So we’ve recently made some huge progress here at Hot Hooves Gaming, regarding the MLP Visual Novel Project, Code Named: Crystal Crisis Equestria. 

Remember that proof of concept that I keep bringing up? Well, I have finally started putting it together in the form of a Prologue to the visual novel that focuses on Twilight as the main character. Through this is a (relatively) short playthrough, I’ll be showing the mechanics that will be going into the game.

Music and sound design may take a little longer to get down - moreso, the sound effects because of the sheer volume of different sound effects that could be added to make a scene feel more lively. Not too sure if voice acting will be incorporated either, but that’s not really the main idea of this pre-alpha demo. It’s more to be able to show you some of the art, the writing style, and the way it will all be presented. 

I’m already excited to see these little snippets of story being put together in a cohesive way, and the background music gets me pumped up every time! 

DISCLAIMER: Hot Hooves Gaming is an indie game developer with no ties to Hasbro or any of its properties. We don’t own any of the characters featured therein, save for the individual Original Character (OC) who has been created for this non-profit fan-made game project.

Wow! April has come and gone in a big way, and I can hardly believe that May is already here. The best part of all this is that classes are over for me and my next semester doesn’t kick in for another few months. Things have been moving particular slowly this month due to class projects and exams, but I’m hoping that May, June and July will be big productive months for our My Little Pony Visual Novel project. Moving on into the update, let’s go! ^_^

Let’s put a number on the project’s progress bar:  8%

Script

We had mentioned that during March, we would be progressing with the story lines for Rarity, Rainbow Dash, and Applejack. In a rather unfortunate way, this has proven to be a very slow process due to the complexity of the first arc we began tackling: Rarity’s romance arc.

This is arguably going to be one of the longest set ups in the game, as far as the romance arcs are concerned. You see, the way that the romance arcs work is that they are fan fictions within the game that advance the plot in one way or another. I wasn’t satisfied with saying, “This is going to be the romance arc for _______. The focus of this story is going to be choosing correct dialogue options that will eventually win the heart of the fair pony by the end of the arc, and they’ll have hearts in their eyes the rest of the story from that point on.”

LAME. And without proper context. So it’s easy to make the main character a lovable dork who gains the interest of all the girls simply because he’s the new colt, or because he is the one who will save the world. Or maybe he’s the main character of the visual novel and he’s supposed to get the girl, right? Well... technically he is. It’s built into the plot that after spending time getting to know the mane six - hey it would make sense to feel impassioned about one of them right?

But what about the mane six? As far as I know, they are not ones to embrace feelings of love toward another colt - in the romantic sort of way. The build for the girls in the visual novel is going to be slow and subtle, to the point that it should feel more natural for the girls to accept that they’ve fallen for the main character who wasn’t just saying the right things all the time, but who was interacting with them constantly and helping them with internal and external issues. “Dusk” tags along with the girls so he can get to know them, and as things spring up as a result of the Crystal Crisis, the girls find that having Dusk around is a much bigger deal than simply having Twilight, or Applejack as their companion when they set off on a trip.

What does this mean for Rarity’s romance arc? I mean to say that it’s going to be much more in depth than a simple scenario where Dusk and Rarity chat for a while and eventually return to Ponyville having grown a little closer after spending quality time together. There’s going to be more to it than that. Mystery. Intrigue. A change of clothes to fit the situation and the genre for the specific situation. It’s something we’re hoping ya’ll will be able to enjoy as a side story within the main campaign of the game. 

It all culminates in the main campaign when Dusk has interacted with everyone and he has forged wonderful bonds that will sustain him for the rest of the story. Oops... at least... that’s what we want you to think anyway. >_o

Cliffnotes: Rarity’s story is still being scripted, so we’ll be working on that immediately! XD XD

Art

Art actually took a lot of attention during the month of April, thanks in part to some advice that we received from a follower on Tumblr. The gist of the conversation was spearheaded by the notion that we needed to get our artist and his respective works “out there”. Credibility, reputation, a following - these are very important factors that could make or break HHG if not handled sooner rather than later.

