Game Start is the menu selection for starting a new game.
After inputting your pony's name, you can configure the game's setup and your character's attributes:
Difficulty: Determines how hard the entire game will be. For beginners to Ponyvania, Normal difficulty is strongly advised. Several major factors are determined by the difficulty setting you choose:
- Damage player takes from getting hit by enemies
- Amount of health that enemies start with, including bosses
- Experience points needed to advance your level
- Invincibility time for player after suffering damage
- Number of bits that your character begins the game with
- Hard and Brutal modes add a few additional enemies in various locations
- Rate at which enemies drop items, and their rarity (see below)
Enemies drop more and rarer items on higher difficulties. This is the one factor in the above list that works to your advantage when you choose a harder difficuly.
Level Cap: The maximum experience level your character can reach. The default maximum is level 50. However, beginners would be wise to set the cap to 99 to avoid an unintended bottleneck if parts of the game prove to be especially challenging.
- Note that there is no bonus for having lower level caps. This option is purely for those who like an additional challenge.
Death penalty: If enabled, the player looses 10% of their current exp and bits (currency) upon death. It may sound intimidating, but most of the time, you will still advance on both even if you end up dying multiple times on each stage. Notably, your exp cannot be reduced low enough to lose an experience level due to the Death Penalty.
- Enabling Death Penalty slightly increases the chances that enemies will drop items, including rare drops.
On the character selection screen, you can choose how your character looks, as well as the race - Every race ("type") has different strength and weaknesses, skills and gameplay. Unlockable characters can be accessed by pressing the attack button on Earth, Pegasus or Unicorn to switch your race to the following, respectively:
| Warning: Spoilers... |
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| Foal, Bat Pony, or Alicorn (the latter of which is not implemented yet). |
If you don't like any of the included cutie marks, you can draw your own in the game on a 5x5 pixel panel.
Mane Six Presets[]
While choosing your mane style, pressing attack with one of the first 6 styles selected will create a pony for you with all of the cosmetic elements, race and gender that corresponds to that original pony's mane style. You are free to further customize your character after choosing a preset.