Category Archives: Release

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!

MLI demo 2 released!

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At last, we’re finally ready to show you progress on My Little Investigations! Although this demo will not advance the plot further than the previous demo (so please don’t complain about that – that’s by design), it contains plenty of runtime improvements, and has a lot more gameplay polish. We’re hard at work on the end of case 1, so rest assured that it’s still coming along strong and that there’s plenty of work we’ve completed that we’re not showing you yet. However, for now, we thought we’d give you a little glimpse at what we’ve been working on in the hopes of keeping interest and excitement high as we finish things up and get the first case ready for playtesting.

First, without further ado you can find the demo here:

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

And here’s a list of what’s new in this demo:

Code ported to C++ from Java

The first demo was written in Java, which worked for the purpose for which it was chosen – enabling the game to come to all three major OSes – but there were two major problems that people encountered:

  1. Software rendering was not supported, which meant that players with lower-end graphics cards couldn’t play the game; and
  2. Some pieces of software like WinRAR were associating themselves instead of the Java runtime with JAR files, which made people unable to start the game at all.

To fix both of these issues, we’ve ported the game to C++, and this demo shows the game in that form.

Gameplay mechanics and content

  • Twilight now has the ability to run! To run, double-click (or double-click and hold), and she’ll move much faster than walking.
  • The game now loads each location’s resources on the fly during gameplay, rather than loading everything at the start. This both makes initial loading much faster and cuts down on RAM and VRAM usage.
  • Evidence and profiles are now separated; you can swap between the two by clicking a tab at the top.
  • Cursors and mouse-over text have now been implemented to show who Twilight can talk to, what can be examined in the field, and where Twilight can exit the screen.
  • Pinkie Pie now teaches new players to the game about MLI’s gameplay mechanics! There will be an option to turn her off in the full game, but that hasn’t been implemented yet.
  • A second cutscene in town square has been added.
  • Cutscenes have been improved and now have greater functionality.

Visuals and audio

  • Screen transitions from one area to the next now feature a fade-to-black instead of just instantly swapping screens.
  • Interjections have been added – now, whenever Twilight presents evidence or presses a statement, our version of the objection bubbles appear on screen to accent those moments.
  • All of the lines in the demo have been mastered by X-Trav.
  • Almost all of the audio has now been implemented; there were several missing lines in the last demo.
  • Twilight has a couple of new emotional states since last time.
  • The “suspense” theme has now been updated to better reflect of the mood of the scene it plays in.
  • A fully animated title screen has been implemented.
  • Sound effects have been added to bring town square to life, and hoofstep sounds have been properly synched to animations.

Now that you know what’s up, downloading the game is as simple as before. Just head on over here:

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

Please feel free to post feedback on this updated demo on the forums and let us know what you think! The team is gearing up for the final phases of development, so we’re hoping you’ll all continue to remain hyped about case 1. While you wait, we encourage you to help this project out by spreading the word! Our fans’ enthusiasm is and always has been what keeps us motivated to work strong to get this case completed.

That’s all for now! Thanks, all!

Case 1 demo patch 1 released

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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.