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Hi, all!
In order to get the voice actors for case 1 immediately to work, we all agreed that a fun project to do might be to do a little promo video to feature the voice actors that you’ll be hearing from in the case. I’m happy to report that it’s now done, so here it is for you to enjoy:
We hope to have more from you soon, but we hope this might tide you over until then!
Hello, everypony!
First off, I’d like to announce that we now have a forum! We’ve already had a few people ask us for this, so we figured, why not? If you’d like to chat with us or other fans about MLI, about MLP:FiM, or just about anything in general, drop on by! Everypony welcome! 
But that’s not what you’re primarily here for, is it? You’re all here because you’re wondering about the team that’s now been assembled! Well, wonder no longer. I’ve already sent invitations to everyone who’s been selected to join the team, so if you haven’t yet received an invitation, unfortunately, that means that you weren’t selected for this recruitment cycle. Before I give big shout-outs to our new team members, however, I’d first like to say a few words to those who weren’t selected. As I said before, please, please don’t take it personally – all of you are very talented, and this recruitment was filled with many, many tough decisions. You have my hearty encouragement, if you weren’t selected this time around, absolutely not to give up, as I have no doubt that all of you will be able to find ample opportunity wherever you go in life.
That said, here are the new members of our team. I encourage everyone to give them all a big super duper Pinkie Pie welcome!
HallowGazer – Dialog Character Artist
WarpOut – Field Character Artist
PonyArtist – Background & Prop Artist
Rautakoura – Cutscene Artist
Trot Pilgrim – Composer
PrincessRil – Twilight Sparkle
LoveKiku – Rarity, Sweetie Belle
BreeFaith – Pinkie Pie, Apple Bloom
DivinexRose – Rainbow Dash
TehJadeh – Scootaloo
Flootershai – The Mayor
ThatCanadianDude – Rover
HoodedYellowPony – Fido, Spot
You can find out more about all of them by visiting our team page. I’m sure you’ll be hearing or seeing from them soon!
…Well, technically speaking they’ve been closed for about a day now and I’m only just now posting about it, but who’s counting?
I’d just like to say one thing to everyone who’s applied so far: wow. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I don’t think I was remotely expecting a turnout this large. To give a brief summary, over the course of the past month, we’ve received applications from ninety unique individuals, and have received over 360 MB of material that applicants have provided for us to look through or listen to. Those are… pretty big numbers, let me tell you.
Unfortunately, that also means that we have a rather larger number of applicants than there are positions, which means that the next step is the unfortunately necessary process of identifying those candidates who’d be a good fit for Equestrian Dreamers. That’ll be happening over the course of this week. Before decisions are made, though, I just wanted to make one thing clear in advance: those who aren’t selected should categorically not take that as an indication or a suggestion that their work isn’t good enough or anything like that. There are a lot of tough decisions in here, and a good portion of the decision rests not so much on absolute quality but rather appropriateness – i.e., how much the style of what applicants have presented matches that which has been pictured for MLI. Every and every one of you who submitted something is awesome, and I have no doubt that those who aren’t picked will certainly find many other opportunities down the road. There’s a lot of awesome stuff in here.
I also additionally have to apologize for having not sent individual responses to everyone who sent in applications – I would’ve liked to, but given the sheer number of applications we’ve gotten, that just wasn’t feasible. I will hopefully be getting around to responding to people who requested a response about their performance, though, once final decisions are made regarding recruitment. Sincere apologies to those who specifically asked for one and haven’t yet received one; I feel quite bad about having not answered them to date.
Thanks again to everyone for your amazing support thus far. We’ll have more info for you very soon.
Ahoy!
First, a brief reminder that the deadline for applying for a position in My Little Investigations is December 31 at 11:59 PM PST. We’ll be making final decisions on positions after that time, so if you’re at all interested in applying (and we heartily do encourage you to do so), please make sure you’ve emailed your application recruitment@equestriandreamers.com by that time.
That aside, you might be wondering what we’re doing while we’re waiting for applications to come in! Well, I can assure you that one of the things we’re not doing is sitting on our thumbs. We’re hard at work getting everything ready for when the recruits come on board, and I’m finally ready to announce one of those items: My Little Investigations is being ported to Java! (Java using the 2D game library Slick, to be exact.) It had previously been written in C# using XNA, but after talking to a very helpful lady named dawnmew (who has since joined the team), I became convinced that this was definitely a good direction for the game and that it was something that should occur sooner rather than later, so it’s something that we’ve been working on during the month of December.
What does this mean for you? Well, if you’re on a Windows machine, it means that the status quo has been maintained – you were able to play the game before, and you’ll still be able to play it now as well. If you’re on a Mac or Linux machine, then you’re in luck, as this means that you’ll be able to play My Little Investigations after all! I had previously said that this wouldn’t be possible since the game was coded in XNA, but this port will change that, and thanks in large part to the help I’ve received from dawnmew to that end, it’s coming along very nicely. We’re just about back up at this point to the level of functionality that we had when the game was coded in XNA.
Exciting stuff, a day late for Christmas, but still in time for the holiday season. 
Thanks to everypony for their support thus far!
