Castle Pinkiestein [explaned]

Premise:
The game actually centers around Twilight. After falling into a deep slumber she suddenly finds herself in a sort of eternal nightmare. A complex castle themed world haunted by strange monsters and evil (and often mutated) Pinkie Pie clones.In order to escape this nightmare, Twilight must destroy the monsters, banish the Pinkie clones back to the abyss, collect all the gold tokens in each level (to pay the ferrypony at the end of the game to take you out of the nightmare) and a few other things to be named.

As to why this nightmarish world exists, who the villain is and what the motivation was, I havent yet entirely worked out. But I hope to gain some ideas as this project progresses.

Origins:
At first, this game was intended to be a sort of mini game designed for project: Spikes Quest (a metroidvania style game staring none other than Spike himself [check the blog:http://spikeqdev.blogspot.com/ ]. It was one of a few videogame themed mini-games that you collected throughout the SQ world and played in a segment called Pinkie's Arcade Room (this also included other games such as Snips Challenge (a parody of the classic Chips Challenge) and Celestian Towers (a parody of Mystic Towers for Dos staring Starswirl the Bearded). I recently decided to do away with this segment in favor of turning these mini games into actual full fledged projects. This is a side project that I'll be working on along side of Spikes Quest, and when finished, I may proceed to work on the other projects mentioned here.

The Game:
The game was originally planed to be a spoof on the popular classic FPS Wolfenstein 3D. You explored 3D-ish levels finding secrets, battling Pinkie Clones (I wouldnt say you killed them, rather 'banished' them back to the abyss in which they came) collecting keys to unlock doors and other basic cliched videogame tasks. Like Wolfenstein 3D, the maps were to be layed out in a grid-like geometry, but instead of the levels being on a single plane in height I wanted to make it more interesting my making it multiple planes of height (making it slightly resemble Doom in some ways). And also give the game floor and ceiling textures for added detail. The textures were originally going to be 32x32 in size, but I've just recently decided for the reboot that I may up them to 64x64 (the size textures you see in the original Wolfenstein and I think Doom).

I also decided that this wasnt just going to be your standard classic style fps. Aside from vanquishing your enemies you will also have to solve puzzles, do some platforming and try to collect 100% of the items to progress. This game will encourage you to explore each level and unlock their many mysteries and secrets.

The screenshot provided here shows the original mini-game as it was in the making (nearly a year ago from the making of this post). I had created a basic level editor for this, but ultimately ended up scrapping it due to some nasty headaches related to the game slowing down... supposedly somehow related to rendering problems. I've decided to use AC3D to create the structured levels and create a basic editor for placing items/monsters/etc in these levels.

Here's the editor that I created for the original mini-game. I was proud of it at the time as I put a number of hours of work into it. But again, after running into a huge problem related to rendering slow downs, I reluctantly scrapped it. :P

I'll post more on this game as it progresses. :)