“Derpy went through a lot of changes, some for design reasons, but most for technical reasons.

The top left sprite is the original design. All of the weapons there are based off actual World War I equipment – The plane is an RAF FE-2, albeit compressed to avoid a lot of empty horizontal space, and Dinky’s gun is a Lewis Machine gun. I kind of wanted Derpy to have to less magical, more real-world design to her stuff here. In the original, the Imperial Ari Force, and the Air Force boss in particular kind of came out of nowhere, so giving Derpy real world weapons out of nowhere kind of pokes a bit of fun at that point. I specifically chose World War I as it best seems to fit the level of Equestria – there’s still actual monarchies, horse drawn wagons are slowly giving way to more automated transportation (the coal powered trains and the Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 9000), and the general feel of Manehatten kind of fitting New York of the time.

The top right was the second version. Drakey requested that the plane be changed from green to brown. This could have been a palette issue I’m unaware of, issues with the green plane blending in with the blue sky (deliberate in real life), or maybe him just thinking it looked better.

The third iteration is in the bottom left. With four player character slots (even if one’s blank), one large enemy, and two medium enemies, the game was showing some glitches in battle. Shrinking everything just a bit fixed that.

Unfortunately, the smaller size had its own issues. For some reason we couldn’t quite fix, Button and Dinky were displaying behind the plane. As a workaround, I build them into the plane, then made the parts of their weapons that didn’t overlap separate, so beating them would just destroy the guns instead.”