By the way, on a completely random note, I neglected to post this when it first went live, so I wanted to do so now – I was interviewed by the site Jay is Games a while back about My Little Investigations. If you’re interested to have a read, you can find the interview at the bottom of the page here:
http://www.jayisgames.com/archives/2011/12/link_dump_friday_244.php
Hello, all!
Couple of things to cover today. First up is an update on the recruitment for My Little Investigations. We’ve gotten a great turnout so far, so thanks so much to everyone who’s already sent in an application! That said, however, one area in particular that could really use more applications is the area of visual art – we’ve only got one application thus far for each of the dialog character artist, field character artist, and background & prop artist positions, and no applications for the cutscene artist position. I know that there’s a ton of artistic talent out there, having waded through countless amazing works of art in Equestria Daily’s Drawfriends, so I’d just like to make sure people understand that animation experience is not a requirement for any of the positions. If you have any artistic talent, I’d heartily encourage you to apply – you have nothing to lose at all! The more applications we get, the better a team we can put together, so don’t be shy!
We also definitely could use some more female voice actor applications, as well – we’ve got a number of great applications for the female roles already, but as above, the final result will be that much better the more people there are who apply.
And if you have any friends whom you know might be interested, definitely let them know, too!
Second, Equestrian Dreamers now has its own YouTube channel! You can find that right here. New videos regarding My Little Investigations will all get posted there, so if you want My Little Investigation updates without having to see my personal pony videos that are posted to my personal YouTube channel, this is for you! (I’ll still post new My Little Investigations videos to my YouTube channel as well, though, for those who are fine with the status quo.)
That’s all for now!
Welcome, one and all, to the grand opening of the new website for My Little Investigations, and for the newly christened development group for the game, Equestrian Dreamers! The game was starting to outgrow its developer blog, so we figured that giving it its own website was the obvious next step.
We don’t just have a website and a new name, though – we’re also finally recruiting people who want to work on the project! It’s always better to show rather than tell, though, so head on over to the recruitment section of our website for more information, if you’re interested. We’re looking for visual artists, composers, and voice actors at the moment. If any of that sounds up your alley, have a look! The current recruitment call will accept applications until the end of December, at which point final decisions will be made.
We’ll have plenty more information on MLI to come in the weeks ahead, so we hope you’re as excited as we are for the future of the project!
Bada bing, bada boom, there’s a video in the room!
…Or so Zecora might say, if she were here, and in a spunky mood.
Here you go:
This is the last engine demo video, so just having this up marks quite a milestone! We’ll have more information later regarding the next step for My Little Investigations, but for now, enjoy!
So, a bit of an update for the folks following this project. In a previous post, I mentioned that there were three gameplay elements still to be implemented that were unique to My Little Investigations. The second of those three has been in progress, but we now see why I wanted to managed expectations: after wrangling both with the logistics and with the core motivation for this gameplay feature, and after having discussed the matter with ZeusAssassin, I’ve decided that the best course of action is just to can it. The reason for this is just that it was difficult to see how it could be structured in an organized yet efficient manner, and that I fundamentally felt that it wasn’t going to materially improve the gameplay experience for the player.
I’m a bit disappointed, since at its initial inception this feature seemed like an improvement, but the more I implemented it, the more I got the sense for why Ace Attorney never bothered with it. Don’t worry, though – I can assure you that the project definitely is better off and more streamlined without it, and that the remaining element still to be implemented is most certainly rock-solid in my mind and will definitely make the final cut. So we’ll still have both that and the partner system to give this game its own personal flair.
More details after the break for those interested.
As the Joker might say, “And here… we… go.”
The next engine demo is up, this time demonstrating – drumroll please – partners! This is something that people have been asking about for quite some time, so I’m happy to finally be able to talk about it. Hopefully people like it. It would suck if people didn’t. 
Anyway, without further ado, I’ll let the video do the rest of the talking:
So!
I haven’t been posting here for a while. This was for a variety of reasons, and I first want to assure people that one of those reasons is most assuredly not that I’m getting bored or tired of this project. I was away for a weekend, then I had company over for a week, and I obviously wouldn’t have been a very good host to work on a project while they were here, and then I had some long days at work – I’m a software engineer, so naturally a long day of programming at work will sometimes make me not want to do more programming when I come home. And then I had more company over last weekend too.
That said, all of that has now passed, and the project is now well underway again. Which brings me to another reason why I haven’t made any posts yet like usual: the territory we’re now getting into for this game. The gameplay aspects of this game that are borrowed from Ace Attorney Investigations (or other sources) are now all implemented. Boom. Done. But that doesn’t mean that the gameplay itself is completely implemented, on account of the fact that we also have some brand new gameplay elements specifically designed for this game (three, to be exact) that ZeusAssassin and I have been cooking up that have still yet to be implemented.
Why is this a reason why no posts have been made? Well, the reason there is basically just expectation control – since the designs of these gameplay features are still potentially in flux, I don’t want to post screenshots or something similar and then find out that I’ll need to change them. Promising something that you don’t deliver is way worse than not promising something. So I’ve been holding these closer to the chest than previous gameplay features I’ve been implementing.
That said, however, one of those three gameplay features is well underway now, and hopefully should be ready in a few days’ time. Watch this space!