Hello dearest fans, both recent and old, of My Little Investigations. As the first case edges closer to completion each and every day, we have decided to share something new and unique. Starting today, various members of Equestrian Dreamers shall be releasing a multi-part series on our individual experiences throughout the development of the game. Brace yourselves for an inside, personal look at our roles in the project, the challenges we have overcome along the way, and our feelings about our time so far with the team!

Origins by ZeusAssassin

So, I bet that a lot of you, despite my constant presence on the forum, don’t know exactly what my role is in the project so far. And to be honest… it definitely is a very difficult thing to answer. My role has certainly evolved and encompasses a great deal of things in this project. Thus, to get to the bottom of this mystery, we must go all the way back to the summer of 2011… August to be more precise. It was at this time where I first encountered the project thanks to a post on Equestria Daily. When I first saw Gabu’s first engine video of the project, I instantly fell in love with it… which is not surprising being the huge Ace Attorney fan that I am and a newly converted brony at the time. Seeing how much I wanted to see this project come to light one day, I offered some of my ideas for the game to Gabu via an email. It was only about three paragraphs long… but it was enough for him to like what I got. From that moment on… we basically exchanged emails every couple of days. I would throw some ideas and questions to him, and he would respond with a lengthy and interesting response shortly after. We did this email exchange for about 4 months, (before THANKFULLY moving to Skype conversations at the start of the New Year) and it was here where my initial roles on the team were defined.

Development of Case Plotlines
Of course, being one of the founding members of Equestrian Dreamers, I had a huge hand in creating the stories for each case in the game. But… just HOW do the plotlines go from fleeting thoughts in our heads to the actual cases in development? Tons and tons of discussion of course! But, there was an order of things that we followed in order to properly develop a story. Our first order of business was determining the crime to be investigated. For simplicity’s sake and to make sure we set an attainable case to complete on our first outing of the game… so we stuck with the idea of theft that was talked about in the engine videos. No closed room murder mysteries this time I’m afraid! The next two things was determining our victim, accused and villain. We didn’t have a lot to go on since we only had Season 1 material to work with, so we decided to rekindle and expand a plotline from one of our favorite episodes, A Dog and Pony Show. Of course, going down this route would make the villain rather obvious… but most Ace Attorney first case villains are when you think about it. (Except Turnabout Trump from Apollo Justice. That case was surprising!)

With the foundation of the case established, our next major order of business was determining how the crime was committed and how the accused would be an initial prime suspect for the case. This probably took the longest time because Gabu and I wanted to make sure that the case was not as open and shut as one would think, nor too complicated for a first case. To accomplish this task, we kept record of everything that was discussed via email and eventually to various Google Docs when we realized that was a better source to use. Once the method, motive, and accused plotline were established, the rest of the plotline became rather simple. We just filled in plot holes that were overlooked by that point and connect the major events of the crime together with various pieces of evidence. We then decided on the rest of the characters to be added into the case as witnesses to help keep the case connected and full of content. With all of the components completed to make the storyline of the case… it was finally time to create some gameplay for it.

Designing the Game’s Puzzles
Just like the plotline, we spent a lot of time discussing the puzzles of the case. Initially, it was going to closely follow the gameplay from Ace Attorney Investigations. However, I was the first to speak up and offer some new ideas to help keep the gameplay fresh, but familiar. And thus, we both developed the partner system, a form of evidence combination, and the confrontation system for the game. With a whole new set of tools to work with, Gabu felt comfortable allowing me to design puzzles for the case. To accomplish this, I first needed to determine what witnesses would be hiding something from Twilight. We didn’t have many witnesses, so the majority of them ending up being sources for the puzzles in the case.

With the witnesses chosen, I needed to determine the best way for them to spill the truth. If the detail they were hiding was something like a piece of evidence or testimony, then it would most likely be a locked topic or interrogation. If the witness was hiding a brand new lead that could crack open the case, a confrontation or a partner related ability would be the way to go. Creating the puzzles themselves at this point was rather a simple 3 step process.

I would determine the argument from the witness that needed to be cracked, then determine how to solve the puzzle using a piece of evidence or a partner ability, and finally explain why the solution is valid via rebuttal. Once I figured out all of the puzzles, they would be recorded and compiled into a large text file that we call a “walkthrough”. And from this, development of the case can truly begin as the walkthrough becomes the centerpiece of our work for the rest of the development process. So… just what is the first step of this long journey of game development? Creating the script of course!

