Them's Fightin' Herds
Them's Fightin' Herds is an indie fighting game developed by Mane6 and published by Gameplay Group International. It features a cast of ungulate characters fighting each other to find a champion worthy of gaining a magical key that will protect their world from predators. First released into early access in February 2018, the full release was on April 30, 2020, for Microsoft Windows, followed by Linux on March 25, 2021, and a beta macOS version was added on October 27, 2021. The game was released for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on October 18, 2022.
The project is a spiritual successor to Mane6's earlier, unreleased fighting game Fighting Is Magic, based on the animated television show My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Mane6 was a nine-man game development team and part of the adult fandom of the show. Fighting Is Magic featured the six main pony characters from that show. Early versions of this game were released in 2012, drawing attention from both players in the Evolution Championship Series due to the unique moves associated with non-bipedal characters in fighting games, as well as from Hasbro which owned the intellectual property to My Little Pony. After Hasbro sent Mane6 a cease and desist letter, Mane6 discarded the assets tied to the show, while keeping some of the fundamental gameplay factors to create the new title Them's Fightin' Herds.
The creator of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Lauren Faust, offered to help with designing the new characters for the game. Development of the game was completed with crowdfunding through Indiegogo.
A separate effort created by fans not associated with the Mane6 team released their Fighting Is Magic: Tribute Edition of the original Mane6 My Little Pony-inspired game in early 2014. This game was made from various beta assets of the original which Mane6 developed in the first two years, and were later leaked by other parties.
Gameplay
The game uses a four-button fighting system: a button each for light, medium, heavy, and magic attacks, and includes staple fighting game maneuvers such as launchers, pushblocking, and cross-ups.Currently, there are seven playable characters, with four more purchasable through DLC, all of which have their own unique fighting styles and moves. These fighting styles range from fast and aggressive, to slow and defensive, with all characters having a high emphasis on fighting with combos.
The game supports both local and online multiplayer via both a near-isometric pixel art lobby system, and an automatic matchmaking system. Players who own BlazBlue: Central Fiction, Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 or Skullgirls on Steam will unlock special cosmetics for their in-game lobby avatars inspired by characters from those games. There are also offline single-player modes available, including an extensive tutorial plus training mode, an incomplete story mode, and player vs. AI fighting.
Synopsis
Setting and characters
Them's Fightin' Herds is a fighting game based on sapient four-legged hoofed creatures from the world of Fœnum, which is being threatened by the return of carnivorous beasts known as the Predators. The Predators were locked away in a separate realm, but they have found a way to escape it. To put an end to the threat, selected champions of the various Fœnum races are chosen as "Key Seekers" by their tribes to find the key that will lock the Predators away again. The Key Seekers must face each other in a friendly competition to determine which one will be the Key Keeper who will face the champion of the Predators.There are six playable characters—Arizona the cow, Velvet the reindeer, Paprika the alpaca, Oleander the unicorn who can summon a demonic being known as "Fred", Pom the sheep and Tianhuo the longma —each with different fighting move sets and unique movement options such as flight, short hops, double jumps, or air dashes. Jessica Gee voices the game's announcer. A seventh playable character, pirate goat Shanty, was also released as downloadable content due to the crowdfunding campaign reaching its stretch goals; she was later included in the base roster for all versions. Additional characters are planned for release via a season pass, including Arizona's bull father Texas, Velvet's father Stronghoof, Nidra the tapir, and Baihe, another longma fighter.
Storyline
The game's story mode begins with Arizona making her way from the prairie to Reine City, sent on her quest by her parents, as the declared Champion of the Prairie. Along the way, she passes through a system of caves that used to be a salt mine, which are now filled with shadowy predators. In Reine City, Arizona heads to the museum to find some clues about the Prophet's Key. When Velvet shows up and learns that Arizona is the Champion of the Prairie, she challenges Arizona to a fight on the steps in front of the museum. Arizona defeats her, and Velvet's ice sprites carry her away. Desperate to get Arizona out of the city, a citizen gives her his boat tickets and sends her off to the Alpake Highlands. In the Highlands, Arizona climbs up a mountain while fighting off birds of prey. At the top, exhausted, she is rescued by members of the local Alpake tribe. After waking up, she talks to their leader, Adobo, who warns her of the "Terror of the Foggy Mountaintops". Arizona is pursued by a mysterious figure in the fog, but the figure always stays hidden a distance away while laughing. At a clearing in the fog, Arizona examines a stone only to see it rumble; Paprika bursts out of it and proceeds to "fight" Arizona through a series of hugs, kisses, and fourth-wall-breaking stunts. Arizona prevails, leaving Paprika dazed and out cold.In the Temple of the Ancestors, which Arizona learned about at the Reine City Museum and from Adobo, Arizona fights more predators while solving some puzzles. Finally, she reaches the Hall of the Monolith. Before she can inspect the monolith, Oleander shows up, and like with Velvet, realizes that she and Arizona are rivals. Oleander and Arizona begin fighting, with Fhtng th§ ¿nsp§kbl helping her out as the battle progresses. Arizona eventually prevails, but Fred knocks her out and rants about how she is ruining his plans. Fred then wakes Oleander up to tell her that she won. While Oleander copies down the inscriptions on the monolith, Fred loots Arizona for all of the items she found along her journey. After the duo leave, Arizona wakes up, severely dazed, and at a loss for what to do next. If the player loses during the third phase of Oleander's fight, the same thing happens, but Fred does not knock Arizona out and talk about how she is ruining his plans.
