Author: aeast667

Hey all! We know it’s been quite a while since you heard from us on our website, but we have a few exciting things to share!

 

We’ve been hard at work this year, chugging away at a variety of components that make up this game. From core foundations, to gameplay features, and the creation of artwork, 3D models and environmental scenes – we’ve been inching ever closer to the alpha demo release! Here’s a breakdown of some specific things we’ve been developing and successfully implementing this year:

 

• Relationships system, allowing ponies to keep a score on how they feel towards each other with the ability to become friends, enemies, etc.
• Careers gameplay – ponies can get jobs, earn bits and level up in their career by building skills and relationships with ponies!
• Core interactions system with variables allowing unique or context-based interactions to become available based on pony personality, relationship scores, or object states.
• Motives “needs” fulfillment and decay, with variable rates that depend on a pony’s personality, object quality, and pony race.
• A unique feature where specific objects can wear down over time – we’ll share more on this in the future!
• A brand new theme song to better reflect the game, with implementation of in-game radio tracks that your ponies can listen or dance to!
• A procedural-generation wall tool that allows for quick, snappy wall building along grid lines adaptive to unique configurations, heights, etc.
• A lot of UI implementation!

 

There’s still a little ways to go – for instance, we are almost there with the pony models, just awaiting some finishing touches and of course plenty of animations! Our modeling and animation team has been working very hard on their own time to complete these, so it takes a little longer than usual compared to most other game development projects (especially since overall, this project is a hobby for us on the team!). We hope to actually have some visual stuff to share before long, and have an awesome alpha demo that you can play!

 

Our release plan

Just to give a little clarity now that we’ve progressed much further on how we plan to do releases, we plan to release milestone builds over the course of development until the final release of the game. This of course will start with the official “Alpha Preview” release, as we are calling it currently. Then once we have successfully implemented more core features (for instance, a full-fledged neighborhood view with multi-lot functionality which will not yet be a part of the Alpha Preview release plus other additional features), then that would be considered the next development milestone ready for another release. Generally this would look something like “Alpha Preview 1”, “Alpha Preview 2”, “Beta Preview 1”, “Beta Preview 2”, and so on. It of course is all subject to change, but this looks to be the best type of release schedule for our project. Unfortunately specific dates are really hard to determine, on account of the nature of this being a hobby project which is generally developed on each team member’s free time, but we hope soon we’ll have a more exact timeframe on when this alpha demo will release! (We’ve honestly even considered just doing shadow drops, with how the schedule looks!).

 

We at the Pixel Codex team want to thank you all for your patience and your support! This project is a dream for us on the team and we are so excited to share more soon and deliver something that you can play and experience yourself! Remember to keep an eye out here for more updates, and you can follow us on social media @theponiesgame for more frequent, smaller progress updates too!

 

Team Recruitment

We are also looking to expand the team in a few areas, such as:

• 3D Modeling – Objects, Foliage, Environmental Objects, Pony Appearance (manes and tails, etc.)
• 2D Texturing – Walls, Floors, Terrains, etc.
• VFX Artists – Working with Unity’s VFX graph or Shadergraph
• 2D Artists – Concept art, UI art, Icons, etc.
• SFX/Music – Creating UI sounds, in-game OST, music events, ambience

Feel free to use the contact form on the website, or for a quicker response, join our Discord here and drop by the #recruitment channel: https://discord.gg/GTz5FY3k5C

Hey, everypony! We know it’s been a quiet year so far, but we’d like to start out by saying we’ve been hard at work on the game still, and although it’s been slow, we’re hopeful to get something playable out soon!

 

We now have 3D modeling positions open again on the project, and we’re looking for any folks interested in joining our team! This would mainly involve creating a variety of objects that ponies would interact with. Experience with animation and the Unity engine is a big plus! If you’re interested, we highly encourage you to reach out to us via Discord or our online contact form.

 

Progress Update

We hope to get some exciting new stuff ready very soon to show you all! We appreciate your patience, and wanted to give you a small update on our progress on the game. It’s quite a big thing to explain, but basically during the previous couple years, we had hit a bit of a slowdown in terms of development. The existing code, although functional, was quite messy and made it tricky to proceed with implementing bigger features – so we essentially got stuck in a limbo. This made it tricky for newer developers to come on and understand our code, as a lot of dependencies were in place that tied in with several game features. We realized this was unoptimized, and very confusing to work with if you didn’t already understand the code structure, so we went forward with doing a development reset of sorts.

 

This does not affect the gameplay design, however. All planned features from before are still planned for the game. The art style will also remain the same (albeit with a few updates we think you’ll like!), and everything about the game itself remains the same. The only major changes are “under the hood” with how the code itself is written and structured. Tackling this had postponed our original demo plans and set the time frame a bit further out than we originally intended, but now we have a much better code structure that has made it much easier to develop more features of the game. This will allow us to move forward in creating a fun and exciting game to share with you all, and will even allow us to include more features for the alpha demo than we originally planned for! We’ll keep you all posted on future updates, and we encourage you to join our Discord server to get the latest news on the game’s development. Again, we’d like to thank you all for your patience, and for being such an amazing community. We hope to have something playable for you soon!

Hey all! It’s been a while since we’ve posted anything, and we apologize for keeping you all waiting for so long. We know you’re really excited for this project and we appreciate all your support thus far! We’ve recently gotten back into the groove with some small updates, including a concept art live stream on our YouTube channel. In case you missed it, or would like to watch it again, you can view it once more here: https://youtu.be/I9JSBY0Ko0w

 

We’re making a lot of progress and we’re hopeful that 2024 will be a productive year for the project. We’re aiming for an alpha demo release this year, so keep your eyes peeled for new updates!

Spring is here, and we’re once again looking to expand our team with talented individuals! To be more specific, we’re especially looking for C# programmers experienced with scripting behaviors. Some responsibilities would include:

• Scripting various pony interactions
• Scripting object interactions and behaviors
• Creating systems that hold various elements of character data

Knowledge about the inner mechanics of life simulators, as well as experience with object-oriented programming is preferred!

Please apply using our contact form, or alternatively you can reach out to us on our Discord server, following the links below:

 

The Ponies Team Contact Form

The Ponies Community Discord