My Little Karaoke: Additional Content Disc #3

My Little Karaoke

 For the third time in a row, the My Little Karaoke team has released a new batch of songs for aspiring horsefamous singers to destroy their vocal cords to. If you've seen this project before, you'll know what to expect; if you haven't, it shouldn't be hard to guess. Like always, the new pack can be downloaded from the project's official site, and the listing of new tracks will be copied below the break.

New songs
From the community:
4EverfreeBrony - Chant of Mirth
4EverfreeBrony - Giggles and Gumdrops
AcousticBrony & Mysteriousbronie - It's OK
AcoustiMandoBrony - A Long Way from Equestria
BlackGryph0n, Baasik, Michelle Creber - Zero Gravity
BroniKoni - Keep On Running
Cherax Destructor - The Rescue
dBPony - Oh Sweetie Belle
Dekko DePony - Ponies on My Mind
Derpy - Nyan
donglekumquat - Hoofdachest
Donn DeVore - Luna
Donn DeVore - She Can Fly
EileMonty - I Am A Parasprite
Exiark - Equestria
Griffinilla, SoGreatAndPowerful - 40 Winks
Griffinilla, Toastwaffle - Love Letters
&I ft. Chichi - Into the Green
Jackle App - I Love Everything
Kenny9807 - Apples to the Core (Rock Version)
Kenny Allen - Everybody's dressed like ponies at the Holiday Inn
Lectro Dub - Fallen
Level None - Fly
Mandopony - Horse Famous
MandoPony & Silva Hound - Wild Fire
Matthew Mosier - My Cadence
Metajoker feat. Fluttershyay - Universe
Mush - The Changeling (Remix)
PonyFireStone - Flight
PrinceWhateverer ft. Dreamchan & Scrambles - Destabilize
Replacer, Megabyte Brony - Finding My Way (Back Home)
SlyphStorm - Soldiers of the Night
Warbalist, EileMonty - Already One Year
WoodenToaster - Tough Luck
Woodlore - Let The Magic Feel Your Soul
YourEnigma - I'll Come Running

From the show (and extras):
Awesome as I Want to Be
Better Than Ever
Let's Have a Battle
Perfect Day for Fun
Rainbow Rocks
Shake Your Tail
Shine Like Rainbows
Tricks Up My Sleeve
Under Our Spell
Welcome to the Show
My Little Pony Friends
Network Musical Ensemble - Giddy Up
Wander Over Yonder - The Box

My Little Karaoke: Additional Content Disc

My Little Karaoke

 For those of you who are into karaoke and ponies, My Little Karaoke must be practically a godsend, and you'll be pleased to hear that they've released an additional content disc with a bunch of new songs for you to sing along to. It includes "the Equestria Girls soundtrack, silly things such as PFUDOR, and the first S4 song (Hearts Strong As Horses)", along with some performance improvements and general bugfixes. There may or may not be some other things, but I wouldn't know since I haven't really looked into it that much.

Will I play this myself? Probably not, since I'd rather keep my terrible singing to my goofy Skype calls, but if you enjoy being humiliated by a computer program criticizing your voice, this is for you. One can download it at http://www.mylittlekaraoke.com/index.php?pages/Game-download

 Your average Canadian day in a nutshell.

Starswirl Academy Goes Completely Non-Pony

Original Post

 After spending a couple months as one of the pony fandom's most popular projects, Hasbro decided to go easy on Starswirl Academy for some reason and ask that the characters be renamed, in addition to some slight modifications to their designs. This means that it is no longer pony-related in the slightest, but is now yet another generic "schoolgirl dating" visual novel with not much going for it aside from its pretty art and the reasonable cost of $0. They've taken down all their trailers and demos from the internet, by the way, so you might want to hang onto your copy for now.

Before you ask, this does mean that yes, we won't be posting about Starswirl Academy anymore (unless an "unofficial mod" comes out to make some...erm, adjustments to the VN).

 It'd be amusing if they ended up renaming the characters really close to the original, in the Fnagame tradition, because we totally need to see more of Twibright Spankle and her friends.

My Little Investigations Demo 2

 It's been quite a while since Equestrian Dreamers last released a My Little Investigations demo, and now that their new one is out what does it have to offer? Nothing story-wise, but there are a bunch of minor tweaks and technical improvements. Hopefully the demo will actually work on my machine this time, but in case you want to give it a shot you can download it over at http://www.equestriandreamers.com/downloads/. Enjoy!

