My Little Game Jam: Winners Announced!

My Little Game Jam is over, and the winners have been announced! It's great to see some of the games I've had the pleasure of covering and playing on the list. Check them out after the break!

Category Winners:

Pinkie Pie (Fun) Category: Order of Twilight [Maurice]

Applejack (Balance) Category: Chaos in Ponyville [Waffle]

Rarity (Graphics) Category: Daring Do and the Scepter of Harmony [Pix3m]

Fluttershy (Ease of Play) Category: End of Chaos [ToCoool]

Twilight Sparkle (Performance): Sugar Boom! [sparklepeep]

Rainbow Dash (Chaos): Chaos in Ponyville [Waffle]

Overall Winners:

3rd Place: Corruption [Oddwarg]

2nd Place: Order of Twilight [Maurice]

1st Place: Chaos In Ponyville [Waffle]

Congratulations to the winners! You can find all of the entries here. 

Colors Of Time

Colors of Time

Hang on, Discord's stopped time. That's rarely, if ever, a good thing. Right now, JCity's Colors of Time is a fairly short, basic platformer - however, its mechanics are nicely polished and the art very pretty for a 48-hour game jam. He's hinted that he may continue the project in the future - I, for one, would love to see it blossom into something unique. Link to the MLGJ page above!

Corruption

Corruption

You guys never cease to amaze me. Complete with custom animation, creepy musical styling, and some slightly mind-bending visuals, The Oddwarg's Corruption is certainly one of the most colorful games to come out of My Little Game Jam. It's a little shorter than what I'd normally review, and borders on creepypasta, so I held off from grading it. Find the rundown after the break!

To be honest, the level styling of Corruption reminds me a lot of the Luna Games, which I'm a huge fan of. Using keyboard controls to move while controlling a magically levitated lantern with the mouse, the player attempts to guide Twilight through a shadowy underground maze. 

The unique art style and enveloping nature of the game mask the fact that there's not a lot of discernible story. There are a few clues - Discord smirks at you before the game launches, and Celestia greets you with Smarty Pants after the game's conclusion, but overall, the plot is indecipherable. 

However, I can't really fault a chaos-themed game for confusing me. I won't spoil the penultimate scene with a screenshot - rather, I'll leave you with the knowledge that I found it awesome and that it borders on creepypasta. 

Lots of insanity, and then... this. Well, that was anti-climactic - perhaps there's a secret ending?

The game might have begun to bore me had it dragged on longer - however, it was short enough that the mechanics remained fun. Aside from using your lantern to prevent Twilight from falling into numerous pits, variety was found in moving glowing balls and platforms to solve puzzles within the cave.

Overall, I think this game could go far if expanded - there's certainly a lot of unique potential here. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for creepypasta. Either way, it's quick and certainly worth playing!

Xtux's note: despite the author's claims you can run this game on Mac OS X by downloading the latest version of Java from http://java.com/en/download/mac_download.jsp and not through the Software Update utility.

Sunset Defender

Sunset Defender

Man, four whole days without a post? This needs to be remedied, stat! Fortunately, Amethyst Air has just the thing. This little game was created for My Little Game Jam, but missed the deadline by a couple of hours. Help Cadence and Shining Armor defend Equestria from changeling missiles, chain reaction-style! 

Letting a couple of locations be destroyed at the beginning proves to be the most effective strategy, as you can then focus your fire on the last remaining area. Waiting to click until the missiles are close to impact is a quick way to clear the board, but a little risky - if you miss, you're doomed. I couldn't get past level 13... if you beat me, feel free to disparage my skills in the comments!

Ponyvasion

Ponyvasion

 Next up from My Little Game Jam is...well, I'm not exactly sure how to describe Ponyvasion to be honest. According to the game's description the player is tasked to "Defend Unicorn-land against the invading pony's", and by that they mean "Kill Them All!". You are then given a variety of weapons that can be swapped with the keys 1-4 and thrown right into the thick of things. Shooting the multicoloured ponies increases your score, while hitting the fluffy white unicorns decreases it. In my opinino it is one of the worst fangames that we have ever come across, although as the case may be it might just be a trollgame. Either way you can give it a shot if you like, but don't expect to come back for more.

Review: Order of Twilight

Order of Twilight

 Being a Mac/Linux user I often lament the lack of multiplatform My Little Pony fangames, and often I wondered why nopony was using the excellent LÖVE engine to do so. However during the last My Little Game Jam a certain game named Order of Twilight was submitted to the competition by a member of a certain Stabyourself.net. Sound familiar? It should. Stabyourself.net was the team behind the famous indie game Mari0 (which was pretty much Mario with portals) and the fact that one of their members decided to contribute to My Little Game Jam is rather encouraging.

 Just because Order of Twilight comes from a well-regarded source doesn't mean that it's automatically a perfect game. To read our short review of it continue on after the break.

