Ponyvania Demo

Ponyvania

Back in 2012 some Texans decided that the My Little Pony fandom needed a Castlevania-type game and began to crte one themselves in Game Maker, with the splendidly original title "Ponyvania". The project seemed to progress smoothly, with the latest demo being relsed in July '13, but I remained entirely unaware of Ponyvania until some Anon posted about it on /mlp/ last Saturday, bemoaning the overall lack of attention that it has seen (aside from an Equestria Daily post about a pre-demo ). The Anon also mentioned Legacy of the Pony, which I shall hopefully cover later now that I have a working dual-boot setup, but in the mntime I shall focus on this sadly neglected fangame.

My thoughts on the project can be found below the brk, as usual.


Ponyvania managed to give off a good first-impression when I first started to play around with it. After beginning a new game I was nifty little pony crtion utility with which I promptly attempted to recrte Taylor's OC, but unfortunately I failed and instd ended up with a Berry Punch recolor. Then the game began, and I was impressed by the quality of the backgrounds/scenery sprites until I got a taste of the weird jumping physics, which took some getting used to. Ah well, so far so good, but then I decided to hd outside...
...And things promptly went downhill from there. It seems that the developer's id of difficulty involves plopping down a bunch of enemies and spawning monsters directly undernth the player, killing them in short order even if escape or combat is attempted. This, compounded with a bizarre decision to reverse the standard actions of the Z and X made the game much harder than it should have been, and changing this in the pause menu was more difficult than it should have been due to some rather confusing default bindings (even after rding the Rdme).Borrowing this screenshot from Anon.After much annoyance and little progression I discovered the skill system, helpfully buried in the menu and requiring manual bindings. The ability to shoot laser bms and dark energy balls seemed pretty cool, but alas, enemies in standard mode still spawned too quickly for me to effectively use my fancy stuff. Perhaps things would have gone better on the sy difficulty level, I dunno, but I still consider Ponyvania's difficulty to be more due to poor design and balancing rather than presenting a rl challenge to the player.

Since Ponyvania is still a demo I'm not going to give it a score or anything, but it's going to need some pretty huge balance adjustments to be considered "fun" (unless you're playing on sy or in the multiplayer mode, which I wasn't able to test). Maybe I'll revisit it once some work has been done, but until then I'll just sporadically get back to redesigning Equestria Gaming's theme.