Another Friday, another backstory post by Andre Hernandez!

My video game aspirations lulled between the ending of Everything is Fine, The Game and my next project. In this time, I played several games that influenced me greatly, to name a few: Spec Ops: The Line, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and Bleach: The Third Phantom. Of the three, I only completed Spec Ops. The game’s story and world drew me in completely and I was hooked from start to finish. It’s also the shortest of the three games, so that helped. Bleach’s story drew me in slightly but not enough for me to figure out it’s sometimes arbitrary combat mechanics. XCOM simply failed to hold me with either its mechanics or its story (games where you, the player, have to take a role in the story never really grasped me).

Even so, I took inspiration from all of the above both from a story and mechanic perspective, and though I have a lot of issues with XCOM, it was the game that pushed me back into wanting to create a tactics style game. I wanted to make a story heavy tactics game that didn’t have the “annoying” mechanics XCOM had, such as the enemy movement in fog of war before you can even react, among others. And so I did something many people in the My Little Pony fandom were doing at the time: I reached out to others in the fandom to create a team to work on my game idea.

I could probably write a book on the many mistakes I made with what would eventually be known as Pony Tactics: Salvation. A project where you bring on 10+ artists/musicians/voice actors/writers, stick them all in one Skype group, and tell them all that they will have a say on the game’s development is not a project that will get very far. I had to learn this simple truth the hard way. But I’ll save my analysis on the failings of that particular project for a future blog post. For now I want to focus on the mechanics and story of Pony Tactics.

As you can tell from the fanfiction I write (Everything is Fine) and the types of games I enjoy (Spec Ops: The Line), I’m a sucker for dark themes. Pony Tactics was no different. The story revolved around a cataclysmic event that was sweeping from North to South along the land, forcing everyone to flee to the South. The game would start fairly small scale with a small village getting some travelers in and some more frequent monster attacks and would eventually escalate as the sweeping cataclysm crept in, forcing the player characters to flee. The rest of the game would be the characters rushing South, meeting other villages along the way and increasing (and decreasing) the size of their party. The story would come to a conclusion at the massive port city on the Southern tip of the continent, where the cataclysmic force would be halted by the city’s army. Future games would have the party traveling north through the destruction towards the cataclysm’s source to eventually destroy it.

The mechanics of the game were very straight forward tactics style mechanics. In all honestly, I was so focused on the story, characters, and artwork that I let the mechanics slip on this project. The only thing I was sure about is that I didn’t want fog of war. My problems with fog of war in tactics games stems almost solely from XCOM: Enemy Unknown, where I felt it was not used properly. Previous tactics games I played, like Bleach and Final Fantasy Tactics, did not utilize fog of war but instead brought in enemies after certain criteria were met. This is a mechanic that has carried over directly into The Eighth Day, where fog of war is only used in areas the player is not currently in.

Eventually, the lack of a clear, defining voice for the project led to me shutting it down months after bringing everyone on. Below is some of the artwork created for the game.

Logo

Banner of the three pony tribes before Celestia came to power

An race of owl people my fiance created, whom I wanted to add to the game

You can still find really promotional articles for Pony Tactics: Salvation on various My Little Pony fan sites. At one point I even made a promotional video showing off the very, very rough combat and story elements. The video has since been deleted (back when the project was shuttered) so that’s gone, however.

Next week I’ll be going into where I wanted to go with The Eighth Day initially, both mechanically and story-wise. It will be the final backstory post before I start talking more in-depth about where the game is now!