Category Archives: Community

Recruiting: Voice Actors and Animators

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Hello everyone! Today I bring some great and not so great news. I’m disappointed to say that four of our voice actors, BreeFaith, Carmen, Mickwhitefire, and Divinexrose have decided to leave the team.

However, that means that we have open positions available! Please see the official descriptions of the roles we need at the link below. We also have recruitment pages back up for your review as well!

https://www.castingcall.club/projects/my-little-investigations

The deadline is AUGUST 1st, 2017 at 12 AM EST.

If you have any questions, please send them our way on the forum or at recruitment@equestriandreamers.com

We are also looking to recruit more animators to our team, so if you are free, don’t be shy and send us an application!

Thanks and we look forward to reporting more progress in the future.

MLI now supports localization!

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(Note: The following requires that players install MLI v1.1 using an installer; the in-process updater won’t work properly. You can get the v1.1 installer here.)

We’ve been in contact with some Russian bronies from Tolma4 Team who were interested in localizing My Little Investigations to Russian, and I’m pleased to announce that that effort has come to fruition – MLI v1.1 has now been released, which supports localization, and which also includes the Russian localization that created the need for these changes. You can grab the new version here! (As above, you’ll need to download the installer; the updater will fail to apply the changes.)

This means that the game is also open for anyone else who might want to localize it into their native language! If you’d like to help out with that process, I’ve put together a how-to here, which I’d encourage anyone interested to check out. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at the address at that page – I’m happy to offer whatever assistance I can!

Thanks to AlexFCS, Alex_Shy, kaze_no_saga, KornyPony, ltybcs, Mad Mix, makc_ar, nogard, Own3df1x, pashok6798, pifon, Skuzl, and Tails Doll for making this possible! It’s super awesome to see our labor of love become accessible to even more bronies than before!

Lastly, this version does also include with it a few other improvements that I put in place since it already required a new installer:

– The updater has been improved to update using a script instead of updating in the executable, which has the benefit of now being able to update everything, including the updater itself and SDL. (This may mean that there may be new bugs to be sorted out, of course – please let me know if you find any!)

– The OS X version now houses everything it needs inside the .app file itself, instead of installing content to /Library/Application Support/, and the DMG file is now just a simple drag-and-drop install instead of a .pkg file installer. (Thanks go to MaddTheSane here for helping me better understand best practices in OS X – I was coming from a Windows background, and my initial implementation of the OS X installation experience put that fact on display.)

(Oh, and yes, we’re still working on case 2, so don’t worry! This is just another thing that we’ve been working on in parallel. We’ll have another interview post with a case 2 character fairly soon.)

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!

Continue reading →

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!

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. 🙂

Everfree Northwest panels posted!

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(UPDATE: The Games Ponies Play video has been reposted; the previous version was taken down.)

Hi all,

As indicated in a previous post, MLI had representation at two panels at Everfree Northwest earlier this month. Both panels have now been posted to Everfree Network‘s YouTube channel, so we’re now able to post them for you to enjoy. The first one is Games Ponies Play, a general gaming panel that I attended, and the second is the My Little Investigations panel that occurred later that day. Enjoy!

MLI at Everfree Northwest this Saturday!

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Oh, hi! It’s been a while!

The good news, which a lot of you have been asking about, is that we’re still hard at work – it’s just that for a few reasons (not the least of which being that we just didn’t have much to show that wouldn’t be a spoiler of some sort) we haven’t had much to say. However, we are getting there, and a final release is starting to come into view in the not too distant future. So, watch this space! We’ve got a number of posts lined up before that to hopefully tide you over until then, too, that will start up once Everfree Northwest is done.

Speaking of Everfree Northwest, I’d like to take this opportunity to say that MLI will be at Everfree Northwest! In two panels, even! We’ll be taking part in Games Ponies Play: Making Games that Players Enjoy at 1 PM, and then we have our own panel at 5 PM on the same day. If you’ll be attending, stop on by! We’ll be happy to see you!

Catch you later!

OC contest results!

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All right, fillies and gentlecolts… it’s the time you’ve all been waiting for! It’s time to announce the results of our OC contest! The three winners will have their OCs put into case 1 of MLI for an interaction with Twilight, and the thirty-seven runners-up in the top forty will get an honorable mention in this post.

Before I get to the results, I’d like to thank everyone for such a phenomenal turnout for this contest! In total, we received a total of 501 OCs entered from 370 creators. Those are not small numbers! As such, we’ve taken a little while to ensure everyone gets their fair consideration, so we’d like to thank everyone for their patience. There were all kinds of ponies, and it was an absolute treat to see all of your imaginations at work here. The creativity of this community never ceases to amaze me.

I’d just like to make one more statement before we get to our winners and runners-up. We had a number of criteria that we judged OCs on, which include their suitability to the Ponyville setting, how interesting we felt they were, how confident we were that we could write an interesting interaction between them and Twilight, and so on. These are all criteria for the OCs’ appropriateness within MLI. These are categorically not judgment calls that should be taken as fundamental statements about the quality or “goodness” of the OCs in a general or objective sense. If one has an OC that contains several cliches, and which doesn’t have a very fleshed-out backstory, but which nonetheless makes that person very happy even so, then that is a good thing, and nothing here should cause that person to consider discarding that OC. At the end of the day, you ought to be your own judge for whether or not you like your OC; if you don’t, then it doesn’t matter how many other people do.

So, without further ado, you may find the winners and the runners up after the break! Continue reading →