What is My Little Investigations?

My Little Investigations is a video game featuring the characters and settings from the TV show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and featuring gameplay inspired by the video game Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth. Within the game, players play as Twilight Sparkle, who plays the part of an crime-solving investigator in Equestria. During the course of the game, she must investigate crime scenes for evidence, question and interrogate ponies who either were witnesses or otherwise know something relevant to the crime, and ultimately confront the culprit and prove that that pony did it.

What is My Little Investigations?

One of the primary goals at Equestrian Dreamers is the desire to bring Equestria to life, such that players playing through our games really feel as though they’re part of Equestria while they play them. Inter-character relationships and interactions are one of the biggest strengths in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, so we really wanted to involve players in those interactions in a meaningful fashion. Given that the Ace Attorney series’ gameplay very nicely facilitates precisely that kind of inter-character interactions, since it requires players to have detailed conversations and confrontations with the characters within the game, it really seemed like a very natural fit the more we thought about it.

When will it be released, and on which platforms?

We’re currently targeting a release date of spring 2014 (?), but nothing’s set in stone at the moment. The game is still in development. We can say, though, that when it’s released, it will be for all desktop PCs running an OS that supports SDL (which includes Windows, Mac, and Linux).

Where will it be available upon its release?

Right here! We’ll let you know the details when it’s ready.

What will it cost?

Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Rien. Niente. Whatever language you’d prefer to hear it in, My Little Investigations will always be free of charge! We’re making it because we love it, not because we want to make money off of it.

What is it built on?

My Little Investigations is written in C++ using SDL. It uses a completely custom-built game engine designed from the ground up to support the kind of gameplay that was envisioned for this game, which includes a robust conversation engine that supports conversations, interrogations, and confrontations, each of which being a different form of interaction with the character with a different purpose.

I’m sure the first thing that you’re looking for is a download link, so you can find that here:

http://www.equestriandreamers.com/downloads/

At that link, you can find four things:

The game executable itself plus case 1
The soundtrack to case 1, composed by Trot Pilgrim
Source code for the game executable
Source code for the (now-defunct) Java case compiler (+ game implementation)
If you just want to play the game, the first item is what you want. Highly recommended as well is the second option, as Trot Pilgrim did an awfully fine job scoring the game, and his music is great to listen to on its own. If you’re interested in exactly how the game works or are interested in any specific functionality therein, the third option will give you that. And if you’re academically curious, the fourth option contains the source code both for the initial Java demo of the game, and of the case compiler in Java that I’ve been using to compile the first case. It’s very bare-bones and is really not very good, and is entirely unsupported – now that case 1 is released, work on a proper case creator is underway in earnest – so only the most curious and adventurous will find anything there. Still, we included it for the sake of completeness.

If you’d like to discuss the game, don’t forget to check out our forum! Talk about MLI, about MLP:FiM in general, or about general things with other fans is all welcome!

Finally, I’d like to mention that we also now have a Twitter account, @EqDreamers! We’ll be using that account both to alert fans to new posts here, news about MLI, or just general communication with others. So, following us is definitely encouraged. :)

We’ll have more to post about in the coming days, but that’s probably more than enough for right now. Enjoy!