A long time ago, in the magical land of Byuu's Board, there were two complete asshats. The expert of the two got interested in My Little Pony, and asked questions to the hanger-on, who relished the chance to be the one to infodump for a change.

Posted by Screwtape

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If earth ponies control the food supply, I'd say that's a reasonable balance of power.

Man, now I want to see an RTS game based on MLP lore.

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The hanger-on's best bud, who had just been convinced that not all fangames are necessarily bad, pushed him to make the expert's idea a reality and become famous all over the fandom.



Spurred on by the expert's intense brainstorming, and his own desire to learn how to write more genres of games, the hanger-on started programming...



...and got talked into making this thread. I've got ideas up the kazoo from Screwtape and Kiyoshi, but nothing really solid yet, and am the only programmer and artist so far.

Let's make this bullshit a reality. I'll post summaries of whatever is not on Byuu's board later on. Mostly because I'm running out of time for today.

For now, here's a quick link to my tumblr, pre-filtered to the relevant items, and my notes. Which includes Screwy's material for some reason.

Pony on, brothers.

Posted by Kiyoshi

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You did not note my suggestions?

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You didn't note my "I'll post whatever's not on Byuu's later"?

Posted by GreyMaria

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That said... what the fuck is this?

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It's a realtime strategy game with marshmallow troops.

Obviously.



The problem with Kiyoshi's suggestions (et al) is sorting through the utter mess that is my IRC logfile to produce readable summaries. So that'll take a bit, depending on how much is added during that time.



For now, here's something I've been working on. The walkcycle needs some polishing, but it's not half bad for a first attempt by me.

← Animated PNG, for lack of GIF tools. If your browser doesn't support those, I suggest you come to terms with it™.

Oh yeah that's one suggestion you gave me yesterday on IRC. Let me summarize that for the audience.

Right now, the game is fully 2D. The map is drawn as pixel art, and so are the sprites. Not unlike in Tiberian Dawn (C&C1). Now, TibSun added voxel-based vehicles, but kept the rest as sprites, and TibWars switched to full 3D. The thing is, in a full 3D environment, you get free zoom and rotate.

What knuck suggested is basically as he just said. Ragnarok-style 2D sprites in a 3D world. Because everypony seems to like those sprites I made.

The thing is, it seems to me that it's easier to get graphics matching the show's style if you stick to sprites (as you can see from the recent Pony Kart update video), and it's in general easier to work with. Another thing, it'd be hell to get rectangular selection working in a 3D space like that.

So you can understand I'm... apprehensive about it.

APNG is a Mozilla invention, so that doesn't surprise me.

I tried to go by an in-show walk cycle, frameskipping through the show's intro sequence -- the part where Twilight gets out of her balloon and walks past Granny and Mac, with the train. If anybody thinks he can make it better, feel free to take bodyshoppe.png and edit it.

How to keep things show-accurately friendly with regards to unit loss

Each pony introduced on the map is given a random color scheme. Because that's how little ponies roll. This makes individual units recognizable beyond task-specific indicators, and helps solve the problem of death in a MLP game.

When you train a new unit of any kind, this takes funds and time. When a given unit is lost, you have to train a replacement, which takes funds and time, and then even more time to get the new one where the old one was, if not further.

Because units in this game are individually recognizable, we can kill two birds with one stone: defeated units disappear from the map, as usual, but as long as the requisite building is available, they automatically respawn at the base with full health, which has a funds and time cost not unlike when they were first trained. This serves to automate part of the gameplay, and it lets you feel some relief for the individual units because everything's all right in the end.

Of course, if you don't have the requisite building, they won't respawn. But the fact that they'd do so otherwise has its implications. They're not dead, they just went home or something.

Lunaria suggested earlier today that they should instead respawn at a hospital. A reasonable idea, but I'm thinking maybe having a hospital merely halves the respawn time or something.

Not that it matters much, because all that is only design and not a single part of that is actually coded yet.

Updated rtslab.txt to have a possible list of units and buildings. It could be bigger, and is tailored to a C&C playstyle (as opposed to Craft), but here's a quick reproduction in HTML:

Name	Type	Description
Scout	Earth	Fast runner, weak attack. Cheap.
Farmer	Earth	Turns fields to funds, like a Harvester.
Striker	Pegasus
Bomber	Pegasus	Drops junk to do damage. Has to return to base to reload.
Battlemage	Unicorn
Medic	Unicorn	Heals other units.
Contractor	Earth	Can build a Farm. Doing so removes the contractor from play.
Farm	Building	Produces Earth units and unlocks the Library and Cloud Castle. Comes with a free Farmer.
Cloud Castle	Building	Produces Pegasus units.
Library	Building	Produces Unicorn units and unlocks the Workshop.
Workshop	Building	Produces vehicles and unlocks the Contractor and Farmer.
Temple	Building	Unlocks Celestia's Favor and the Hospital.
Hospital	Building	Reduces respawn time.
Apple Ballista	Vehicle	Slow to move, strong attack.
Rainbow Dash	Pegasus	Tougher striker, unlocks Atomic Rainboom.
Derpy	Pegasus	Bomber with higher damage and carrying capacity.

Which part of "a possible list that could be bigger" did you not understand?

In the first C&C GDI mission, and I think Nod as well, you start with a preset group of units and no Mobile Construction Vehicle. You never get an MCV in those missions, but you do get scripted reinforcements. Several times, in fact. And it's not just the first missions that work like this.

Do you get the point?

Well, that's assuming there's gonna be hero units. The answer's simple: you don't. Easiest way to handle them is by starting out with 'em, maybe not even giving you a base.

And now the reason I wanted to post for:

Not a mock-up, as the window frame is meant to imply.

Also, please cast your eyes a bit further to the left. I intend to use my current avatar as the game's icon.
Yes/No/Suggestion? _

That's what suggestions are for! But seriously...

...does this answer your question?

That's a shop, btw, due to a lack of .ico editor.


Edit: bodyshoppe.png has been extended. Here's an APNG of the new stuff: