Game: Legacy of the Pony

 

Legacy of the Pony

  This game has been out for a couple of months now, but it's never too late to post about projects, I think! Legacy of the Pony, created by DeftFunk and Noonanna, is a non-linear Metroidvania-style platformer starring Spike as he ventures through a sprawling cave system to rescue Rarity from the Diamond Dogs. To complete their journey, players will need to locate the Elements of Harmony hidden deep in every corner of the game world.. A variety of powerups and collectibles are littered throughout the game to help Spike on his quest, and a map system helps keep players from getting lost. The game has an 8-bit aesthetic reminiscent of Game Boy games, which provides a bit of charm.

 The game can be downloaded from Dropbox (with a Spanish version available for some of the international readers out there), and it has its own subreddit for discussion on the game. I've barely scratched the surface of the game so far; this post may see updates in the near future with further impressions as I progress.

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.

Spike's Quest Graphical Showcase

Spike's Quest

It's been a long time since we've heard anything from the Spike's Quest developer, but yesterday he decided to release a graphical showcase of a particular ingame room. It's fairly obvious that he has put a lot of work into this project, but it almost feels as if it is missing something. Part of it probably has to do with the cluttered environment and overwhelming amounts of detail that take the focus away from the main character. At times Spike almost feels invisible with all pillars and grates standing in front of him, but thankfully good ol' MisterBull appears to be aware of the issue and will hopefully resolve the issue before the next playable release.

I am also of the opinion that adding a slight parallax scrolling effect to the pillars in the front and back would have a positive effect on the environment's three-dimensional feel, although again it's up for MisterBull to decide as to whether or not he will include that effect.

Review: Rainbow Dash Shooter Project

Rainbow Dash Shooter Project

Ever since their release the Desktop Ponies sprites have been used in almost everything. Yes, they are good-looking retraux pony sprites but at times one likes to see developers do their own sprite work for a change. I can say from experience that the main problem seems to be that four-legged characters are rather hard to animate properly and simply using a standard set of sprites saves much time and lets the developer work on things other then character animation. The creator of the dully-titled Rainbow Dash Shooter Project claims that his game's graphical resources were created entirely by himself, and this may be either a good or bad thing depending on his artistic talents.

Of course, it is not the graphics that matter most as the gameplay, so how has this project turned out? Find out after the break.

Of all the sidescrolling shooters that I've seen come out of this fandom this one has to be the most ambitious. The player starts off controlling either Rainbow Dash or an OC created within the game itself (more on that later), and can eventually unlock Fluttershy and Derpy, the latter of which must be obtained by finding a special code either ingame or in the game's comments. Each character has their own special abilities but they can all fly, shoot magic fireballs and enter "overdose mode", which basically speeds up gameplay and enables the player to fire at an absurdly fast rate.

At times one almost wishes that the entire game could be played in Overdose mode.

Unfortunately things get worse fast. Unlike other titles such as the splendidly-made Dash the Rainbow Dash Shooter Project lacks a sense of speed and the sluggish controls make you feel like you're not flying, but swimming in a pool of mud. There is also a very small variety of enemies, and until the first boss is complete the player is stuck fighting large swarms of parasprites. Thankfully once the player reaches Cloudsdale a couple new foes are added to the lineup, although you'll still be mostly fighting parasprites throughout the entire game. To be honest it gets boring quite fast, although the addition of a couple bosses helps considerably.

The game's first boss is Trixie, who is apparently too lazy to perform a levitation spell like unicorn OCs can and is being pulled in a flying cart by Fluttershy. She starts off extremely boring, just slowly firing bullets at the player, but it's once you start to damage her that things get hectic. The game practically switches genres from a plain old shooter to a fully-fledged bullet hell game, although the execution is rather sloppy. In the final stages there is no logic as to where the bullets appear from, and the sluggish controls make dodging the high-speed magical projectiles nigh impossible. As almost everypony realizes it is far more fun to skillfully dodge bullets at high speed, not soaking up damage as possible without dying and with the grace of an overfed seal that can barely swim in it's aquarium pool without sinking.

Thankfully Cloudsdale isn't quite as dull as the stages before it.

As for the graphics...I'll just say that the Rainbow Dash Shooter Project looks quite dull. The occasional passing cloud makes things slightly more interesting, but in general the scenery which you will be flying by is completely bare. It also seems that like many people the artist has a difficult time drawing ponies, and it shows. It's nice that he made the effort of designing his own puppets in Flash, but I really wish that he had just used either the My Little Pony Flash Resource Kit or the Double Rainboom puppets instead of his own work, as it would have improved the game's look immensely. Letting the player use  OCs in the game was a nice touch, although it seems that cutie marks do not import properly  after uploading them and they come out as a garbled mess. There also seems to be a distinct lack of manes and accessories to choose from although thankfully it seems that more shall be added to the game fairly soon.


Let me get this straight: the Rainbow Dash Shooter Project could have been a great game, but poor execution ruined it. Put simply, this game was boring. The game looked dull, the controls were sluggish, and fighting endless swarms of parasprites grew tedious quickly. I had high hopes for this project, but they were shot down as soon as I began to play and were so heavily damaged that they were unable to fly again. To make this game better one would have to loosen up the controls, entirely revamp the graphics, tweak a couple bosses and BAM! We'd have a must play on our hands. Thankfully the game is still under development so hope is not lost yet, so why don't you play the game for yourself and give the creator some feedback, eh?

Princess Civilization

Princess Civilization

 So far this month has been rather slow for fangame-related news, as most of us have been busy preparing for our final exams and whatnot. Thankfully it appears that a few developers have been able to sneak in some time for development; for example, some guy named Petr Hudecek is getting close to completing his Princess Civilization game, but needs voice actors for Spike and Princess Celestia before he can do so. In my opinion he could probably use some better spriters too, because frankly the terrain looks awful. Gameplay should come before graphics, yes, but your average gamer tends to notice a game's art first and will make their decision on whether to play it or not based on how appealing its graphics are.

 Interested in helping Petr out with his project? Check out his design document over at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PEARgE6fq206J_9PI9NmxRx1qJ6VePRwuJ6rs4M1xY8/edit, and then you can send him an email over at petrhudecek2010@gmail.com.