So full disclosure, I'm under no illusion that this stupid meme is some sort of masterpiece. I came up with the idea to pony demake Desert Bus while high as a kite rewatching the Angry Video Game Nerd episode about it. This writeup exists largely as a creative exercise/excuse to put something on my website for the first time in awhile.
The entire game was developed in Godot Engine, while using Aseprite for art and DN-Famitracker for audio. I've been daily driving Fedora Linux since October 2025, and now my entire workflow runs flawlessly under it, so going forward everything I release will have a native linux version where applicable. Desert Pony only runs in browser at time of writing but I do have a desktop release planned that I would like to put on Steam, but I have LLC filing to deal with before any of that can start to happen
The color palette, sprite sizes, and number of objects on screen follow the NES to a T, while leaving out the crappier parts of NES games like the often choppy framerate or the sprite flicker. Developing my art style more, particularly in Godot, was a big part of why I was willing to dedicate a small chunk of free time immediately after finals wrapped up on a stupid small meme project like this.
Total time spent in-editor actually working was around the 24 hour mark, with the bulk of that just being drawing and tweaking. The gameplay loop *as I chuckle under my breath* took all of about 15 minutes to get working from start to finish. It actually relies on an optical illusion: the player doeasn't move left and right at all, nor does the screen scroll. The only thing that actually moves is the ground. Much like Desert Bus, Desert Pony contains an anti-cheese system that causes Moonshot to veer slightly to the right over time, eventually leading to a game over if not manually corrected
As your reward for actually reading this thing, the game contains a singular cheat code. If you type in the letters PONY in the correct order during gameplay, fast mode is toggled until either the run is finished or the game is reopened. Fast mode makes the game progress exactly 600x faster, with this largely added to show people that the game actually is completable and does have an ending. I wasn't joking during development when I said it was going to take the full 8 hours: it does.
The game can be played for free in your browser here: Desert Pony
Stay tuned for more games set in the hauntingly quirky town of Innsmane