 Order of Twilight is a platformer with a puzzle-centric focus. You play as Twilight Sparkle who appears to have been trapped within her own mind by Discord and must escape using various spells while avoiding spikes and Diamond Dogs. The spells are cast via the arrow keys, and as the player progresses they will be able to cast more powerful spells such as teleportation, invisibility, and wall-walking. All this may sound somewhat confusing, but don't worry. The game does a wonderful job of explaining everything as it goes along, and like all good puzzle games should it gradually becomes more difficult as Twilight comes closer to breaking free.

Things really get crazy later on.

 Graphically OoT (no, not that one) is rather minimalistic, with a unified 8-bit style. This is probably a good thing since more complex sprites would have been distracting from the core gameplay, but I do appreciate the parallax scrolling effect that Maurice added to the background. The soundtrack only contains two actual songs and is 14 seconds long in total (not counting the sound effects and static), but tends to fade into the background and thankfully doesn't get annoying after being looped over and over.

 Since Order of Twilight was created in 27 hours it is rather short with 12 stages in total. A "challenge mode" that encourages minimal spell use adds a little replay value to the game, but once you have completed it there is little reason to go back. After looking through the source code (which can be downloaded here) I have discovered that with the use of a graphical editor and a minimal amount of coding one should be able to create extra levels, but since I haven't tested this out yet I can neither confirm nor deny that idea. It is possible that Stabyourself.net might release a level editor for the game; after all they did make one for Mari0, but don't get your hopes up.


 What could be done to improve the game? The level editor that several users have mentioned would be the only thing so far, since there really isn't much that I can think of to improve the game (maybe some of our readers have suggestions?). It would also have been nice to have more opportunities to use certain spells such as the invisibility spell, which is only required once. Giving a game like this a definitive score is hard, but for now I'm going to give this a 7/10.

What did you think of the game, eh? Let us know in the comments!

My Little Game Jam Open For Voting

Vote and Play Here!

As you probably know, My Little Game Jam finished up last weekend - and they received a very impressive 37 successful submissions. You can expect a wrap-up post (or posts) featuring the fan favorites after the contest's end, but for now: Go! Play! Vote! 

My Little Game Jam has begun!

Competition Website

Why are you reading this? You're already behind! Yes, the first round of My Little Game Jam started four hours ago! You've only got until this weekend ends (midnight Sunday to Monday UTC, or 4:00 PM Pacific Time on the 7th, for all my Seattle bronies) to complete your game. It's certainly not too late to start - but you must have your chaos-themed My Little Pony fangame completed and submitted by the deadline. Here are the rules, shamelessly copied from their front page:

• All assets and game logic must be created during the weekend of competition. 
• The contest is individuals only. You have to work alone.
• The game must follow the theme announced at the beginning of the competition (chaos).
• Code and assets must be open-sourced and added to the submission.

Caught flat-footed? Never fear: you may miss the contest, but any 48 hours is a perfectly good time to make a pony fangame in my book. I'm thoroughly jazzed to see what you guys come up with, and I'm certainly looking forward to raving about the winners come next week!

My Little Game Jam

One of the more unfortunate aspects of my being given control over the site was that I could not afford to hold game development contests like we used to. Some of our fandom's most well-known fangames were spawned during those contests such as Story of the Blanks during our Creepypasta Game Contest, and Super Filly Adventure during the Brony Day Terraria Giveaway (although it seems that silly ol' Strawberry Spice forgot to give the winner his prize). The newly-spawned My Little Game Jam is a similar contest and to enter one must create an entire game by yourself within 48 hours. Sounds easy, no? Not so fast, bucko. The game also has to be created entirely from scratch, so you have to draw all the sprites, make all the music and program all the stuff by yourself. Lovely, eh? 

Of course we can't wait to see what you guys will make during this contest, but before entering we would advise that you visit the contest's website at http://www.mylittlegamejam.com/ and check out all the details first, just so that you don't accidentally break any rules in your entry.

My Little Game Dev Marathon Reviews: Pink Pone Action / The Unknown / Luna Wander

Time for another dive into the My Little Game Dev Marathon submissions! Again, they've been reviewed and graded relative to the other games in the competition.

Find Pink Pone Action, The Unknown, and Luna Wander below the break!

Download Pink Pone Action

This one's a bit of a head-scratcher. Playing as the long-nosed, unintelligible Pinkepone, the player must traverse a candy-coated level that looks like Super Mario meets Sugar Rush.

However, things are not as they seem. A la Cat Mario (perhaps its closest relative) and other unfair platformers, the world of Pinke Pone Action will kill you by any means necessary. As you fall before inexplicably exploding turtles, collapsing ceilings, and invisible blocks, your amount of lives remaining dips into the negative numbers.

Like many of its counterparts, Pink Pone Action appears to be a demo for a full-length game - and worlds of frustration - to come. I'll look forward to it.

Grade: 7/10

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Download The Unknown

I'm not sure exactly what to make of this creepy little survival-horror game. The player awakens in the middle of a darkened, snowy, evergreen forest with nothing but his wits and a few flares for protection. Unfortunately, you're quickly surrounded by strange stone ponies with glowing red eyes.