So during April, we released our Spring Heat Art Pack which featured six fan art pieces for MLP characters enjoying themselves in the warm Spring season. It was a great bit of practice for us, and a challenge to complete a couple of pictures a day during our Spring Break week.

We have also been working on sketch bases for characters who will be appearing in the visual novel including, Shinning Armor, Vinyl Scratch, and Octavia. 

Working on other pieces of fan art, some of which will soon be featured in a future post has also lead to a great deal of practice and increased morale among the group. Some healthy, petting to our collective ego to let us know that we are not the only ones who think that our art is improving as time goes on, and that in the context of the full visual novel - many will be able to appreciate the final product when it finally manifests. ^_^

Programming

Not too much time has gone into programming or planning anymore parts of the visual novel game. We’ve already done a fair bit of experimenting using Tyranno Builder as our visual novel engine. We feel that the prototype menus are a great start to something that could become a little more sophisticated in the future.

However, we are still focused on the scripting phase of our pre-planning process in order to better understand what the game will end up looking like at the end of the production process. By doing more research into the way that other visual novels present themselves, we’re hoping we can come up with an aesthetically pleasing way of presenting our game. When the script is finished, it will be much easier to build the game according to the dialogue and narrative content.

Our main focus for this month is going to be completing the romance arcs for all of our characters in the story. That is, to finish the stories beyond the half way point that we have set up for each of the Mane 6. Twilight, Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie have half of their arcs complete - next up will be the first half of Rarity, Rainbow Dash and Applejack. After ward, Dusk will take a full day to complete the rest of the romance arcs for all of the girls.

The main campaign will then continue with a very exciting revelation that will turn our main character’s world upside down. O_O

That’s going to wrap up this month’s Developer Update for the month of April (in May) XD. Class made things a bit slow for the month of April, but with May on the horizon, we hope to finish a lot of content in order to move the project ahead.

See ya’ll in the next update. And remember -

DISCLAIMER: Hot Hooves Gaming is an indie game developer with no ties to Hasbro or any of its properties. We don’t own any of the characters featured therein, save for the individual Original Character (OC) who has been created for this non-profit fan-made game project.

Hi everyone! Hot Hooves Gaming has been hard at work on our My Little Pony Visual Novel Project, and we’re here to leave our first big update that will catch everyone up to where the game stands as of the beginning of March. During the early phases of the game, we will be posting about progress in THREE specific categories. As we continue onto later stages of the project, more categories will be added to the Developer Update.

First let’s put a number on the project’s progress bar:  5%

Script

The script for the story is extremely important since it will include all of the events and dialogue that will make up the game from the beginning to end. An outline for the main campaign has already been complete. During the scripting process, the outline will be expanded upon and rewritten as the finer details of the story are written.

There are currently 8 chapters so far, and the maximum number of chapters is in constant flux as new scenarios are written along the way.

The script is being written as a text-based adventure. This is being done so that we can run through the story one line at a time, the same way that it would appear in the visual novel. The program has an auto-save system, and choices can be made the same way that they will be made in the game.

Art

Character portraits and CG scenes are going to be essential to the visual novel experience, and we want to make sure that most of this art is complete before diving into the visual novel maker.

Altogether, we have base portraits for 24 characters, with more on the way. Base portraits will feature a neutral expression, and the next step will involve adding small changes in the portrait such as folding ears and tail movements. Oh, and more expressions of course.

NOTE: Though there is room for experimentation, we are sticking to a 2D art form with movements that occur with changing images not animation (though that would be pretty cool).

Programming

The visual novel engine that we will working with is TyranoBuilder Visual Novel Studio (not sponsored).  We’ve finally started practicing with this VN engine and have encountered a great amount of success in building scenes and modifying the UI.

Modifying the UI is taking the form of a mild modding process where we extract the images from a specific template in the game and we modify the images to fit the theme of the My Little Pony series. Since the style sheets for these templates have already been made, the menus are fully functional and ready for play testing.

This is not to say that the game will not dabble with experiments to make as much of the game as original as possible. We have developed three versions of the title screen so far, and we are currently working on a fourth iteration to see how it works when it’s all put together.