Earning my Scriptwriter Role
And now we finally get to one of the most enjoyable parts of the whole process. Looking back on what we wrote… I have to give my mad respect towards the writers of both the Ace Attorney games and MLP: Friendship is Magic. Writing a script is certainly not something anyone can do, especially when dealing with well established characters. It takes a lot of hard work, revisions, patience, and an active mind to create quality scripts. Usually, before Gabu and I hit the Google doc, we review what each scene is about in the case from the walkthrough. We outline the major events and segment them into “Scenes”. Then, sometimes to get the creative juices flowing, Gabu and I exchange some unrelated jokes in the style of the MLP:FiM characters we are about to write for. Here’s an expert from one of those segments!

RARITY
PLACEHOLDER TEXT! WA HA HA!!! Now, write me like those other ponies.

TWILIGHT SPARKLE
Rarity… what are you doing?

RARITY
Just a little something I picked up from Pinkie Pie, darling.

TWILIGHT SPARKLE
Right… of course. Now stop creeping me out.

PINKIE PIE
Hey girls, whatcha doin’- *GASP* Rarity, can you see THEM too? Oh my gosh this is so COOL!

TWILIGHT SPARKLE
GAH! Pinkie!!! *pant* What do you mean? There IS nothing out there! It defies science!

PINKIE PIE
*giggle* Oh, Twilight, maybe someday you’ll be able to see them…

TWILIGHT SPARKLE
(I… really don’t know if I want to. Some mysteries are best left unsolved.)

Ah yes… nothing like the classic fourth wall breaking joke…ANYWAYS! Once Gabu and I are ready to write, we just… simply start writing. Most of the time, Gabu does the writing while I give feedback as he writes. But, there has been some times where I had to write lines on my own, especially if Gabu got stuck with something. Other times, I like to get ahead of myself and work on the script while Gabu is at work. And very rarely… Gabu asks me to leave him alone to write. And I totally understand that. There are some scenes in which you need to be by yourself in order to write some of the most impactful scenes in the game. The end result of those times he was by himself was simply… amazing. I’m sure you’ll see what scenes I’m referring to once the full case is released. In the end… it probably took us a solid five months to write and proofread both the main dialogue and side dialogue scripts. However! Despite the large amount of time that went into it, other parts of the project were moving right along like the artwork, music composing, and sound effects gathering. And that brings me to my final point of my debut entry into this developer series, recruitment.

Forming the Equestrian Dreamers
Like with most video game projects out there, we needed a great group of artists, musicians, and voice actors to bring our game to life. However, since we were starting out, we simply were not going to let every able person on board our team. My Little Investigations, ever since its inception, was intended to replicate the show’s quality in the form of a story driven, mystery centered video game to the best of our ability. We wanted the best of the best if we ever wanted to achieve this goal. This is why in December of 2011, we uploaded recruitment pages detailing what each member on the team is expected to do during their time with Equestrian Dreamers. When the applications started coming in, Gabu and I needed to weed out the best from the rest via a simple grading system. This system was similar to the one used in the first round of the OC contest held in September of 2012, where we graded the likelihood of each applicant from 1 to 5 (1 best, 5 worst). And to be honest, it was quite successful! It made our lives selecting applicants much, much easier. As far as my role during recruitment, I mainly helped spread the word around the internet for recruitment. I posted in places like Facebook, deviantART, and even told my friends around school about our upcoming project!

Once the pages were up, we allowed an entire month for recruitment to happen… and the results were quite amazing. We had over 90 different applicants, although the majority was for the voice acting roles. It truly was flattering to see our recruitment effort bear fruit despite the other major brony fan projects going on at the time. Ever since that day in January of 2012, I have been more than happy to work with each and every one of the 18 recruited members of the team!

And on that note, I should take the time to formally introduce the newest member of our team referred to by our lovely and talented vector artist, TehJadeh. She is a vector artist from the amazing team that worked on Double Rainboom, and she has been helping with the finishing touches of Case 1 ever since schoolwork started to slow our artists down in April. Her name is Artsy Feathers and she is definitely here to stay with us for a while! Please give her a warm welcome to the team, and we apologize for not making this announcement sooner.

That’s all I have for now. Next time, I will address how my role evolved after the recruitment period was concluded. I now turn the spotlight to my other awesome teammates. I hope you are all looking forward to what we have to say! Continue to hold out on Case 1 for just a bit longer everyone. Rest assured that this long drought of updates on Case 1 is almost over.