Breach of Harmony

Breach of Harmony

 Not too long ago somebody decided that what the My Little Pony fan community really needed the most was an online PvP arena game, and thus Breach of Harmony was born. It features everything you'd expect from this type of game: multiple player classes, gratuitous amounts of colourful horses and an unintentionally cheesy plot involving a secret society of rich ponies who apparently get a kick out of paying the lower classes to fight each other. I could dissect it further based on the preview video, but since it's still in the pre-alpha stage I shall refrain from doing so for the time being (given that most of the problems I have with it are related to the animations and will most likely be resolved in the near future).

You can find more detailed information about the game at breachofharmony.com.



...I'm just going to pre-emptively tag all newer Unity games on here as "multiplatform", since a developer using it would be foolish to not export OS X and Linux binaries these days.

MLP:Online Shut Down

 If you have visited MLP:Online's website at all during November you would have noticed that the game was no longer available for download, with an announcement that the game was no longer under development. No details were given as to why this might have been the case, but today our suspicions were confirmed in that the project had been taken down by Hasbro for copyright reasons. All hope is not lost, however, as the developers have stated that they are going to begin work on a new MLP-related fangame, and will give details on how to help fairly soon.

Anyhow, in case you want to read the original announcement you can do so via this link or just go down and read beyond the break.

 Just over a month ago, we released our first episode of our game. After a year and a half since the outset of the project, we were happy to present our first Episode to you. Though our servers suffered, we were pleased with the response and the great feedback we received!
 Shortly after that–exactly 4 weeks prior to now–we received a complaint about copyright and trademark infringement. We initially dismissed this it was most likely submitted by some trolls, as they could be submitted anonymously by anyone through our CDN. However, we continued to look into it, and by the following Monday, found it to be very real.
 Hasbro is not to be blamed here. As per U.S. Trademark law, as soon as an infringement comes to light, they are obligated to defend the trademark, or they will lose it. They had no choice in the matter, regardless of what they thought of the project or how it benefited them.
 The matter was quite strict: there was little that we could do to work around it. We removed the download link and development was suspended. Discussions continued through the month, but it came down to one fact: MLP:Online had come to an end.

MLP:Online: April 2015-November 2012. RIP. 

 We apologize for the wait. The time that we were taking for our discussions and to announce this publicly was time-boxed. Salty will be posting a eulogy about the project.
 But all hope is not lost. While MLPOnline is officially dead and buried, the team is mostly sticking together. Some took their leave due to real-life considerations, but about 75% of the old team remains. We've officially changed our name to Starlight Studios, as per a team vote last week. We have selected a new project. It is pony related, but otherwise we're keeping most of the details secret. It is our goal to have it completed by Bronycon 2013, though this may be ambitious.
 You should expect to see something unveiled this summer.
 EDIT: If you would like to help out with our new project, keep an eye out. I will be posting information about how to within the next 8 hours.

 Kind of a bummer, eh? At least they're going to be working on another project, so at least there's that to look forward to.

Another Legends of Equestria Open Server Weekend

 In order to ensure that their upcoming public stress test gets as much publicity as possible, the Legends of Equestria team decided to announce this one over a month in advance. As can be mostly deducted from reading the header image (unless you're a hardcore CLI fanboy browsing this site with Lynx, in which case you should probably ignore this game and go back to Angband), the event starts on January 24th at 12:01am EST and ends at 11:59pm on the 26th, and will most likely feature overworked servers crammed with seas of ponies to murder your framerate, along with a snazzy new Linux client. You'll also have to register on their forums in order to play, which can be done at http://forum.legendsofequestria.com/index.php?action=register.

 This will also coincide with their Ohayocon panel, where you'll be able to watch people demonstrating a game that you could have played yourself had you stayed at home.

Pony Tactics: Salvation

 For some reason it seems that nearly all of the of non-Flash My Little Pony fangames are RPGs, and most of which are announced are never heard from again and forgotten. This is probably due to the fact that making a decent RPG takes a lot of time and effort, which often proves to be too much for many developers to handle. A small team calling themselves "Slammin' is Jammin'" have recently announced their upcoming RPG and released a promotional video that shows off some interesting concept art and...less than impressive gameplay (although to be fair the game is still in the pre-alpha stages, so that is to be expected). 

Will Pony Tactics: Salvation ever be released? I have no idea, but you can find their promo video and some more information on the game after the break.