The Unknown takes advantage of the first person medium to add creepiness to your mysterious assailants - they only advance when the player turns away, freezing  the instant you sweep your view back to them. Luckily, they're vulnerable to your dwindling supply of flares.

The object of the game appears to be to survive for as long as possible, limited to the resources you can scavenge from the ground. Until it gets a plot, The Unknown is certainly good for a scare, but not much else.

Grade: 5/10

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Download Luna Wander (Win x32) | (Win x64)

Among the submissions, Luna Wander takes the cake for world size and perhaps also hours of gameplay (although the latter is tricky to measure). While neither of these can guarantee a game's success, those of you into open-world sandbox games will find a lot to love here.

Playing as the recently exiled Princess Luna, the player must traverse the vast three-dimensional surface of the moon and find enough food and water to survive. These demands are met easily enough (especially if one plays in creative mode,) so what's left to do? Check out the mysterious objects scattered far and wide, that's what.

Located sparsely across the moon's surface are power-ups to help your exploration, materials with which to build crude shelters, and many other strange objects (which I won't spoil.) Even if you cheat using the included map, exploration will take a very long time - so play if you're ready to submerge yourself in the meditative world of the game for a while.

This one's a little hard to grade. At times, I felt lost in the wasteland with little sense of direction and few to no reference points - but I get the feeling that was part of the intended experience. It's not the right game for everyone, but what Luna Wander attempted, it confidently achieves.

Grade: 8/10

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Update: seems like we've overtaxed MLGD's Dropbox. Here are alternate download links for Luna Wander and The Unknown - Thanks, Jach Marsdonpone!

My Little Game Dev Marathon Reviews: Pinkie or Not Pinkie / Primaeval Threat / The Moon

After playing several games from the recent My Little Game Dev Marathon, I realized that I couldn't review them in our standard format. For one thing, it would be unfair to hold a game created in two weeks to the standards I'd expect from a larger project. For another, it would be impossible to do them all justice!

Instead, I tackled three of my favorites at once and graded them against their peers. Find Pinkie or Not Pinkie, Primaeval Threat, and The Moon below the break!

Download Pinkie or Not Pinkie

I know I'm not the only one who wondered if Twilight accidentally left the wrong Pinkie Pie standing after the chaos of s3e03. Now, you can relive the sinking feeling that you've just blasted one of your friends into oblivion... over and over and over again.

The premise of the game is simple enough - playing as Twilight Sparkle, blast away at a horde of Pinkie Pies until there's only one left. At the end of the game, you'll be informed whether you made the right clicks along the way. Fortunately, the player has a "distraction button" to help weed out the fakes - the Pinkies who succumb to the diversion can be safely eliminated.

I ended up playing through the game several times, coming irritatingly close to victory. It may be simple, but Pinkie or Not Pinkie gets points for originality and fun.

Grade: 6/10

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Play Primaeval Threat Online

Set in a space-age version of the ponyverse, Primaeval Threat is a step up from your average choose-your-own adventure game. Techna is a World Custodian, a member of a dwindling organization tasked with protecting ponykind. As such, when a pony ventures into the prison of an ancient evil, it is Techna's duty to track her down and bring her back.

With 118 slides and multiple endings, Primaeval Threat has perhaps more content and gameplay time than any other game entered in the Marathon. The game avoids railroading smoothly - at every juncture, the player is presented with a several options based on the chosen skills of their character. 

Primaeval Threat's engaging storyline and decent replay value certainly don't hurt its appeal. Bonus points for adding to my headcanon!

Grade: 8/10

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Download The Moon

Best princess on the moon? (Almost) always a recipe for success. I'm not sure I've ever played a ponified escape the room game before, but this one was certainly a treat.

The version of The Moon submitted to the My Little Game Dev Marathon is only the first chapter of what will hopefully blossom into a much larger project. However, in its current form, the game already hints at a complex storyline, stylish character portraits, and frustrating puzzles to come. Trapped in a mysterious throne room, Princess Luna interacts with two separate, conflicting manifestations of Nightmare Moon - thus setting up a unique take on her backstory.

I'm notoriously bad at escape the room games, but I was able to solve the throne room puzzle (despite, at several points, being convinced that it was impossible.) Hopefully, we'll see more content soon in the form of a second installment!

Grade: 8/10

My Little Game Jam: Mini Game Jam

Mini Game Jam

 The folks over at My Little Game Jam have decided to hold monthly contests called "Mini Game Jams", and unlike the main events there is no requirement for the entries to include their source code (although the game must still be made from scratch). Apparently one started earlier today, and it lasts for 48 hours. If you have an awesome idea for a fangame, now is the perfect time to create it (unless you want to wait for the next full-sized game jam that will  start later on this year). Shame I wasn't already busy with my own fangame, or I would participate in the event myself.

 Oh yeah, and on a somewhat unrelated note it seems that the My Little Game Dev forums are going to stay down for a couple days while its creator sets something up (think it was a new domain name or something).