Review: Welcome to Ponyville Act 1

Welcome to Ponyville Act 1

As I said in my previous post I have never been entirely sure as to why the Brony fandom seems to have fallen in love with Welcome to Ponyville. The one that seemed most likely to me based on my observations was that they really wanted a game in which you could date ponies (which isn't really that strange, given that there was a pigeon dating simulator of all things) and this game promised both that and a fairly decent visual novel experience. Now that Act 1 (which is essentially a demo of the final thing) has been released we can play this game for ourselves and decide whether it really has lived up to the hype.

Just how good is Welcome to Ponyville? Find out in our review which we have conveniently placed after the pagebreak.

You would expect that a visual novel demo would have a fairly small download, right? Wrong. Imagine my surprise when I began the torrent and found to my horror that the demo took up over 1GB of hard drive space. Just let that sink in for a moment. But if the game is that large it must be really substantial, right? Wrong again! Act 1 is a very short demo, and what contributes the most to the game's filesize is actually the audio. It's quite a shame that the team didn't even bother to put the game in a zipped folder (which in tests has been shown to almost halve the game's size) in order to save on download time, but let us get on with the actual game, shall we?

Bon Bon introducing herself.

Pretty much Welcome to Ponyville is your basic visual novel and has a very small amount of actual gameplay. Most of it is spent talking to the various ponies in town with a minimal level of interaction, with the player just clicking the left mouse button to advance the conversation and occasionally having a choice between saying different things. In my opinion the game would greatly benefit from making greater use of the latter, since at times it felt like I was just an observer and had almost no say as to what went on in-game. Players in general like to have plenty of choices when it comes to interactive stories but sadly Act 1 drags them along, forcing them to be nice when they are feeling naughty and vice versa. Hopefully the developers will realize this and make the necessary changes in the next few acts, or else I (along with many others) shall feel greatly disappointed with this.

As most of you probably already knew by now Welcome to Ponyville only uses a minimal amount of original sprites, and uses community-created vectors instead. While I must admit that this was a good idea the execution was quite flawed. You see the vectors are often scaled inconsistently, creating the effect of a pony growing and shrinking as they talk. For some reason it seems that Filly Games refused to zoom in to some of the various backgrounds used in-game which introduces black bars on the top and bottom as you can see in the screenshots. This is only a minor setback but it would make Act 1's environment even more immersive then in its current state. As for the music...it's good, but nothing special. It does its job and does it well but most of the time you won't even realize that it's there.

I get the impression the Vinyl Scratch will probably be the easiest character to ship yourself with early on.

One final complaint that I have about this game is the engine. Sure, it was nice that they actually went through the trouble of creating their own engine and it runs smoothly in Wine but much development time could have been saved if they would have used a free visual novel engine instead such as Ren'Py. The current engine also has several annoying quirks such as ponies disappearing during transitions, which makes it look like they are popping in and out of existence and actually ruins what could have been a genuinely scary scene near the end.


From this review most readers would probably conclude that I am rather disappointed in Act 1, and they would be correct. However one must remember that this is just the first chapter in Welcome to Ponyville and that hopefully things will get much, much better. Still, I would not say that this game has so far not lived up to the hype and for that I give it a 4/10. Let's hope that the next few instalments will be somewhat better, eh?

Oh, and here's a warning to any of our readers that happen to be both autistic and have sensitive hearing.  You may want to turn down your volume for the bell chimes, as they can aggravate your noise sensitivity and cause varying degrees of pain. This was discovered during my first playthrough and resulted in around an hour of pain for yours truly.

A couple of additional notes from Arctic Lux:
An alternate download link can be found here. The file's a little smaller, only about 600MB.

If you attempt to run the game and get the error "The program can't start because d3dx9_43.dll is missing from your computer," click here to update DirectX on your computer. Make sure to uncheck the box to install the Bing toolbar...

Also, I figured I'd add my unasked for personal opinion on the game: I'm more a fan of story-oriented games, and I had fun with this one. I think Xtux is right about a lot of the problems, but I'd still recommend it to fans of similar games.

Welcome to Ponyville Act 1 Released!

Welcome to Ponyville

Back in March a visual novel-type game was announced named Welcome to Ponyville, and for some reason people got really excited about it. Most would expect that the sudden explosion in popularity had something to do with that desire many Bronies have to visit Equestria, but eventually it turned out that most of you sickos just wanted to get your hands on the romance portion of the game and ship yourselves with Lyra Heartstrings. To be honest I wish that they had downplayed the romance portion of the game, but either way Welcome to Ponyville should be a rather interesting game.