 From the information that has been given out so far Pony Tactics: Salvation will be a roleplaying game with a very heavy focus on tactics (obviously), taking place soon after Discord came to power. The player controls a herd of common villagers who decided to flee from the Lord of Chaos and find a better place to live, while beating the crap outta various giant monsters along the way. Celestia and Luna's origin story also plays a major part in the story, as does the discovery of the elements of harmony.

 According to Slammin' "Unlike most tactics RPGs Salvation does not have a classic jobs system. Instead each unit falls uniquely into a role, with skills and abilities maintained by the story instead of jobs/levels. Smart uses of a team's abilities and items is rewarded, as health/mana is not fully replenished after each battle." I may be no veteran when it comes to tactical RPGs but that does sound kind of interesting to me, although how the final product shall turn out is yet to be seen.

 The game is being made in Unity3D, and due to the fact that they're not listing Linux as a platform I'm going to assume that they are not using Unity 4. The sprites used in the trailer appear to be only temporary placeholders (thank God), and due to some of listed positions on the "join our crew" page it appears that the ponies themselves will be drawn as 2D sprites in contrast to the 3D world. This is quite unlike most other pony RPGs which either rely exclusively on sprites such as The Lost Kingdom or use only 3D models like Questria; the former of which is far more common.

Any thoughts? Leave them in the comments!

No Guns in Canterlot

 There's a distinct lack of first person shooters in the pony fandom, and for good reason: colourful horses just aren't as fun when you can't see the ones you're playing as. However, that hasn't stopped Jach (you might be familiar with some of his previous works, such as A World You Should Not Know), who decided to switch from the Blender Game Engine to Unity3D and make a game about shooting changelings with guns, because apparently magic missiles aren't good enough for some reason. Players also have the choice of playing as Princess Celestia, Luna, Cadance and Shining Armor, each with their own weapons and magical abilities, which offers some more variety I guess.

 No word on when the project will eventually be released, although Jach claims he'll set up a blog for it in the near future with development updates.

This was the closest thing to a SFW Princess Shining Armor picture that I could find.

Press Release: Equestrian Robotics

Equestrian Robotics

(Megamare X)

 The Equestrian Robotics Initiative is proud to unveil its face to the world-wide internet. We are now announcing our brand-new site, which can be found at EquestrianRobotics.org. This site, we hope, will provide answers about our many upcoming projects and products to make the speedy recovery of our world smoother for all.

 As always, questions and comments can bseasoned via our twitter account, @EQRobotics. We appreciate all feedback we receive regardless of any profanity-laced responses that come from Jay’s desk. Please don’t sue.

– From the desk of Dr. Atelier.


 The indefatigable minds at Starlight Studios have created some new content concerning popular retirement simulator/action game for reprogrammable computers, Megamare-X. The site has been a project of theirs since the events of BronyCon 2013, and will be updated with in-universe, in-character game info concerning the rich world of Equestria 21XX. As the game draws closer to its completion, the blog will become more and more relevent to the events of the game, and will eventually serve as a direct portal for download and support as well.

Horse Game Update 2

Horse Game

 Even if the Horse Game is pretty much a proof of concept demo, it's still rather fun, especially now that the developers have added bots and made some improvements to its innovative spell-crafting system, among other things. It may be nowhere near ready for a review yet, sure, but the project is rather promising and I'd advise that you folks keep an eye on it for the near future, and maybe even volunteer to help out if you have any coding or 3D modelling skills.

Interested in giving this fabulous update a spin? Then download the Horse Game at http://horsegame.ca/.

 Meanwhile, Ponykart's C++ translation chugs along. I should put up a full post for these guys sometime.

(You can check out the Ponykart revival Google Group at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ponykart, and the project website at http://ponykart.org/)

Temno Moves to Unity

TEMNO

 Multimedia Fusion 2 gets kind of a bad rap, and after spending over a year developing Temno with it Lexo Astonov grew sick of its quirks and decided he was just going to switch over to Unity. This provides several benefits, such as support for higher resolutions and native OS X/Linux binaries, along with the possibility of an Android app. Temno is also no longer a solo project; it is now being developed by a Czechoslovakian indie team currently known as Little Bit Interactive, which should help speed up development a tad (even if the game only features original characters now, to protect it from receiving a Cease & Desist order).

I'm still not sure what to think about OC-only fangames, to be honest, especially since the last one I encountered wasn't free.

Oh yeah, and some girl decided to draw an OC for me, although she hasn't coloured it yet or uploaded a high-rez picture. You folks like it?

