Development – The Ponies

June 2022 Progress Update

Hey everypony! We know it’s been a bit quiet, but we’ve got some exciting progress to share with you. Over the past several months, we’ve been working on a variety of game features.

House Customization

Customization is a core feature to The Ponies, and that includes the houses you build. With a variety of options in the game’s build mode, you’ll be able to create all kinds of different homes for your ponies to live in. Will it be a cozy cabin? A huge mansion? Or even a dark and dumpy shack? It’s all up to you!

You can use a wall tool to drag walls wherever you desire them, and place floors and wall coverings similarly. With the game’s buy mode, you can purchase an assortment of furniture for your ponies. Don’t get too carried away though, otherwise your ponies may run out of funds…

Interactions

As standard with any life simulator, interacting with the world is important. You can control any pony within the household you’ve loaded up and command them to perform various interactions with the objects on their lot and with other ponies. Objects will satisfy specific motives based on its intended purpose. For example, directing your pony to sit down will boost their Comfort need. Or directing them to insult another pony may provide a Social motive boost to themself, but negatively impact the pony on the receiving end.

New Interface

The interface is just as important as the enjoyment of the game. After all, that is where you’ll be keeping track of everything. We’ve been working on a new interface that will closely reflect the energy of the game, and allow you to easily find things and have full control over the game.

We’d like to thank you all for your support this far in the development of The Ponies, and we hope you’ll stick around for the road ahead!

We’re Seeking C# Programmers

We’re actively looking to recruit programmers for our project! If you have a passion for ponies and life simulators, we strongly encourage you to apply!

Our game runs on the C# programming language, using the Unity3D engine. We’re seeking programmers who can help develop various aspects typical of a life simulator game, such as:

Character behaviors – personalities, ponies interact with each other and build relationships, react to their surroundings, have needs that affect mood and attitude, etc.
Player creativity tools – game modes which allow the player to build homes, customize terrains, create and customize pony characters, etc.
Interface – implementation of user interface among various areas of the game.

Our project utilizes tools to help organize tasks and cross-communicate with fellow teammates for increased productivity and to provide all teammates with an understanding of the heart of the project.

If interested, please contact us here on our website or reach out to our team through our Discord server. We will get back to you as soon as possible. We at The Ponies Team look forward to hear from you!

End of July Update – Contest Ended, PoneCrafter Released!

Object Creation Contest

Attention everyone! We have ended the Object Creation Contest and are no longer accepting submissions. In the coming weeks, we will be deciding the winners. Thank you all who participated! In the future, we plan to hold more community creation contests. Stick around!

PoneCrafter Released!

We finally have our first public (and open-source) release! However, it is not the actual game itself, which we know may garner some disappointment. But don’t worry – we’re still working on getting the game itself out as soon as possible. Now you are probably wondering, what is PoneCrafter? It’s the custom content creation/implementation tool used for The Ponies! It serves the purpose of allowing you the player to easily implement your own custom content into the game without the hassle of messing with any code. We decided to release it early as open-source for potential developers and advanced modders to study the source code to better understand how our object format works. You can take a look at this tool via GitHub: https://github.com/ThePonies/PoneCrafter.

Progress Update – November 2020

We’ve had a slow down in progress lately, primarily due to a good portion of our team members being busy outside the project. Don’t worry though, we’re still going strong and we’ve been working on some exciting things. In fact, we’re planning on doing a livestream once more on our YouTube channel (which you can check out here) sometime soon so we can show you what we’re currently developing.

We understand some frustration in our project’s community in that there’s been less frequent progress updates lately, with less work examples being shown. As mentioned prior, we’ve had a slowdown and therefore haven’t had the opportunity to showcase anything exciting. But we’re planning to get back in the groove of things and hopefully provide you with a lot of new stuff in the next couple months. We’re very passionate about this project, and we can see our followers are as well!

It takes time to make a good game, especially with a team as small as ours. But we’d rather take some time to get it right rather than rush it and make the game unenjoyable. We’re still planning on releasing an early alpha demo when we can. Remember that since this initial release will only be an alpha demo, it will be fairly preliminary with only the most basic of features. But we’ll let you know what we’re working on and what’s to be added next with each release… this is a surprisingly big game, so it’s going to take quite a bit of time before the whole thing is truly complete.

Progress Update – Ponies, Finally!

We know what you’re probably thinking: “when are they going to get pony models made?” Well, we’ve got them! Or at least a customizable Stallion anyways, which you can see here! There’s still a lot more work to be done – such as manes, tails, accessories, outfits, the whole works… and not to mention Mare models as well as models for each age group. But slowly, it’s all been coming together, and we’ll be sure to have more stuff to share soon. Our next big goal after these models is to get them implemented in the Create a Pony environment, as well as walking around in live mode, that way we can replace those pesky needy placeholder cubes!

Be sure to drop by our community Discord server for the latest: https://discord.gg/Vs5u8hp