Pony Island

Gameplay

Pony Island is presented as a point-and-click style adventure game though often using other user-interface metaphors, such as a simulated operating system. The player uses this to explore the internal programming of "Pony Island" arcade game. At times, the player must play the "Pony Island" game, a type of endless runner game with shoot 'em up elements, guiding a pony character in a side-scroller while avoiding obstacles and shooting enemies that might attack it. Mechanics of this "Pony Island" game, as well as the operating system, may be accessed by clicking on special marks that appear on the screen, presenting the player with simplified pseudocode along with one or more boxes and visual instruction commands, such as "move down", "move left" or "repeat". On these screens, the player will be required to reorder the visual instructions as to allow the program execution to complete or to achieve a certain goal, such as raising their experience points past a specific level.

Development

Pony Island was primarily developed during the 48-hour Ludum Dare game jam in December 2014, in which the theme was "Entire Game On One Screen". The game placed high in both the Ludum Dare's Mood and Humor categories, and was featured in Zoe Quinn's top 10 games of 2014. Inspired by the positive reception, Mullins prepared the game for release through Steam Greenlight, and subsequently published the game in January 2016.

Daniel Mullins wanted to create a game that defied players' expectations from standard game interfaces, and "flipping them upside down". Mullins had been intrigued with games that are "dark and mysterious", but also wanted to create something that felt like it was not meant to be played. Part of this last goal was accomplished by minimizing the amount of instruction that the game provided, particularly once the player began to reveal the internal code workings, but built these systems on familiar interfaces so that the player would have intuition on what to do. For example, in the pseudo-code sections of the game, he found that adding iconography for locks and keys for the commands the players could manipulate helped them to understand how to interact with the code without direct instruction. At the same time, Mullins wrote the language of the pseudocode to make the programming commands seem ominous as to make the player seem like they were "toying with a system that [one] may not fully understand". Mullins also built in fake error screens and messages through the Steam software that appeared to come from the player's friends, to further the unease that he wanted the players to feel while playing the game.

Reception

Pony Island has generally been well received by critics, praising it for being a metafiction on the nature of video games. The game holds an aggregated score of 86/100 on Metacritic based on 29 critic reviews. IGN awarded it a score of 9.0 out of 10, saying "Pony Island is a punk rock experiment in storytelling and game design that delights in toying with the player." Lizzy Finnegan of The Escapist compared the experience of playing Pony Island as what it might have been like playing Polybius, an urban legend of a cursed video game cabinet, and is "psychological horror done so incredibly right".

On the success of Pony Island, Mullins announced his next game The Hex for a planned early 2017 release. The Hex, like Pony Island, is a meta-fictional game where the player takes the role of an innkeeper to solve a murder mystery where the suspects are characters that represent specific video game genres.