Spike's Quest: Progress Video #1

Spike's Quest

 A quick search reveals that we last posted Spike's Quest over a year ago, leading most to assume that the project was dead. However, several days ago MisterBull pulled back the curtain and revealed that the silence was due to his completely rewriting the game's engine in BlitzMax, which should theoretically give him much more freedom from a developmental perspective and possibly enable OS X/Linux support. To showcase the new engine, he has released the above video, and plans on releasing a new one every week. Perhaps a tad excessive, sure, but still a better idea than releasing a big update once a year like MisterBull had been doing before.

Also, many thanks to Bry Fury to sending this in to us.

Pony Amnesia Demo

Pony Amnesia: Love and Mysteries

(Download)

 For various reasons I don't like posting the release announcement and review of a game right next to each other, and what do you know? Some developer usually happens to conveniently release a demo or something right in between posts, so our readers don't get two articles about the same game in a row. I'm not sure as to why this always happens, but here's a thank-you to Gentlecolt Collaborations for accidentally upholding this odd tradition and treating you all to a brand-new pony visual novel at the same time.

 Since this is only a demo I'm not going to put a score on the project or anything, but I might as well put some feedback below the break. Fair enough?

 Initially I had some issues with running Pony Amnesia, as some sort of bizarre audio issue that distorted the music, driving me mad until I finally discovered that running the program through the Ren'Py launcher somehow resolved my problem (which occurred on the 64bit version of Linux Mint 15, if that helps at all). Good thing too, as the project's music is quite pleasing to the ear and definitely not something I would want to play the demo without. The only thing that could make it better would be some atmospheric sounds for the brief portions without music, but it's a bit much to expect that from a fan project.

 The protagonist (whose name you can choose, if it amuses you to introduce yourself as a certain infamous German chancellor) wakes up alone in the Everfree Forest, with no memories as to who he is or how he got there in a completely original scenario that I've never seen before. Thankfully he is relatively near a road and heads out of the woods into Ponyville; otherwise he'd probably wander around and get eaten by a forest bogeyman or something of that sort, making for a very short and unsatisfactory demo, albeit one that could potentially be rather amusing. He then bumps into Spike, meets the mane six, and stuff happens.

Yeah, thanks for reminding me.

 The plot may sound fairly generic, and it is, but Gentlecolt Collaborations manages to pull it off fairly well with excellent writing and characterization. Unlike a certain other pony VN to which this will inevitably be compared, Pony Amnesia doesn't make the player feel as if they are being dragged along with no say in the plot, and presents you with plenty of choices. It actually managed to keep my interest for the duration of the demo, and I'm looking forward to any future instalments of the project.

 As for the art...sometimes the characters look a little off-model, leaning into "unintentionally humorous" territory, but overall it's no big deal, especially with the gorgeous, beautifully-vectored backgrounds that have a distinct lack of those nasty horizontal bars which constantly got in the way of that other visual novel. Still, if I were the character artist I would probably play around a bit more with pony faces to get them looking just right before shipping future releases, because good artwork is fairly important in a visual novel, after all.

...What, you're not satisfied with your plastic surgery?

 According to the visual novel's website, "The game has a total of four arcs, each downloadable after they have been made, with the player able to choose the gender and name for their pony", and "Each arc lasts a total of seven days, allowing the player to interact with various characters in the game and follow their own independent stories before moving on the main story. Players are encouraged to follow these sub-plots in order to increase their friendship and maybe even establish a romantic relationship further on should players desire one". I'm not all too keen on the romance bits, but despite its clunky name Pony Amnesia: Love and Mysteries should definitely be a project worth following, and I'll be more than happy to review it when the time comes.

Super Lesbian Horse RPG Update

Super Lesbian Horse RPG

 For those of you who don't follow Bobby Schroeder's tumblr, you may be wondering how SLHRPG is coming along, so he created this Youtube video to give you folks some incentive to visit it more often. Most of the progress updates are too short to be posted here (for example, a recent series detailed his work on a particular rock sitting in the forest), but at least Bobby is being fairly open about the development process when compared to most of the other fangames I've seen which get this far, since they tend to be relatively silent for the most part.

So...yeah. You can follow Super Lesbian Horse RPG's development here.



