Pony RPG Video Preview

Well, apparently this Pony RPG trailer got featured on Equestria Daily, and I figured I might as well post this on Equestria Gaming. There are two more trailers after the break, in case you wanted to see more of the project.

MLP RPG (Fighting the Unknown) Update

MLP RPG

 So the MLP RPG has been updated, you know, the one with the ponies. There's apparently lots of new stuff in it, but since I haven't been able to find a detailed changelog I have no idea as to what Harvard Han added this time. I probably won't be able to review it anyways until it leaves the beta stage either, so in the meantime you might as well give it a shot.

...Enjoy, I guess?

Pony Chronicles Update

Pony Chronicles Tumblr

It seems Pony Chronicles has come a long way since we first posted on it during Pon-E3 2012. Today marked their second trailer release, showcasing the game so far and some of the beautiful original music. A while ago, a release date was set for late 2012/early 2013, so it hopefully we won't be in for a long wait!

A Release Date for Super Lesbian Horse RPG

Super Lesbian Horse RPG

 Apparently Super Lesbian Horse RPG is coming out on Christmas Day (Wednesday, in case you haven't checked your calendars yet). Since I just got from watching The Desolation of Smaug and am rather tired, let's just say that words cannot fully describe my excitement so I can get this over with and listen to the Electric Light Orchestra, maybe see if a friend of mine is online at this hour.

Good night!

PonyCraft Video Update #7

It seems that the developers of PonyCraft have decided to completely rewrite their game in C++, which means that development will probably take much longer than it would have before. To make up for it though they've released a brief update video showcasing Twilight Sparke's new abilities and voice acting by the talented Rina-chan. Not much, but at least it's something, right?

Anyhow, you can find the video update below the break. I was originally going to put it at the top of the article but figured that you would like to see the game's fabulous logo in all its glory.

MLP: RPG Housing and Graphical Updates

MLP: RPG Download

Over the last few weeks, MLP: RPG has gone through substantial updates, including a full graphical facelift, personal housing, and the inclusion full library of songs! Check out the longer v1.88 trailer above, and the v1.93 housing update after the break!

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.

Choke on My Woona, YOU NASTY CHANGELINGS

Choke on My Woona
(Download)

 While taking a brief break from working on the 4th Nightfall beta, Night Breeze from Silly Mare Games decided to clone a favourite game of his, the name of which cannot be mentioned here for various reasons. Choke on My Woona was the result, a shooter involving Woona and changelings. Upon inevitably dying in the game Woona will respawn, and be assisted by the ghost of her previous self. This goes on for 10 levels although I haven't gotten nearly that far yet, given that it practically runs in slow-motion on Wine and I'm not as patient as I once was (having beaten an unstable version of SuperTux running at 5fps). If you aren't using Linux or OS X, however, the game looks pretty fun so I'd definitely give it a shot if I were you.

Meanwhile, I still haven't figured out how to get Windows 8.1 to play nicely with Linux.

 Come to think of it, for some reason those multicoloured changelings in this game remind me of Carnifex's creations. If these ever ended up making a cameo in a fangame...hoo boy. I'd probably puke rainbows.

Rainbow Dash Brawl Mod Trailer & Beta

So, I know you guys like Super Smash Bros. Brawl built around ponies - how about ponies inserted into Brawl? Spearheaded by turbobear, this project currently includes several skins for Rainbow Dash (including Scootaloo and WonderBolt) and a variety of moves. While it's far from finished, you can download the current build here.

The project is currently in growth mode: the team is looking for an animator, a modeler, and an additional code monkey to finish up Dash and begin work on the rest of the Mane 6. If you're interested, or just want to follow the project, the official thread can be found here. Have fun!

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.

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*

Ponyvania Intro

Ponyvania

 So it seems that Ponyvania game we posted a while back also has a pretty sweet animated intro, probably the best we'll ever see in a fangame. Shame it'll probably add a lot to the game's filesize and hurt those of us with slower internet connections, so if I were the developers I'd probably release a version of the game with the intro stripped out. Still, I've seen far worse examples of pointless filesize inflation in a particular game I reviewed on this site a while back...you probably know of what I speak.

