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