Hello everyone! It’s finally time to put another team member into the spotlight. Say hello to Pony Tim, our field artist extraordinaire. Check out his thoughts about My Little Investigations after the break!
Grand Brony Gala Panel Posted!
Hey everyone! My apologies for this taking a while be uploaded, but my AV friend finally started putting up panels from the con I attended back on June 29th this year in Tampa, FL. I also tackle some of the forumers questions in this video too.
Enjoy!!!
Everfree Northwest panels posted!
(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!
Equestrian Dreamers: The Classified Files Part 1
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!
MLI at Everfree Northwest this Saturday!
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!
Happy new year!
…Well, a belated new year, at least. Hi all! GabuEx here. I hope you all had a great winter holiday season, a great new year’s celebration, and a great 2012 in general.
We’re still hard at work behind the scenes, but to keep you interested and your appetites whetted, I thought we’d release a few teaser screenshots from sections not seen before from case 1. Nothing spoiler-y; we’re still keeping the story itself under wraps to ensure that you aren’t bored when case 1 is released – but, hopefully, these should intrigue you enough for now while we work on getting case 1 completed.
(And no, please don’t ask about release dates – we’ll let you know when we’re prepared to commit to something that won’t result in us working 39-hour days to get things completed. :P)
Find the screenshots after the break! Continue reading
MLI demo 2 released!
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:
- Software rendering was not supported, which meant that players with lower-end graphics cards couldn’t play the game; and
- 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!
A glimpse at progress!
Hi all! GabuEx here.
We’ve all been hard at work behind the scenes on the first case, and we can’t thank you enough for being patient with us while you wait. A game like My Little Investigations is always a bit tricky to give public exposure, since we can’t show you anything that would give people an inkling regarding the way in which the story goes – but by this time, I think it’s safe to say that we owe you at least a little something to whet your appetites and reassure any of you out there who might be worried that we most certainly are still going strong. So, I’d like to take a little bit to highlight just a few of the things that our wonderful team has been up to. You can find that after the break! Continue reading
OC contest results!
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
Welcome our two new team members!!!
Hello everypony! Apologies for not having posted things about MLI in a while, but we would like to formally introduce two new members of the team.
The first new member is Pony Tim. He is our new Field Character Artist/Animator and is currently WarpOut’s apprentice. Our second new member is Abion47. He is our new Dialogue Character Artist and will focus on helping the vectoring process along with TehJadeh.
We are super excited to have more power on the artistic front. This will greatly aid in speeding up development time for this case and beyond, as well as keep stress levels to a minimum. So, please join me in giving them a warm welcome to Equestrian Dreamers!
We look forward to releasing more info pertaining to MLI soon. So, please continue to be patient!