 And yes, I'm still working on that Moonstuck part 2 review, so be patient. Reviews take time, especially when you possibly have two of them to write in one day.

 Imagine if this intro was actually rendered in-game instead of just being a pre-rendered cinematic. It'd probably be quite hard to code, sure, but it'd be really impressive from a technical perspective. Plus, yay for drastically reduced filesizes!

Gameloft's Welcome to Ponyville Gameplay Footage

Update: the title for the game has been revealed: Welcome to Ponyville. I get the impression that Filly Gamez won't be too happy about this...

Apparently Gameloft has been developing an official My Little Pony mobile game for a while now, and yesterday one of the developers released a video preview that showcased the game. I must admit that overall it does look rather pretty, but it seems that this game is yet another example of how ponies really don't look that great in 3D (PonyKart managed to get around this with some fancy shading, but it would probably drain cellphone batteries to have that). This game should make an interesting review to say the least, although that reviewer won't be me since I do not currently own any working mobile devices.

What do you think of this preview, eh?

MLP: Rise of the Clockwork Stallions Demo Trailer

MLP: Rise of the Clockwork Stallions

The team behind My Little Pony: Magic Shards, Darkera Studios, is well into the development of their next project - and frankly, it looks pretty cool. My Little Pony: Rise of the Clockwork Stallions is slated to feature more than 30 playable characters, 8 locations, 16 bosses, and a whopping 48 levels. Check out the trailer, and visit the project's development website via the link above!

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.

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!

Project:Harmony Teaser

Alas, our wondrous fandom still lacketh a MOTHER-style RPG, but fear not! Project:Harmony is here, riding on its shining horse and repelling the forces of darkness with its stunning graphics, terrifying foes (just look at the size of that giganto robot!) and a cast of incredibly handsome Bronies who can love and tolerate the crap out of all haters, even not-so-invincible clumsy robots! For the first time ever I am going to rate a game based off of the trailer alone, and give it a ten out of-

Sorry, I can't keep this up. In case it somehow managed to escape you the above paragraph was a joke, and despite what you might expect Project:Harmony is an actual fangame. They're releasing an actual announcement and trailer for their game on November 21st (which also happens to be my birthday), but they made this silly teaser just for laughs and...I couldn't resist posting it. Sorry folks, but you'll have to wait a mite longer to find out what Project Harmony is actually about...

TEMNO Trailer

 If you've been following our Twitter account you may have been aware of a Limbo-style platformer/puzzle game through various screenshots that we have retweeted and given feedback for multiple times. Many times I have wished to see some actual gameplay footage of TEMNO, and last Saturday Astonov granted that wish with the release of a video update. Apparently the game takes place within a depressed Pinkamena's mind in which she is trapped inside and Twilight has broken into in order to rescue Pinkie. In a game like this graphics are of the uttermost importance, and hopefully Astonov manages to pull off a look reminiscent of Limbo (although I don't expect it to be as good as Limbo, since it is a solo fangame project after all). The fact that he is designing the majority of the game's environments with his DS is impressive, although I suspect that without some of Limbo's subtle effects such as grass blowing in the wind the environments may end up feeling flat and dull. That doesn't mean that the game will suck though!

Also, one thing that I think Astonov appears to have forgotten is that Pinkamena is not only depressed, but batsh** insane. If he realizes this and makes TEMNO reflect this somewhat...we might just have a winner on our hands.

Starswirl Academy Debut Trailer

Starswirl Academy

 About time they released a trailer for Starswirl Academy, and it has everything you might expect. Humanized ponies in schoolgirl outfits, pretty backgrounds, synthesized music, etc. Now about that protagonist...it's probably for the better if I don't say that much about him, although I'm honestly not all that surprised. At least this is almost guaranteed to turn out better than, ahem, that other pony visual novel did.

I would write more, but things are kinda hectic around here; the boiler room flooded while the cat was taking a dump in it. Needless to say, she got more of a shock than you will when you discover the main character's identity.