Backfilling a bit of content I’ve been wanting to write up for a while…

I always have a bunch of game ideas kicking around in my head, but the small projects (like making this post) always seem to get pushed aside for whatever big thing I’m working on. Flash backward to last summer when I heard about a local themed game jam on a weekend I had open. The theme was ponies.

Being something of a fan and generally finding the show eminently positive and upbeat, I was intrigued. The show follows the adventures of 6 mane characters working together on various adventures while learning how to be better friends. Thinking on the cooperation theme, I remembered a concept of simultaneously controlling multiple characters with different abilities to accomplish a common goal. The high-level mechanic was a perfect fit, I just needed to find a “gamey” goal. Surveying the source material, I found the “Swarm of the Century” episode in which Ponyville is attacked by a Biblical swarm of magical insects (“parasprites”) that eat everything in site- including the town. The ponies had to work together to herd them back into the Everfree Forest from whence they came.

I love it when the mechanics and the flavor of a game mesh together and this was a perfect “click.” (Especially given the constraint of a pre-defined setting.) Anyway, the game…

It’s an infinite series of levels with increasingly more numerous and hungry parasprites. Get them all back to the Everfree Forest in the upper-right while distracting them from eating too many buildings. Left-click to select a pony, right click to move, other (middle) click to use the ability. I like the way it turned out, but remember that it was only a 3-day project so it’s rough. There are in-game instructions, but read “How To Play.txt” if you get stuck.

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You’re still here! Well, here’s some more development tidbits:

*Like any good game jam, this was the result of an insane and sleep-deprived weekend. It was also a blast.

*I’m often looking to insert a new technical challenge into my small projects. For this one I decided to implement my own pathfinding algorithms. It works pretty well although missed out on a bit of polish due to time constraints.

*It was relatively easy to figure out the abilities of 5 of the characters. Rarity was not easy. I thought of a series of mediocre ideas until I finally stepped back and realized that the difficulty in figuring out what she could do was the answer. This was one of those “ah-ha!” moments where you know it’s right as soon as you think of it and wonder why you didn’t see it earlier. It also resulted in one of the best jokes in the game.

*I generally like to create and build my own worlds. This is the only personal project I can think of where I was specifically working in an established universe. It forced a different way of thinking where I had to start with the “world flavor” and find the game mechanics that would fit. It was a nice change.

*This was written in C++ and was my excuse to update to version 2.0 of the wonderful SFML media library. If you’re looking for a quick multi-platform, multi-language library to handle a bunch of low-level stuff you might need for a 2D game, check it out.