Author Archives: GabuEx

Livestream results!

Posted on by
3

Our Livestream happened as planned earlier today – we had a pretty good turnout, getting (I believe) around 40-50 viewers at peak viewing time. In case you missed it and would like to check it out, here’s a recorded version of our antics:

Thanks to everyone who came out; it was a great time, and we’re happy that it looks to have been a success.

New Scootaloo voice actor

Posted on by
4

Hi all,

It’s with a bit of sadness that I have to announce that TehJadeh, our Scootaloo VA, has had to step down from that role, owing to insufficient time. However, don’t worry – we’re still full speed ahead; DivinexRose, our Rainbow Dash VA, has agreed to step up and fill that role, and we have no doubt that she’ll do as lovely a job as TehJadeh would’ve. And TehJadeh will still be filling her dialog character artist role that she does so well, so no worries about any impact there, either.

As a little preview, here are a few of the tracks that she’s done for us already:

We’d like to thank TehJadeh for the work she’s done for us already, and DivinexRose as well for taking on this role at such short notice! You two are both awesome.

MLI turns 1, goes to Everfree!

Posted on by
2

Hi all! GabuEx here.

Haven’t seen you in a while. How have you been? We’ve been great.

Today is a bit of a special day for My Little Investigations, because the project has officially turned one year old. One year ago today, I created a new XNA project in Visual Studio for an idea that I had. Then, a few days later, I sent what I had created thus far to Equestria Daily, just since I figured I had nothing to lose. And, well, the rest has been history. This project has far surpassed all of my wildest expectations when I first started that XNA project, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. It wouldn’t have gotten here without everypony’s love and support, so thank you to everyone for helping to get us this far. And it certainly wouldn’t have gotten here without the wonderful hard work of the team, either – so thank you to them as well, for everything they’ve already done on the project.

On that note, now seems as good a time to make another announcement regarding MLI!

Everfreee NW Logo

You would’ve already seen this had you gone to the Everfree Northwest website, but I’d like to officially announce it here, as well: My Little Investigations will be appearing at Everfree Northwest! We had somewhat of a presence at BronyCon a few weeks ago, but this time around we’ll have a full hour-long panel, hosted by yours truly and ZeusAssassin, at which we’ll be talking about MLI and showing some never-before-seen gameplay from the first case. You can look forward to that when Everfree Northwest comes around on August 17-19!

We have an audio engineer!

Posted on by
6

Applications for the position of audio engineer are now closed.

And in tandem with this announcement, I’d also like to announce that we now have our audio engineer, as well. I’d like everyone to give a big, warm welcome to X-Trav. We look forward to working with him in order to bring you all the best audio experience you can get.

Thanks to all of our wonderful applicants! You all are great, whether or not you made it.

Interview: The Round Stable

Posted on by
1

A while back, The Round Stable did a very nice, lengthy write-up on our case 1 demo. I’m happy to report that they also recently conducted an interview with us as well! That can be found here:

http://www.mlponies.com/2012/05/25/interview-my-little-investigations/

Anyone interested in a bit more insight into the origins of MLI, on the team, and on our thoughts on various matters should definitely go check it out.

Recruiting: Audio Engineer!

Posted on by
4

EDIT: Applications are now closed! Thanks to everyone who applied.

Hi all,

Just dropping you a line to say that, in light of feedback from the case 1 demo, we’ve decided to start recruiting for an audio engineer. The audio engineer will be responsible for a number of audio matters, such as normalization and equalization of dialog, the creation of sound effects, and more. Have a looksee through the recruitment page if it sounds like something that you can and would like to do.

Thanks, all!

Case 1 demo patch 1 released

Posted on by
33

A bit of an update since our last post – we’ve just put live a new version of the case 1 demo, which you get can here.

The list of changes since the initial release are as follows:

  • Twilight’s voice during the Rarity interrogation has been fixed.  Previously, the audio files had a bitrate of 48000 Hz but were being played back at 44100Hz, causing Twilight’s voice to be audibly lower in pitch than it should’ve been.  The audio files now have the correct bitrate of 44100 Hz.
  • Rarity’s voice has been toned down; she no longer speaks with THIS MUCH VOLUME WHEN ADDRESSING HER SUBJECTS.
  • A POTENTIAL fix for the data folder issue has been implemented, although no promises are made – without local reproductions of the issue on our own computers, it’s impossible for us to know for sure.  If not, we’ll keep at it.
  • The launcher now opens a window before actually launching the game, during which several options can be selected:
    • You can now choose between frame rate caps of 30, 60, and 120 FPS.  Choosing a frame rate cap of 30 may improve performance a little for lower-end machines, while choosing a frame rate cap of 120 may improve quality a little for higher-end machines.
    • In the event of an error during gameplay, you can now opt to save a log of the game’s status and command line output, which can be sent to us (well, to Dawn) in the hopes that it might provide us better insight regarding the cause of technical issues people are running into.
    • Also included are options to account for hardware differences – you can now disable shared contexts and PBuffers.  If you don’t know what those mean, don’t worry – in layman’s terms, they’re effectively optimizations to speed up loading and make the loading screen more responsive.  That’s good, but they’re not supported by all machines, and although we’ve implemented logic that should account for a lack of support of these technologies, you can still opt to just turn them right off to see if that helps anything, if you’re running into technical problems.  Let us know if turning these off does improve things – that’s valuable information for us.
  • Finally, we’ve changed the fonts used in the game.  We do this reluctantly, but after discovering potential legal issues with the ones that were previously in use, we’ve opted in order to ensure there will be no problem to change the fonts to ones that are guaranteed to be free for use.  We’ve done our best to find as close an approximation of the fonts that were previously in use as we could.  Try to take a bit to get used to the new fonts, and if after a while you still decide you don’t like them, let us know, and we’ll see what we can do about that.

This doesn’t fix EVERY issue that has been reported to us, of course – it only fixes the ones that were fixable in a brief period of time.  Rest assured that we will be addressing all of it in due time.

Thanks to everyone so much for all your kind support and wonderful feedback thus far! You all are grade-A awesome.