As this post's title should have indicated to you the first act of Welcome to Ponyville was released earlier this morning. The 1.14 gigabyte download (which they foolishly refused to compress) is enormous for what essentially amounts to a demo for a visual novel, although from the looks of it most of the space is taken up by audio files. We'll give you a review of the game and guides to running the game in Wine once we have finished downloading and playing it, but hopefully Act 1 is worth the 1.14GBs of hard drive space that it has taken away from me.

Also, for downloads we recommend that you use the torrent over at http://kat.ph/welcome-to-ponyville-act-1-t6676897.html for faster downloads. If you can then we would really appreciate it if you seed the torrent after downloading; after all nopony wants this torrent to be dead by the end of this day, right?

Welcome to Ponyville at Bronycon + Interview

Filly Gamez

A little while back Filly Gamez (the developers of that visual novel Welcome to Ponyville) announced that a couple of their team members are attending BroNYCon. Specifically Raish Dash and Writers Block are going, and they will be on the game developer's panel in the tail hall at 2:00pm. Apparently they're answering questions about the game (most of which will probably be on the romance feature) and will present a playable demo for everypony to check (which most of you will presumably use to test romance). They also said they will be handing out free vinyls to fans of the game, although I'm guessing that they will have a limited supply so try and get a hold of one as quick as possible.

Oh yeah, they also had an interview with The Lighting Round podcast. Find it after the break!

Welcome to Ponyville Trailer and Casting Call

Welcome to Ponyville

Allright, so here we have another video demonstration of Welcome to Ponyville, this one mainly centring around romance, since apparently that is what you guys were most interested in (really now?). While that doesn't interest me in the slightest, the update also showcases some of the team's vocal talent for the game,  which I did not care for that much. Hopefully there will be some option to turn it off in the final game, although even if there isn't I'll still tolerate it. Still, this is shaping up to be a most interesting game, and the idea of the game's artwork being supplied by the community is one that I find quite appealing.

Also, the team is looking for even more members: most of the needed positions are for voice actors, although they are also wanting a couple more programmers. In case you are interested in helping you can read their casting call at https://docs.google.com/document/d/17_HCpb4UYaoRjzgrRB0GSUerI67p3AaWFlzD4GPWaZo/edit?pli=1

Starswirl Academy

Starswirl Academy

Dev Blog

 The Brony fandom has a distinct lack of visual novels, aside from that My Little Dashie demo and its sibling, Welcome to Ponyville, which is fairly surprising given the amount of talented artists and writers we have lying around, and how quickly these games can be scripted in a good engine such as Ren'Py. Sensing this void, the Zap Apple Project team hopes to fill it with their upcoming visual novel titled Starswirl Academy, and it stars some unrevealed colt in high school who befriends humanized versions of the mane 6. In other words, this is your stereotypical visual novel about schoolgirls and romance, and like many of its peers has seperate SFW/NSFW versions. At least it had good art going for it: I'd say that it already looks quite professional despite being in such an early state. Oh yeah, and since the developers went with a modified version of Ren'Py instead of writing their own engine like Filly Gamez the game runs on Mac OS X and Linux, and an Android port of the game is also planned.

Feel like playing a visual novel while you wait? Then I would suggest that you give Juniper's Knot a try. It is fairly short and lacks ponies (even humanized ones), but then again it's not like ponies automatically make everything better, right?

It's Always Sunny in Dark Skyes

 In case you read the comments of our last post, you'd have heard that Dark Skyes' artist Pukey Pony got together with several folks and began work on an actual visual novel based off of the ill-fated trolling attempt (albeit without the supposed "deep RPG elements" and "100+ hours of gameplay"). As of now they're using placeholder music and backgrounds until more progress is made on the writing and character artwork, but I guess that isn't a really big deal since the fandom does have an overall lack of complete dating sims and it'd be nice to have that particular genre covered.

 There was a video update before this one, but Sam Hyde had it taken down from YouTube over "copyright violations" or some crap like that.

 Meanwhile, Windmistress is still probably one of the most unintentionally hilarious OCs I've ever seen in a pony fangame (especially with that cringeworthy dialogue in the original Dark Skyes trailer).

