The team has released early pre-alpha gameplay footage that displays basic game mechanics such as launches, juggles and hyper combos as seen in existing fighting game franchises such as Marvel vs. The game uses the Fighter Maker game engine. When another, Nappy, saw those images, he became determined to make them a reality, and in summer of 2011, the team, which at the time, consisted not only of Nappy and Anukan, but also of Jay Wright, Lucas Ellinghaus, James Workman, and Prominence, met on Skype for the first time. There is also some interesting info pertaining to character creation and the struggle it takes to create a truly unique character.The game originally began when a Mane6 team member, Anukan made mock-up screens under the title of 'Marevel vs Clopcom' and posted them to a Ponychan board discussing fighting ponies. Leave your feedback on the game regarding what you read from the article. That has been a fun challenge to play with.' I don't think there has ever been a fighting game where the standard character design was this wide. When we put it in the engine, we found the game became very cross-up heavy. As Nappy explained, 'When we drew up the hit boxes for these characters, they were basically square heads and huge rectangle bodies. Naturally, the first few attempts didn't feel quite right and required extensive reshuffling. Once a character makes it into the game, the team can see if their attack designs-specifically the hit box layouts-work well in real combat.

It is important to note that there is 'some crying involved.' As one of the team's animators, Wright has penned an extensive entry on MANE6's official site detailing how this is done. It is an extremely complex, often heartbreaking journey as the vector-based, soft-edged images from Flash are made ready for the pixel-based, hard-edged world of 2D Fighter Maker 2002. This final step is the long, difficult road each character must travel to make it into the game. Plus, since a pony's legs and torso are the same color, certain attacks just looked like a mess of color. As Wright explained, since ponies lack the T-shaped torso and shoulders of a human, they cannot attack with the sweeps and rotations that make punches look painful.

Early on in this process, the team discovered that animating attacks that felt powerful with a pony's physiology was going to be tricky. All moves have received the MANE6 seal of approval and are drawn up one by one in Flash. This step is where the rubber hits the road.

Fighting is magic my little pony