Andre Hernandez again with the continuing blogs posts giving backstory to The Eighth Day!

It was shortly after I stopped working on Mobius that I got into the My Little Pony fandom. I will go into the details of how, why, and what in future blog posts. Today’s blog will focus on my next attempt at a video game: Everything is Fine, The Game.

Everything is Fine is a My Little Pony fanfiction I wrote with a friend of mine at the time. The story revolved around one of the ponies dealing with a cataclysmic event that kills everyone she knows and half destroys the town she lives in.

. . .

I will explain more about all of this in future blog posts.

The idea for a game based in the same setting as the fanfiction was completely my own. I decided that it would be a 2D puzzle/platformer with some kind of “day/night” mechanic that changed the environment based on certain factors. That’s about as detailed as I can get with that mechanic because to this day I still can’t decide what I wanted to do with it. The initial plan was for the environment to be tied directly to a “diary” that you would find pages to. Every page would be describing a person, place, or thing, and when you read the page, it would become reality. You would progress passed gates and puzzles by finding the correct pages and changing your reality based on where you were reading in the diary. If you needed to close something behind you that you just opened, you just go back in the diary and it goes back to being closed. I really liked this idea as it felt like a more complicated “red/blue” puzzle from the 2D Zelda’s.

The second idea I had for the main mechanic was a much more generic day/night cycle where enemies would come out at night. To change things up slightly, an additional mechanic was considered where the main character taking damage would cause night to come faster and also warp the environment between reality and the false reality the character was deluding herself to seeing. Then, the idea became simply to keep the false reality in place until certain story factors dictated that reality be shown. And THEN, the idea became to simply hint at reality though small gaps in the false reality that was part random / part story dictated.

A third idea was to go into an alternate reality whenever the main character went to sleep that would be more combat focused. It would tell a completely different story with parallels to the main game’s story and would eventually tie into the main game in a final confrontation scene.

Basically: I never quite figured out what I wanted to do with this game. I began programming it in Unity with very vague ideas about the end goal and didn’t get very far due to my constant struggles to implement jumping. Yes, jumping. I spent weeks implementing rudimentary gravity and more weeks implementing platforms. The very core of a puzzle/platformer and I couldn’t get it to work in the way I wanted. Needless to say, after months of working on the project, I eventually stopped due to an ever growing realization that my programming skills would not be up to snuff.

Before the eventually canning, however, my amazing Fiance drew a number of environmental pieces of the game. This was the first time we had worked together on a project and it put an extreme strain on our relationship as I attempted to explain exactly what I wanted her to draw and she attempted to draw it. As always, her art was amazing, but I was constantly changing the angles and what I wanted in the shot which drove her absolutely insane. It almost ended our working relationship, but thankfully we worked through it and continue to work together to this day. Below you can see a number of the images she drew for the game.

Path to Fluttershy’s cabin, almost dead-on to how it looks in the show

Everfree Forest path

Splitting path

Sugarcube Corner

I eventually started storyboarding the environments out in Powerpoint before she worked on them so she knew where things were supposed to be.

Sugarcube Corner first floor

As is common for first time game developers: I put the cart before the horse by getting art before I even know what kind of game I was making or even making a prototype. I learned a lot from this project and decided that I would need to work with more people on my next project in order for it to succeed.

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned next Friday for the continuing backstory of The Eighth Day!