’ve had a number of people ask about the possibility of translating MLI into languages other than English, so I thought that it might be good to make an official post on the matter rather than individually replying to each person.

Basically, the blanket response to the concept of localization is, “Certainly! But not yet.”

The primary reason for this is that the game needs work before it can be properly localized. There are a number of barriers between where we are right now and where we’d need to be to be able to call the game localizable. For example, one of the biggest problems with localizability is the fact that the game doesn’t presently properly separate the core stuff that every version of the game is going to want and the specific text that should exist on a per-language basis. That’s a definite design flaw, and one that I would certainly like to fix, but until we do, any localization would be logistically difficult at best. There’s also the issue as well that the default fonts in the game don’t support any non-Latin alphabets, which would make translations into languages such as Russian, Arabic, or the like impossible without fixing that, too.

We do have a plan for fixing this, one that basically involves updating things such that files such as common.dat contain a core part and a localized part that can be updated independently. And we’re intending to make the case creator, when it’s done, support localization by splitting the text and associated dialog files apart from the show-dialog conversation actions themselves. So, basically, hang tight. We will definitely eventually support localization of the game – it’s just not feasible right now. Apologizes to those who are raring to go in terms of wanting to get started. Your enthusiasm is certainly appreciated. 🙂

IT’S HERE

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That’s right! After almost three years in development, the first case in My Little Investigations is finally ready to be released to the public!

I’m sure the first thing that you’re looking for is a download link, so you can find that here:

http://www.equestriandreamers.com/downloads/

At that link, you can find four things:

  1. The game executable itself plus case 1
  2. The soundtrack to case 1, composed by Trot Pilgrim
  3. Source code for the game executable
  4. Source code for the (now-defunct) Java case compiler (+ game implementation)

If you just want to play the game, the first item is what you want. Highly recommended as well is the second option, as Trot Pilgrim did an awfully fine job scoring the game, and his music is great to listen to on its own. If you’re interested in exactly how the game works or are interested in any specific functionality therein, the third option will give you that. And if you’re academically curious, the fourth option contains the source code both for the initial Java demo of the game, and of the case compiler in Java that I’ve been using to compile the first case. It’s very bare-bones and is really not very good, and is entirely unsupported – now that case 1 is released, work on a proper case creator is underway in earnest – so only the most curious and adventurous will find anything there. Still, we included it for the sake of completeness.

If you’d like to discuss the game, don’t forget to check out our forum! Talk about MLI, about MLP:FiM in general, or about general things with other fans is all welcome!

Finally, I’d like to mention that we also now have a Twitter account, @EqDreamers! We’ll be using that account both to alert fans to new posts here, news about MLI, or just general communication with others. So, following us is definitely encouraged. 🙂

We’ll have more to post about in the coming days, but that’s probably more than enough for right now. Enjoy!