March 2024 Progress Update

Hey there! I hope you've had a good weekend, and hopefully had an opportunity to spend some time with family.

This month I actually spent a little over a week out of the state and away from my PC to visit my own family, so I didn't get as much done on Tales From the Herd as usual. But there has still been some important progress made, starting with perhaps the most notable:

Villages Work

Not in theory, or hypothetically, or in a designated test simulation – in my most recent build, you can visit the village by train and it will generate and organize acres of land based on a seed. You can see a small piece of one in the image up there in the header, where the colored tiles around the grassy areas represent art assets that are still being worked on.

Last update I talked about the challenge of actually getting the player to the village and bringing their information with them, since it's technically a new scene. What I didn't expect to be so difficult was actually getting them back, where the world is already curated before the player enters. This again relates to the "organization" of my project I seem to love going on about, and how best to manage such large and diverse sets of data.

Sparing the details though, I can say that the train is essentially now a revolving door, and the player is free to switch back and forth between their villages and the hub world (Atlas Station) that connects them all.

Depth and Gravity

This is an interesting one. If you've been following the project since WAY BACK you may remember a demo in a test chamber where you could "fall" off of ledges and land on platforms beneath you. This was accomplished by a very sloppy method of essentially splitting all tiles onto three planes or layers, and the player having three sets of colliders that would disable / enable according to what floor they were on.

In hindsight, this was an insanely goofy and limited way of going about it, and by the time the actual itch.io demo came out, gravity and "falling" had been disabled entirely. For a little while, I even considered just leaving it out of the game... after all, people don't typically think about platforming in a top-down game.

But this month, as a more experienced developer, I decided to take another crack at it.

Gone is the three layer limitation, and the premise of the new system is actually quite simple: all floors have a height, all objects and characters have heights, and those objects and characters will fall until their height matches that of a floor beneath them. Simple! ...I mean it was, until walls got involved.

Take this image as an example. This daring mare is technically colliding with 4 unique surfaces – the floor she stands on, the wall "behind" her, the floor far "below" her, and a hidden wall that raises up from that lower floor to the high platform she stands on. To a true 2D game like Tales From the Herd is, none of that stuff in quotes matters. All the engine knows is that she's hitting all of them.

Thanks to now tracking the heights and dimensions of all of this geometry though, the game can pick and choose what collisions actually count. There is a little bubble around the player that will preemptively determine if a wall is going to stop them or not, and temporally disables collision between that wall and the player (or object) if not. That's why this mare can walk right up to the edge when she's on top of the platform, but if she walks off...

The wall she was standing on a moment ago becomes very much real, and will block her from passing through or over it while she falls. Thanks to a smarter use of layer sorting, even her appearance is rendered beneath the wall and platform she was just on a moment ago. I can even use ramps, that calculate the distance of objects on them from their lowest and highest points to determine a constantly lowering or rising object height.

It's a little bit like attempting to trick the engine into thinking it's rendering a 3D space while technically confined to a 2D one; which is great, if you're a stubborn developer who doesn't want to work with any 3D assets.

Cleanup

Last month I did talk about how the constantly expanding scope of my project was beginning to way heavy on my development pipeline, and this was the month I decided to finally do something about that. This meant re-organizing all of the game's files, both inside Unity, and the library of raw assets I've stacked up over a year of development. Finding a random rock or tree is much easier for me now, and even the default script that's opened up when I create one has been updated to better suit my needs.

I also spent a healthy amount of time fixing bugs. This included issues with the UI not updating after the player changes their inputs, and quite a few "special cases" that break the new lists and custom dialogue responses I've added recently, like pausing and un-pausing the game while giving a custom response, or preventing accidental confirmations if the player had changed their talk key.

I know it's not glamourous or interesting work, but these issues will quickly compound on one another, and I think it's best to sort them out as early as possible. The bug tracker is always gaining new additions...

Coming Up...

With the village up and running, the steady work of giving it more assets to fill itself up with marches onward. It's also nice that I can play around with verticality now in these little acres of land, and I'd like to polish up that new gravity system with some animations and such. Oh! And the little side project from last month hasn't been abandoned or anything – but I'll reveal more about that when I have some bigger news.

As always, thank you for your patience, your kind comments, and sharing your excitement about the project with me. I know I say it a lot, but it never becomes any less true: I am very much looking forward to eventually getting this game into your hands, and getting to hear your thoughts.

Until then, more updates to come!