February 2024 Progress Update

I've realized a little late here that I should really be posting progress updates to Itch as well, since unlike most social media they don't seem to have a character limit. If you missed updates for the previous 3 months, you can view the blogs here:

November 2023 Update
December 2023 Update 
January 2024 Update

February 2024 Update

Hey again. I hope you're doing well. I'll jump into the normal updates in a moment, but if you'll allow me to take a brief little detour before that...

When I first starting working on Tales From the Herd, I had very little experience with game development. And while it's always been an interest of mine, apparently reading a bunch of news stories and Wikipedia articles about game development does not supplement the experience of actually working on one... and what I mean to say by that, is I may have estimated my timeframe incorrectly.

I want to get Tales From the Herd into your hands as soon as I can, but I also care deeply about the game's presentation. And the truth is, getting it up to my par of quality is taking longer than expected. Because of this, I've decided to let go of an April release window for Milestone Build 1.

I know this isn't great news to hear, and unfortunately I don't even have an updated release window to provide. But I think the release of the first Milestone Build carries a special weight that can't be ignored – I want it to feel "worth it". I don't want to rush your first dive into this world.

So no payments, no release of the first Milestone Build until I feel it's absolutely ready. There will be an announcement in advanced when I know that's the case.

And with the sad stuff out of the way... let's talk about the progress I've made since last month.

Getting to the Village

Atlas Station is officially connected to the village. What's more, is that thanks to my dialogue system I ranted about for an insane amount of time last month, is that creating, deleting, and selecting villages to visit all happens in normal conversation. I'm really trying to make this world feel as immersive as it can, and so handling all of these functions in a naturalistic way – say, like speaking to a pony at the station's ticket counter about it – is important to me. And one new way I've made to help me do that is:

Response Lists

I don't blame you if you'd groan at the thought of more dialogue tech discussion, so I'll just keep this one short and sweet. When you need to access or delete one of your villages, you do so through a response list: a cataloged list of memories in a pony's brain. In this case, that's the name of your villages. 

This is one application for the feature, but you can imagine more, like a shop keeper listing items for sale or something. The cliff notes version of its development, was that it was a pain in the ass. Moving on.

Realms

This was a task I dreaded handling. When you "create" a realm, what actually happens is it only generates the basic info for it, then saves that to a file. It's when you leave the train station that that info actually needs to be put to use; so began the tedious work of transporting data between one scene into the next.

However in addition to exactly that happening now, scenes also save their "last known realm data". This is because I don't want to force you to have to go through Atlas Station every time you boot the game, and will instead let you go straight through to your last played village. This makes testing on my end a lot easier too, since I can just directly playtest any open scene.

Bug Fixing / Organization 

As you can see in the image at the top of this post, I did find a little time to work on some new art assets. But as this game grows in scope, it really feels harder and harder to escape constantly finding things that need fixing. I had to fix the response radial menu from floating off into space every time you paused and un-paused the game. And prevent one of the characters from forgetting who you are, 15 seconds after meeting you. I figured out you can ice-skate away from the train if you hold the gallop button while deboarding, and had to patch that up. Not to mention the endless trouble that handling data between scenes has presented me with. It's overwhelming, and somewhere in the middle of all of that work is when I had the realization that April was a rather optimistic forecast for the Milestone Build.

A Random Side Project...

If you're the creative type, I'm sure the feeling of wanting to divert your attention away from a big, exhausting project towards a smaller and more "fun" experiment is a familiar one. For me, that's been this:

That's it. It's just cute, and it makes me happy.

Coming Up...

Again, sorry about the news of abandoning the Milestone Build's release date. I love this game (and ponies in general) so dearly, but I'd be lying if I said it hasn't been incredibly stressful. Regardless though, I promise to continue working diligently on it, and hopefully when it's finally in your hands all of that effort will show. 

The village itself remains my primary focus. And while it isn't glamorous work, cleaning up the rough spots in my code and design I think will go a long way for more stable development in the future. Especially now that I have like, thousands of assets.

Anyway, thank you for stopping by. I hope to see you around!