Ashes of Equestria

A fan project that serves as an adaptation of a popular fanfiction in the My Little Pony fandom. It is an open world fallout inspired RPG. a post-apocalyptic fantasy set 200 years after a devastating war ended civilization, a unicorn emerges from an underground bunker to find a town overrun by squabbling raider gangs.

I have been apart of the Design Team since 2014, and as of 2024, I am the lead of Design Team as well as lead producer. I work with a moderate sized team of voulenteers. A download to the current build can be found here.

Leadership

As a lead in this project, I took a project that was in a slump and turned it around, implementing new production pipelines and strategies that turned a group of people working on a project into a semi professional situation that is able to get deliverables done in a timely manor.

Level Design

Details

Overview of Map

One of the big things I wanted to have was letting the player see the whole map right at the start that gives the player several POIs to head to

Player Progression

While the map is small, I wanted to make sure there was a gradual increase in challenge, with different weapons and enemies spawning in different areas

Visible POIs

Everywhere on the map, there is at least one POI always visible to the player to help guide them

Exploration

I wanted exploration to be a major theme of the game and to service that, the map rewards exploration around every corner, with environmental story telling or good weapons hidden for players willing to look

Process

The first thing I did was draw a layout, talking with the other designers and our script team to get a map that would work as a vertical slice and do everything we wanted to do.

Once the layout was approved, I went in engine and made a block out of the level with basic terrain and whiteboxes in place of large clutter and roads.

I then separated the map into various zones and assigned the other level designers to the zones to finalize the look of the terrain

After that was done, I separated the map into clutter zones. I replaced the whiteboxes with the final assets, and the level designers were assigned to clutter zones to do set dressing and decorating all the areas

I next went through with the designers and placed enemies and items into the map

After QA approved of each of our changes we added Quest NPCs and did finalizations ready for release

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