Ponykart Officially Dead

Ponykart

(GitHub mirror) (Another one)

 Much to the surprise of absolutely no-one, a post released yesterday by Hoppip states that the once incredibly-promising Ponykart project is now completely dead, as most of the team members went on to become professional programmers/game developers and no longer had any time for fangames. It's quite a shame, yes, but at least the source code is still freely available, so anybody with some C# experience can pick up and resume where the developers left off (as some anon on /mlp/ is currently attempting to do, although I kind of doubt he'll get very far).

The original post can be found at http://ponykart.net/we-ded/.

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

 

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.

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 Magic

Project Magic

(Hotfix) (Windows XP build) (Source Code)

 Contrary to the expectations of some people, /mlp/'s series of Game Dev threads have been pretty productive, although its output so far has mainly been limited to Flash puppets and animation tests. Project Magic is the second playable game to come out of those threads, a clone of Project Diva that is best played with an Xbox 360 controller for some reason. I actually haven't played it yet myself due to the relatively large filesize (mainly due to its including 1080p music videos), but I'm sure that at least some of you will enjoy this for the time being.

Also, if you don't install the hotfix the game will crash if you press any button on the keyboard. Pretty sweet, eh?

Crazy Pony is Back from the Dead

Crazy Pony

(Bitbucket repo)

  As Crazy Pony went for months without an update, people began to think that the project had died; this theory was all but confirmed when the website went offline. However, what nobody noticed was that the website came back online in April, and without further ado its Bitbucket repo began to show signs of life. Since then a brand-new release of the game has came out in July, and by compiling the source code one can find wonderful new features like Linux support. Multiplayer support is probably still a ways off, unfortunately, but in the meantime one can easily help by making new levels in Inkscape. Maybe I should contribute to this project a little myself, eh?

 Speaking of level design, we have another post related to that subject coming up later on today. Stay tuned!

Fallout:Equestria RPG

Fallout:Equestria RPG

 In the vast Brony fandom there are many fanfics, but none of them are as influential as Fallout:Equestria (unless one counts the abominaton that is Cupcakes). Given that it was based off of a video game, it was only a matter of time before somepony began the herculean effort of adapting it into its own game. For quite some time now Plaristote has been working on his game, and from the website it appears that he has made surprisingly good progress when you consider that he's doing most of the work by himself. He's even making an editor for the game, so adapting your favourite Fo:E fanfics such as Project Horizons and Pink Eyes should be fairly easy.

 Since the game is being made by one man, development has been relatively slow when compared to several other fangames. According to the recruitment page he could use a C++ programmer, some 3D modelers and an interface designer. If you feel like applying for a position, you can do so via their form.

Want some screenshots and a trailer? Of course, you could always compile it yourself and take a look at the actual game, but looking below the break is much easier.

A trailer from October. Not as pretty as how the game currently looks (see below), but it gets the general idea across.

A fairly recent terrain test (minus the interface and whatnot).

The Pipbuck's quest manager.

The level designer as it looked back in October.

The worldmap editor.

Interested in helping out with the project? Like I said above, check out their Recruitment page and fill out the form.

MLP: Online Source Code

MLP: Online Source Code

  After MLP:Online was shut down last year most of us expected the developers to give up on fangame development altogether or move to commercial development, but apparently they've decided to make another fangame codenamed Project Cygnus. Unfortunately we don't know much about it other than the fact that it is an action game, but in the meantime they have decided to ease the weight by releasing MLP:Online's source code (stripped of all resources). They are no longer supporting it, but if you want to use it for your own fangame: go ahead! It should work quite well for any RPGs that you plan on making, and if you tinker around with it a bit you'll probably be able to compile your game for Mac OS X and Linux too.

What are you waiting for? Grab the source code from Bitbucket, and it'd probably be a good idea to pick up the tools as well.

Trailer: Rotor

 We don't see too many 3D pony fangames, but Oddwarg (the man behind Corruption, overall winner of the 2012 My Little Game Jam) has decided to release the trailer for a game he's been working on a week before he sets off to sail the sea in his yellow submarine, which is apparently his idea of a vacation. Aside from Rainbow Dash's nice animations the game looks pretty bland, but since the code is apparently lying around somewhere on the internet somebody could probably fix it up while Oddwarg mucks about in the sea of green.

 As to what platforms the game runs on...I have no idea. Oddwarg didn't specify where on the internet he keeps the source code (although I suspect that it's probably on GitHub), but he did say that it was released under the MIT license which means that you're free to modify the game yourself and port it without asking him. In my humble opinion fangames would be much safer from Cease & Desist notifications if they were all open source, but apparently some folks really don't like it when others can read their messy code...

Budding Friendship Hiatus + Source Code Release

Budding Friendships (Website)

(Source Code)

 While listening to Budding Friendships' soundtrack it suddenly occurred to me that we hadn't heard from the developers since October, so I decided to look at their website. Turns out that their dev team kicked the bucket a couple days ago, but their programmer was nice enough to actually release the source code on GitHub before they made the announcement. If anypony wants to contribute to the program they most certainly can, although I somehow doubt that it will get much further.

 Anyhow, if you really want to you can compile and play the game for yourself over at the GitHub project page. As of now the project is Windows-only and in an incomplete state (obviously), but somepony might be able to port the game to OS X or Linux if they wanted. Come to think of it that would be an excellent way of attracting more contributors...

Magic Hexagon

Magic Hexagon

 As can be gathered from the game's announcement on Tumblr, Magic Hexagon is basically an open source clone of Super Hexagon with pony cutie marks, placing it under the "barely pony related" category. There's not really much to offer for feedback here without either essentially reviewing the original or commenting on the developer's taste in libraries/programming languages, although it would be nice to have some more variety when it comes to songs (the creator is looking for a musician though, so that might be resolved in the near future), along with pre-compiled OS X and Linux binaries in the near future.

 In case you're interested in contributing to the project or compiling it yourself, you can check out Magic Hexagon's GitHub repo at https://github.com/meh2481/magichexagon.