*waits for DialgaBrite to complain about me posting this again*

Crazy Pony 1.2

Crazy Pony

(Bitbucket repo)

 Yesterday verycrazypony, macho-sadist extraordinaire, released a brand-new version of Crazy Pony with fancy new features like an online leaderboard and player avatars (which, sadly enough, don't seem to be working for me right now on Linux Mint), along with some some new levels in case you've beaten the original. Mac OS X support is also available for those willing to compile the game in Xcode, although I expect that verycrazypony will provide official OS X binaries fairly soon like he did with the previous releases.

Want to give the updated Crazy Pony a spin? Then check out the download page at http://crazypony.net/site/index.php?id=download

 

Reminder: Legends of Equestria is Livestreaming

Legends of Equestria Livestream

 In case you've already forgotten (in which case you should be ashamed of yourself, as we only posted about it 3 days ago), the Legends of Equestria team is livestreaming right now, and will continue to do so until tomorrow at noon EDT. They'll be making stuff live in front of an audience, and cover up their extended breaks with panels on various things related to their upcoming game.
 

Also, for some reason they moved the event to a different channel, so head on over to http://www.livestream.com/nutsonclark to watch it.

Guess Who's Livestreaming This Weekend?

 If you've been following Equestria Gaming over the past couple months/years, this banner should probably tell you all you need to know, but if you haven't figured it out yet Legends of Equestria is holding yet another 24 hour livestream, in which they will be extra productive in order to please the general public and hold several panels which may or may not interest you. The event will run from the 2nd of November at 12 noon EDT for a full 24 hours until the 3rd at 12 noon. And before you ask, the stream will be held at http://www.livestream.com/legends_of_equestria.

You can find a full schedule below the break.

Megamare X Seeking Level Designers

 SaltyJustice, a prominent developer from Starlight Studios, decided that Megamare X could really use a new level designer and submitted a post on Ponychan's /collab/ board asking for help. Problem is, he apparently hasn't realized that /collab/ is (among other things) dead and very unproductive. Since I can safely assume that all of us want to see the project reach completion in the near future, I decided to take the liberty of reposting his thread in hopes that he would have more luck finding someone here.

A copypasta of the full post, along with details on how to apply, can be found below the break.

Hello everypony!
Starlight Studios is developing a game called Megamare-X, and we're looking for at least one level designer to help us make it a reality.

The game is a jump-and-run-and-shoot platformer modelled after Megaman-X. More information is available upon request, but the important point is that our level designer must be able to analyze and understand how a Megaman-X level works and is constructed.

Much of the public information on the project can be found at http://www.mlponline.net/threads/megamare-x-clarifications.2048/ 

What we are not looking for is simple level layouts. We are also not specifically looking for someone to do art (tiles, backgrounds) for these levels, though that skill is handy if you have it. What we are looking for is someone who understands (or is not averse to learning) what makes a level fun, what features can be added, how the enemies and their positioning contributes to the level, and how a level is meant to teach a player over time.

If you're really interested, we also require that you be online and attentive. We use skype to communicate with one another, and have team meetings often throughout the week, and you are required to be present at least once a week (more is better!). We do our best to keep times flexible, but being present and communicating often is vital!

If you have previous level-design experience, by all means, apply! If you don't, but think you have the guts, you may as well take a stab at it. We work hard and we're at it all the time - this is a fan project, but it's also our passion, and we hope to make another game after Megamare-X that will be commercial. If you're good at your job, we might have a place for you.



This recruiting drive will last a finite amount of time, so don't delay. I will reply to this thread once we close it. If you have additional questions, post them here. What is expected of you will be detailed after we receive your reply, serious applicants only.

To apply: Email me directly. saltyjustice AT starlightstudios DAWT org Make sure to leave some method of contacting you.

Skype is preferred, but email will do as well.

Rainbow Dash Pony Disaster Playground Demo

Rainbow Dash Pony Disaster

 The wonderful folks that brought you Waiting is Magic and TWALAGHT SPARKUHLZ REVEHNGSHE are currently working on a game titled Rainbow Dash Pony Disaster, and after surprisingly little ado decided to release a tech demo for their project. I'm quite impressed with the game so far, although the combat needs quite a bit of work and adding a little shading to the vectors would work wonders for the overall look. We'll be sure to review this for you when it comes out, but in the meantime why don't you give it a try, eh?

On a somewhat related note apparently our author Enigma is providing vectors for Penta Studios and is listed as a team member on their website. This isn't the first time he's worked on a fangame (his only released one being Click the Twilight Sparkle so far), but it's nice to see that he's contributing to the project.