misAdventures in Game Design! (Patreon)

Spookitty, the spooky kitty here! I saw some people commenting around about lack of updates (and the potential of this all being a scam, even!) Fear not! If this whole thing was a scam then I'm doing a pretty poor job at it!

So I've decided to show you a little of the hurdles I've had to figure out in this project- and others too! These things have driven me mad at times while trying to figure out how I'm going to attempt to gamify everything!

Today we'll be looking at world maps!

Fans of a certain tiny equine show may have noticed that the local horsie town is quite the unique and wonderful place. In fact, you could say it's so whimsical and fantastical that it's hard just to figure it out! Well, at least that's what I think when I tried to lay it all out.

I'm going to cheat just a little tiny bit here and show you some of the work I did for a similar horsie game that's currently in development: Pony Waifu Sim!

Some of you may not know this, but I do backgrounds and various other assets for them on top of working on this game as well. So I had to tackle figuring out their in-game map fairly early on, and it's still not finalized due to them always adding new locations!

Pony Waifu Sim MAP!

1: Tiny Houses!
One of the first things I did was sit down and doodle these cute little mini-houses of potential locations that they may want. Of course they decided that using these 1:1 wouldn't work because of the frontal view, but I just absolutely loved drawing these.
They're so little!

2. Concepts and Placements!
You can only draw little cutie houses so much before you realize you gotta figure out where they go! So first I had to figure out just exactly how did Ponytown look like? Looking through some other fan works in trying to figure out the layer out, as well as studying the source material was something I tried out to lay it down, but luckily the devs decided they didn't really care much for getting everything exactly in the right spot. Whew!

3) Figuring it out!
So they didn't want it 1:1 relatively but I still need to get something down to show them! Using the tiny houses as placeholders I tried to figure out the locations once more!

4) Unique things!
You might've noticed earlier but a certain Princess of Friendship's castle looks a li'l tiny bit different! That's because on the PWS project they really wanted a unique tree house/castle hybrid. So I tried my best to figure that out for them as well.

5) Final placeholders!

Now don't tell the players, but the PWS map is currently a placeholder I fancied up. Due to the fact that locations may not be finalized yet and there may be changes later I elected to make it look like a rough map until everything's sorted. Whew! What a trip!

Pony Tale Adventures, yay!
So now that we got that out of the way I can discuss the map for THIS game!

1) Pinkie's Joke Map
This might look familiar! This is the joke map Pinkie currently slips you in the game. Originally this was the idea I was going to use for the actual map, but I decided against it because it was so simple.

2) Let's Map this Map OUT!
As you can tell this map isn't finished. Originally I was going to draw out the entirety of the town as we've seen it in various places on the show! This was a very bad idea!
The show just doesn't really bother to be concise with locations and you rarely see the whole picture when it comes to the town, or even where the town's businesses are located. Unfortunately I got pretty deep into this before I realized how crazy it all was!

3) More is less, but till more!
I didn't really want to show some of the concept art for what the new map idea is or will be since it's still a bit away that players would get to see it, and I wanted it to stay a surprise, but I can give this quick doodle!

It really bothered me that I couldn't make something super complex that stayed true to the show, but looking around at carnival maps and brochures I decided that perhaps a simpler, more cutsie idea might work for this game! A certain official map from a certain comic book series was also a huge inspiration to me when I finally stumbled across it as well.

Keep on Truckin'!

Here's some finalized buildings from the doodle above that haven't been colored in yet. (Kinda looks like a coloring book, doesn't it?) With Silk Wright's help I've finally been able to figure out what we need and when we need it, so working more on this map is definitely something I'm looking forward to doing as soon as the next public release is out!

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On an unrelated, but still related note since it's about the game, the next scene has been finalized and finished! On top of all of that Silk Wright's also completely revised everything we have AND finished even more than that! She's hard at work on Pinkie's route right this second while ErrorStream and I finish up with what we have!

We'll have a more thorough update with what we've been doing soon. It's gonna be fun stuff!

ErrorStream and SilkWright have really breathed new life into this project, and I could absolutely not see myself being able to do any of this without them now. Before they showed up I spent more time trying to find people to work with than I did actually working on the project. I can only dream of what this game would be like if I had had them from the very beginning there to keep me in line, and do all the stuff I can't! They're the greatest!

Speaking of thanks, I can never thank all of you enough for so graciously donating to our tip jar to let us keep working on these free fan games. Without all of you we couldn't even think of being able to do all the things we'd like to do!

~spookitty OwO! ~ <3 <3 <3