Case Creator

Hey all – a number of people have requested it, so I’ve uploaded the current state of the case creator to the MLI GitHub page. You can find that change here:

https://github.com/GabuEx/my-little-investigations/commit/0689f2ca3e808ba39864f024280abd2e77f8ad20

It’s written in Qt, which you’ll need to compile it. It’s in a very unfinished state, and has only ever been tested on my computer, so I can’t make any promises about what anyone else’s experience will be like should they try to work with it. But, should you want to have a look at it, here it is.

If anyone wants to do anything with it or with the case resources in the previous post, you’re more than welcome – no need to ask permission or anything like that.

Project Cancellation

Hey, everyone.

I’m sure this won’t catch many people by surprise at this point, but we still want to make it official, so – it’s with a heavy heart that I confirm that My Little Investigations is, indeed, canceled. There were a number of factors leading up to this, but the biggest was team turnover in positions we were unable to completely fill, causing development in other areas to slow to a standstill. We tried multiple times to get it going again, but ultimately had to conclude that it just wasn’t happening. I’m really sorry to everyone who was looking forward to the second case and beyond – trust me, we were too.

In case anyone would like to do anything with what has been made to date, we’ve bundled up all the assets for case 2 into a single zip file, which you can find here. If anyone wants to pick up where we left off or do something else with the assets, you’re welcome to.

Sorry that it had to end this way. We really tried to get case 2 across the finish line, but it was not to be. 🙁

Recruitment Update – November 2017

Hello everyone!

It has been a while, but we’d like to announce the members of our team!

Rainbow Dash VA – Kiles-The-Geek
Pinkie Pie VA – Adversaria
Uncle Orange VA – Pretzleman718
Masquerade VA – Icyfire888
Fluttershy VA – Adversaria
Animator – age3rcm

Once more, we have an open position ready to fill here on our team. Please see the recruitment page for more information on how to apply.

The deadline to apply is Saturday, December 23rd. We will make our decision around the new year.

Thanks for staying tuned to this front page. We hope to deliver more promising news over the next couple of months.

Recruiting: Voice Actors and Animators

Hello everyone! Today I bring some great and not so great news. I’m disappointed to say that four of our voice actors, BreeFaith, Carmen, Mickwhitefire, and Divinexrose have decided to leave the team.

However, that means that we have open positions available! Please see the official descriptions of the roles we need at the link below. We also have recruitment pages back up for your review as well!

https://www.castingcall.club/projects/my-little-investigations

The deadline is AUGUST 1st, 2017 at 12 AM EST.

If you have any questions, please send them our way on the forum or at recruitment@equestriandreamers.com

We are also looking to recruit more animators to our team, so if you are free, don’t be shy and send us an application!

Thanks and we look forward to reporting more progress in the future.

Recruiting: Audio Engineer

Hello hello!

For personal reasons, our current audio engineer has unfortunately had to step down from his position in the team, so we’re presently in need to fill that position. If you’d like to be in charge of ensuring that all of the voices in the game sound just right, and that all of the dialog lines are properly punctuated with sound effects to give the second case that classic punch from start to finish, we’d like to hear from you! Don’t be shy. 🙂

Head on over here to learn how to apply. Please send all applications to recruitment@equestriandreamers.com, as well as any queries or questions about applying.

Thanks so much!

-Gabu

More Case 2 background music

Hey, everypony!

It’s been a while since we last showed you some work from our composer, Trot Pilgrim, so to give you some more tidbits from case 2, this time we thought we’d share a couple more songs that he’s been working on. We can’t give you the titles of these songs yet, as both of those would potentially be spoilers, but we hope you enjoy them all the same. 🙂

The case creator: A first look

We’ve said a lot in this space about what’s in store for players in case 2, but one thing that we’ve only touched on in passing each time it’s come up has been the My Little Investigations case creator, which is also in development in tandem with the second case. It’s still nowhere near ready for public consumption yet, but it’s nonetheless coming along quite well, so I thought I’d take a little while to show people what to expect from it.

