Category: Uncategorized

Hello everypony! We hope everyone has been doing well!

 

We know it’s been a while since we had an update. This announcement will be a bit of a tough one, but we want to emphasize the project is NOT cancelled. We are however in a hiatus period as we aren’t moving quite at a fast enough pace to really meet our demo goal this year. A lot of the team has been impacted simultaneously by things like family deaths, personal health issues, etc. and currently we only have a tiny handful of folks working on a few things here and there. We found it necessary in this case to put the project in a hiatus status. We are still working on a few things but choosing right now to go at a slower pace for the sake of the team so everyone can tend to personal matters and not feel too much pressure to chug away on the game. 

 

We do plan to make another announcement soon showcasing what we have worked on over the summer, and give a little more info about our new demo release plans. We really truly appreciate your patience and your support for this project! It’s a dream for all of us on the team to be able to work on such an amazing game, and we know it can be frustrating when things don’t go to plan and things get postponed. We know you’ve been waiting patiently and have supported us every step of the way and honestly we couldn’t wish to be part of any other community!

 

Again we do plan to share some stuff we’ve worked on over the summer soon and share a little bit of an updated roadmap as to what our next plans are. We will be going at a more relaxed pace for the time being so everyone on the team can have a chance to take care of themselves during this time. Thank you again for all your support!! It means the world to us on the team!

Little update, we are still alive! We know it’s been a while since we last shared an update but we have been making good progress towards our alpha demo milestone! We’ve been working on a bit of scene building including some new models for different environmental props as well as chipping away on some very complex but necessary code to power how ponies will choose actions autonomously and how it affects their needs. Additionally we’re just about finished with the mechanics for the careers system and we’ll be working on a new iteration of the Build and Buy modes including a nice small but varied catalog of objects you can buy for your ponies! We hope to share much more soon and give a bit bigger of an update when we’re closer to release. Thank you all again for your support of the project!

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!