This week's Spotlight is coming to you live from scenic Ponyville, courtesy of drud14! Explore Ponyville is an adorable compilation of minigames and small scenes wherein the player hangs out all over town with the Mane Six. Released in the far-flung year of 2013, it comes surprisingly close at times to passing for an official game, though one or two parts have a some quirks to them that break that immersion! Sure, I could elaborate, but maybe you should just play it for yourself to find out what I mean!

In Olden Pony Times™, Equestria Gaming featured a recurring series of posts titled Lyra's List. The idea behind it all was simple: help the development of pony fan games along at every stage of development, from concept to completion. Originally, it was a list of game design documents for projects in their earliest phases, but would later include signal boosts from developers in need of a helping hand, and a list of folks of all creative stripes that projects in need could get in touch with.

A wonderful idea, right? Absolutely! Unfortunately though, it suffered from a pretty major design flaw: it was a monthly feature with zero hold-overs between posts. It made sense to do it that way at the height of the pony craze in 2012, when the absolute torrent of new projects and volunteers ready to join them coming in every month would've eventually made Lyra's Lists hilariously long without things rolling over. In the years since, though? Well, things are just the tiniest bit slower, to say the least! When we tried bringing Lyra's List back in 2017, we failed to take that into account and make the necessary changes, and ultimately things didn't get very far due to low submissions.

Seven years later but hey, who's counting, right? certainly not me!, we're giving Lyra's List another go! This time, we've decided to tweak the format a little bit to (finally!) compensate for the times. Starting now, Lyra's List will now take the form of a dedicated page (use the link above or the much cuter link in the navbar!), and all submissions will remain on the list for a period of one year, unless a shorter duration or removal are requested. We're hoping that these changes will (again, finally) make Lyra's List the resource it was always intended to be, even if it's better late than never.

If you're reading this, submissions are officially open, and we hope to hear from y'all soon!

For this week's Spotlight, which just so happens to fall on St. Patrick's Day, there's no game in our library that meets the moment better than kevinsano's Sweet Apple Cider. Released on February 3rd, 2013, this ponified version of the arcade classic Tapper quickly made a real game out of what was originally a simple title screen animation posted to kevinsano's channel just one week prior!

It wasn't long after the release of Sweet Apple Cider that kevinsano made five additional mockup title screens based off of different Season 2 episodes... though unfortunately none of them became actual games, and were just used as t-shirt designs. I don't know about you, but man I sure wish we could've gotten to play Marzipan Mascarpone Meringue Madness! Honestly, if any of y'all out there have any ideas for what the other games would've been like had they been made, I'd love to hear them!

This week, we're spotlighting Canterlot Defender by the insanely prolific futzi01! Perhaps not the most popular game of theirs with the word "Canterlot" in the title, but this is a fun little game nonetheless. Another title based on the events of A Canterlot Wedding, the player, as Twilight Sparkle, must try to survive as long as possible while defending Canterlot from an endless swarm of invading Changelings. It's about as simple as it sounds, really. Go give it a shot! get it?? because you're shooting down changelings?? anyone??? please laugh

Welcome to the very first Arcade Spotlight, a series of weekly posts dedicated to giving a random arcade game a little time in the sun! I've noticed over the years that, with the sheer amount of titles we have, there are more than a few with... less-than-stellar view counts. Let's see if we can't fix that!

Mine Escape, the penultimate pony project of developer CertaintyPrinciple, was originally posted to DeviantArt on July 5th, 2012, making its way to our arcade that same day. A point-and-click puzzle game based on the events of A Canterlot Wedding - Part 2, it features Twilight Sparkle solving a series of puzzles in order to free herself and the real Princess Cadance from the depths of the Canterlot gem mines so they can put a stop to the impending Changeling invasion.

This is quite possibly my favorite game out of all of the ones we have, so I'm super stoked that it came up first. Give it a go and let us know what your final time is! I remember it taking me a... uh, little while to get through, my first time. Won't be hard for y'all to do better than me! i'm dumb and bad at puzzles lmao