Anyone who’s either worked on translating the first case, or who has just looked at the case XML file, will know that the format of the case file in its current form is a huge mess. That’s more or less by design – it was never intended to be human-readable – but it still throws up a huge hurdle for people wanting either to edit existing cases for translations, etc., or perhaps even to make their own cases. So, both to facilitate that – and to make my own job easier, too – we’re working on developing a much more user-friendly case creator, which will be able both to read and edit MLI case files and to create new case files from scratch.

NOTE: The user interface displayed in these pictures is still very much in development, so don’t take anything from this other than a very high-level impression of the design direction.

(Click pictures to see the full-size image.)

MLI Case Creator - 1

As said above, this UI is still very early, but the general idea behind the case creator is that people should be able to use it without having any understand of programming or anything like that – to the fullest extent possible, we want the case creator to be intuitive to use. In this case, which is the location editor, everything present in this location is displayed in layers that can be enabled or disabled, and anything in an enabled layer can be dragged to where the creator wants it to be. Selecting an element will also bring up a pane that will let you edit any properties of that element, such as determining its position more granularly, defining what should happen when the player clicks it, conditions that determine the presence of a character or object (not yet implemented), and so forth.

MLI Case Creator - 2

Editing character encounters is necessarily less visual in nature, since there’s nothing to be laid out on screen, but I’m still doing my best to make it as easy to understand as possible. Conversations are organized in a hierarchical format, with new layers of the tree created anytime something branches, like a condition, a loop, a multiple-choice question, and so forth. If you click on a conversation action, you can see what it looks like in the top-right window, and you’ll be able to click to play any given line of dialog to see if the text synchronization or emotional choices look good, or whether you’ve selected the right voice line.

MLI Case Creator - 4

To edit an action, just double-click it to bring up a dialog window that facilitates that functionality:

MLI Case Creator - 3

Or, to insert an action, you can just double-click on one of the separators, which will display a message on mouse-over saying that you can do that.

5

Editing cutscenes is somewhat a combination of the two, in that you can see the current state of the cutscene visually, including character and camera positions, while also being able to edit the cutscene phases on the right in the same way you can edit conversation actions.

There’s still a lot that has yet to be implemented – for example, you can’t yet edit characters, evidence, or zoomed-in views – but all of that is in the pipeline. This will be the tool that we’ll be internally using to implement case 2, so the tool will get plenty of internal usage that will vet its usability. Once it’s released, we’ll also be releasing a pack containing all of the audio and visual assets used to date in MLI in both case 1 and case 2 (that will include all the mane 6, plus Spike, plus all the other characters seen in those cases), which will give people a good base to build upon if they want to develop their own cases.

That’s all we’ve got so far. Sorry we’ve been a bit lax in terms of posting to this space. I know I say that often, but, well, that’s because it continues to be true. Thanks for your patience as we continue to develop. ‘Til next time!

We’re recruiting!

Hey, everyone!

Work’s still progressing on the second case, but after some internal conversations, we’ve reached the conclusion that it would be awesome if we could find another animator and vector artist to take some of the load off of our current visual artists. If you’re interested in being a part of the second case of My Little Investigations, we’d highly encourage you to apply here:

http://www.equestriandreamers.com/recruitment/visual-artists/

Don’t be shy about applying even if you aren’t sure if you’ll make the cut – you might be surprised! 🙂

We’re not going to impose a hard deadline for applications this time, since last time applications were fairly slow (so please do apply!), but we’ll let everyone know here once we’ve found our new team members.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

-Gabu

Meet the characters: Masquerade

Hello, everypony! Today, we’ve got another interview with a case 2 character for you. Last time, we gave you Royal Ribbon, a waitress at the Grand Gastronomie du Griffon. Today, we’ve got Masquerade, her co-worker.

Are you all set, interviewer?

Yup!

Then let’s get to it!

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