Development
''My Little Pony: Fighting Is Magic''
The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic series, while aimed at young girls and their parents, has drawn a large number of adult fans from 15 to 35, typically male, who are often referred to as "bronies". These fans were drawn in by the creativity of Lauren Faust and her team, who wrote the show to appeal across generations. The show's characters, Flash animations, adventure-themed stories, and occasional pop cultural references are considered other draws for the older audience.Many members of the brony fandom are technology-savvy, a common activity in the fandom being the creation of images of the show's ponies, parodying other commercial works including video games. Fighting Is Magic grew out of a set of images for a hypothetical "Marevel vs. Clopcom" game, parodying the Marvel vs. Capcom fighting game series, created by Anukan, who would later become one of the Mane6 developers. Anukan didn't expect anything to come from these images, but found that at discussion boards, fans were postulating how the various pony characters would translate into fighting games; such as what sorts of moves they would use. One of these users, Nappy, recognized the potential in realizing a complete game, and began the formation of Mane6, including Anukan, Jay Wright, Lucas Ellinghaus, James Workman, and Prominence.
The team decided on using the Fighter Maker 2D game engine, despite having no prior experience with the software. After getting in the basics of having characters hit one another, they discovered that they could get the engine to include wall bounces—the rebounding of a character from walls at the edges of the screen—which according to Ellinghaus, show "the potential for both the game and the team". Much of the development work was spent in trying to achieve certain effects within the Fighter Maker engine, referred to by the team as "taming" the engine.
The game was initially developed as a three button-based fighter, allowing to remain simple to be picked up by players but still offering a variety of combinations of moves, while limiting the amount of animations for the various moves for all characters. The three buttons were designed to mimic the light, medium, and heavy attacks of the Marvel vs. Capcom series. However, the development team also wanted to include an EX system like the one in Street Fighter IV where pressing two attack buttons at the same time executes a special move. Within the initial game engine, Fighter Maker, the game would only register two simultaneous button presses if they were within the same processing time frame, which would hinder gameplay. To work around this, the team designed a fourth button,, used to have the character remain still while doing a specific activity that would build up an EX meter, such as Twilight Sparkle reading a book. With a full EX meter, the player would then be able to execute special moves with any of the other three buttons.
Mane6 focused initial efforts to build up the six main characters from the show as the initial fighters, but have stated that an expanded roster of up to seventeen characters would be in their planned final version. The game was to be downloadable and free-to-play, with local and online multiplayer modes as well as a story mode. Character-specific moves were to be present in-game. The individual movesets for each character are based not only on how they are represented in the show, but also considering other characters in fighting games to fill out their fighting style. Twilight Sparkle, in the show, is a unicorn with powerful magic abilities, which the Mane6 matched with Akuma from the Street Fighter series, while Rainbow Dash, an aggressive pegasus, was compared with Magneto's playstyle in the Marvel vs. Capcom series. Fluttershy, a timid character within the show, does not fight directly, but instead her animal companions fight for her, creating a playstyle similar to Eddie from Guilty Gear XX or Phoenix Wright in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. In another case, Pinkie Pie, a hyperactive pony who is shown to have some fourth wall reality-warping powers in the show, allowed the team to experiment with a wide range of haphazard moves. They had designed one move where Pinkie would use her "party cannon" to launch a present at the opponent, and then she would then pop out of the present at close range. As they were developing the game, Persona 4 Arena was released, in which the character of Kuma/Teddie had a similar move. They realized they were thinking along the same lines as the professional developers and continue to work more of Pinkie's moves based on Teddie's moveset. While these other characters helped to inspire additional moves, the Mane6 team made sure to stay true to the characterization on the show and not introduce moves that would be outside of this, such as Fluttershy herself making an aggressive attack.
After each character's moveset was tested and refined based on testing feedback, the team then began to animate each character, first by creating Flash-based animations and then transforming these to sprites needed for Fighter Maker. The team noted that the pony shape of the characters proved an additional challenge both visually and for the engine. With most fighting games, players can easily identify heads, arms, and legs, and know where to watch for attacks, but the same was not true for the ponies. They proceeded to add effects like sparks on the attacking character and opponent responses to help players recognize attacks. In terms of the engine, the hitboxes for the ponies were more horizontal than vertical as would be the case with humanoid fighter characters, and they had to work around this in the engine to accurately model attacks. Additionally the more horizontal shapes of the characters limited how much of the fighting stage space they could use; they overcame this within the game by using a 3/4ths view of the characters that shortened their on-screen lengths giving them more space to work with.