Sure, it was nice that they actually went through the trouble of creating their own engine and it runs smoothly in Wine but much development time could have been saved if they would have used a free visual novel engine instead such as Ren'Py. One final complaint that I have about this game is the engine.
I get the impression the Vinyl Scratch will probably be the easiest character to ship yourself with early on. It does its job and does it well but most of the time you won't even realize that it's there. This is only a minor setback but it would make Act 1's environment even more immersive then in its current state. For some reason it seems that Filly Games refused to zoom in to some of the various backgrounds used in-game which introduces black bars on the top and bottom as you can see in the screenshots. You see the vectors are often scaled inconsistently, creating the effect of a pony growing and shrinking as they talk. While I must admit that this was a good idea the execution was quite flawed. Hopefully the developers will realize this and make the necessary changes in the next few acts, or else I (along with many others) shall feel greatly disappointed with this.Īs most of you probably already knew by now Welcome to Ponyville only uses a minimal amount of original sprites, and uses community-created vectors instead. Players in general like to have plenty of choices when it comes to interactive stories but sadly Act 1 drags them along, forcing them to be nice when they are feeling naughty and vice versa. In my opinion the game would greatly benefit from making greater use of the latter, since at times it felt like I was just an observer and had almost no say as to what went on in-game. Most of it is spent talking to the various ponies in town with a minimal level of interaction, with the player just clicking the left mouse button to advance the conversation and occasionally having a choice between saying different things. Pretty much Welcome to Ponyville is your basic visual novel and has a very small amount of actual gameplay.