The Saga of Dark Skyes

 This here is Sam Hyde, a failed internet celebrity turned scammer whose life basically revolved around trying to sucker money out of other peoples' pockets to pay his rent instead of actually working for himself. He fancied himself as a sort of master troll who could do nothing wrong, and his next big scheme targeted whom he believed to be the internet's least intelligent people: the brony community. Several months in the making, this plan was a surefire way to make him some quick cash and immortalize himself as a legendary figure amongst his adoring fans...

...Except he didn't. The plan completely backfired, and as of now the Dark Skyes Kickstarter has been cancelled after most of the original backers pulled out. What lead to such a carefully planned-out project to fail so dramatically? You can find the story below the break, along with a bunch of screencaps.

(Source)

 On the 20th of December, Sam publicly announced his plans to create a Kickstarter for a fake pony dating sim on the Facebook page of his mediocre YouTube "comedy" group, Million Dollar Extreme, and thus had already doomed his project to failure by providing evidence of its invalidity. He also uploaded a casting call on YouTube, but at least had the sense to make it private to keep prying eyes from finding it (not that he succeeded, of course). Early reactions from his limited fanbase seemed to be extremely enthusiastic for the most part, since the majority of them despised the pony community and were of the opinion that this was the perfect opportunity to take those bronies down a peg.

 Several months passed as Sam and his small crew of voice actors created their Kickstarter pitch at a snail's pace, but they lacked one very important crew member to ensure that their ruse would be successful: an artist. For that purpose they paid a woman named Pukey Pony to draw "concept art" for the visual novel's characters that supposedly wasn't going to be used in the final product, a decision that would later come back to haunt them in the months to come.


 On March 6, they were finally ready to put their plan into action, and uploaded their first Kickstarter project under the title "Dark Skyes -- an EPIC brony dating sim", along with a 6 minute video and some mockup screenshots. With positive press from major pony news outlets being released shortly afterwards and several thousand dollars worth of donors, success seemed even more sure for MDE than ever before.

 That is, until the frequently misunderstood anons of /mlp/ became extremely suspicious at the trailer's distinct lack of any actual gameplay. All it contained was some guy talking in a mask and cringeworthy samples of voice acting playing alongside static pictures of ponies on abstract backgrounds, which is very unusual for a project claimed to be 95% complete. This lead to the discovery of various incriminating screenshots, some of which were compiled by Horse News' analysis of the Kickstarter. This was followed by another post a day after the first, which was extremely well received and lead to over $2000 in funding being pulled by concerned backers.

(Source)

 An increasingly desperate Sam Hyde, afraid of not being able to earn his $7500 and finding that the pony community was a bit too intelligent for his liking, turned to 4chan and uploaded an unintentionally hilarious plea for them to donate to his Kickstarter anyways because he apparently expected them to appreciate his "sense of humour" or something. This was unsurprisingly met with widespread derision and mockery of the angry little man, along with Pukey Poney publicly pulling support from the project in an incredibly damaging blow to the scam that would later lead to her being interviewed by PonyToast of Horse News and effectively proving beyond any reasonable doubt that Dark Skyes was by no means a genuine visual novel.

 After this, Dark Skyes was effectively defeated; no amount of sockpuppeting by MDE or its fans could salvage the Kickstarter now. After much pressure by potential backers a demo video was supposedly released, although it wasn't very convincing for a game that had supposedly been in development for four years (longer than the total existence of Friendship of Magic and its fandom!). There was also an attempt by MDE to artificially inflate the amount of donations received after most backers had already left, but with 12 hours left on the clock Sam finally decided to call it quits and pull the plug on his flawed dream after having made a mockery of himself and everybody else associated with MDE.


 So what have we learned about Sam Hyde through all of this? He's an extremely lazy and pathetic man who takes 3 months to set up a half-assed scam, and screws it all over by publicly bragging about it beforehand due to his insatiable desire for attention. Now he's even poorer than before, utterly friendless outside of his small circlejerk, and best of all his actions are forever archived on the internet to ward off any potential employers who would consider hiring him.


 Also, I'd like to thank the anons of /mlp/ for uncovering this and Horse News for their phenomenal coverage of the scandal as it unfolded, along with Pukey Poney for her assistance in the matter as well. Derpibooru is also an excellent source for screencaps if you'd like more info on exactly what took place: just search "dark skyes".

Mind you, there's still more of Dark Skyes to come, although that'll deserve a post of its own...