The screenshot below is the latest version of the title screen (ver 3).

The My Little Pony Visual Novel Project is a narrative driven story-based game that is dependant on character development and story progression. There will be choices made throughout the story that could affect the results of certain conversations and potentially - the ending of the game. These features are still being discussed at HHG, and development will continue to focus on the “True Ending” route with little deviation from the canon of the story.

Hot Hooves Gaming will be returning at the end of the month with another update and perhaps some new information about the story and the characters that will be featured in the game. We look forward to bringing our audience an enthralling and fascinating story featuring the characters from MLP that we all know and love experiencing a story that expands their world in this alternate canon.

So i recently uploaded a video to my Twitter that showcased a series of images with alight differences to them. Altogether it shows the main character, Dusk asleep and slowly opening his eye.

Now that felt exciting. That smallest bit of movement made me feel like the character was alive for the briefest moment. I liked it, and I wish I could bring that type of movement to the MLP Visual Novel project.

It’s not that I can’t, but at this time, I’m not thinking in terms of full blown animated sequences. Movement that occurs over a few fully rendered slides is more what I’m going for atm. I recently tried to move a neck and head through a full motion (in sketch form) and managing the layers alone is an arduous task. I don’t know where to start and I fear that I’m doing it the “hard” way when there are much simpler techniques available to do the same thing with less effort.

It was a nice experiment, and while I may incorporate something as simple as the “eye blink” in the game, I’m not thinking in terms of a full animation. A transition over two or three pictures to show motion will do for now.

I’m slowly starting to figure out how to build a scene and introduce characters through TyranoBuilder. More updates coming soon, and thoughts for that demo/proof of concept gameplay will be available soon! Thanks for listening y'all. ^_^

So I’ve experienced a bit of a hiccup in an far as how much I have prepared for the game after reviewing the images I have actually drawn for the game.

… that sounded a little confusing.

Or maybe it’s not. You see I became inspired to work on this big visual novel project while I was drawing fan art for MLP which featured the title character of the game romancing each of the mane 6. It was about 4 images per character along with some extra stuff toward the end that totalled a collection of ~42 pictures! I was like, “This is great I shall incorporate all of these into the image gallery for a visual novel date sim game!” Not a bad idea right?

Except that after all was said and done, I have continued to draw and draw and draw and I finally started working on the character portraits for the game. Like these ones here:

And I realized, I’m starting to draw everything in a style that differs greatly (but not too greatly) from the art I was drawing before. I had developed a new look for the characters that I was comfortable with and that I was planning to use for the rest of the game. “OH NO… I don’t think I can use my old images anymore.”

Not only was the look different, but I was limiting the scope of the story so I could tie in these pre-made drawings which had been done with no real story in mind, just a sequence.

So I’ve scrapped them. 🙃🙃 And I’ve given myself the freedom to come up with new stories with images based on the events in the story instead of the other way around.

What does this mean for the ~42 unreleased art pieces? Well I have to properly credit each one individually, which won’t be easy… But when that’s done I’ll be releasing them in some form or another as… concept art. Nothing reflective of the way Dusk and the mane 6 will interact in the game, bit it’s pretty darn close. In the end, it was practice.

Bit of a shame, but if I can get the CG scenes to be as good as the practice set (or better) then y'all can already tell the look that I’m going for in the long run.

In short, I have gone from ~42 CG images ready for the game… to 0.

In an effort to give the MLPVN it’s own visual flare, I’ve been working on original designs for the Menu and HUD that appear in the game. By making custom images that replace the ones pre-made for TyranoBuilder, I’m able to give everything a touch of ponies to make things more funny and colorful.

I’ve already made prototypes for the Message Box and Menu as seen below. All of the buttons are missing though.

Next I hope to add something to the Data Save and Data Load screens. Some cutie marks, parasprites, a different font and look. Imagine if the “NO DATA” box had a picture of that pony meme with the “idk” look on its face? Or Sweetie Bell doing that ‘I’m so bored" crawl on the ground. It would be so fitting, ya know?