April 2024 Progress Update

April 2024 Update - New Village Sections, Randomization, and Jumping!

Hello once again. I'm happy to report that progress felt pretty solid this month, with lots of additions and improvements made on both the village as a whole, as well as the player's interactivity with the world.

As a reminder, subscribing as a premium patron will not charge you until the release of the first playable milestone build, which is still at least a few months out. An announcement will be made when a release date has been selected.

Onto the updates!

New Areas of the Village to Explore

Last month I had reached the important milestone of villages successfully generating, and gave them just two acres to be randomly placed around. In this update, I'm pleased with the addition of five additional acres being thrown into the mix, and you can see them all below:

I've developed some new tools that have really helped speed up designing these things, and I'll get into more details about them soon. But hopefully with this overhead view you can really start to imagine how these villages will stitch themselves together. My idea is to make every acre of land stand out enough that you could navigate around your village by the sites alone. Some of these landmarks are more obvious than others: things like the train station, or the overgrown cottage in the bottom left corner. But even the "filler" acres are being designed to include at least one entirely unique landmark.

A lot of new assets were designed for this update in general, including fences, rocks, flora, and structures.

Macro and Micro Randomization

There's this really cool little trick The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (one of my favorite games) pulls: the position of the stars in the night sky are randomized for each player, based on the name of their save file. So when you look up in Clock Town, your sky will literally be different than the one I see; even at the same time of night. It's super subtle, but I've always loved that little hint of personalization to a game's world. Like a universe you've discovered yourself.

I've already talked about how Tales From the Herd's villages randomly cobble themselves together from a 'pool' of puzzle piece-like acres of land – e.g, train track acres can go into other train tracks, rivers into rivers, etc., but another step I've taken towards truly unique villages is randomizing them on micro level as well. That is, when I place an oak tree down in my editor, it will share its appearance with every other oak tree in the village. However when you actually visit the village, all of those trees, bushes, stones, and more will have their colors and appearances randomized based on your village's seed. Actually... it's based on an equation that combines the seed with the object's position, but the details don't really matter; what matters is that even if your village somehow randomly assembles itself in the same exact order as another (extremely unlikely), it will still technically be unique in appearance.

Jumping / Falling 

I started this last month, and was honestly surprised at how smoothly things seemed to go. But BOY did I underestimate what a pain jumping would be.

Without getting too lost in the details, the main issue is that I had originally programmed "falling" to measure itself by the distance an object moves down on the Y axis while not grounded. So you walk off a ledge, become not grounded, are pushed downward, and then your descent is measured by the distance you travel along the Y axis. Seemed to make sense at the time.

Well one huge issue I overlooked is that "falling" isn't the only thing that moves the player around on the Y axis; in fact, they move around the Y axis all the time by pressing W and S on the keyboard. So what was happening was that moving North and South in the game world was actually being interpreted as "falling" up and down respectively. So jumping North would greatly extend the character's jump, and jumping South would cut it short because of the momentum they already carried in that direction. You have to remember, I've built this game to be truly 2D, so to the code walking and "falling" down on the Y axis mean the exact same thing.

Well it did, anyway. I can say now however that ponies are free to jump along to their heart's content in any direction, and their journey in the air will be the same length of time regardless. This stuff can still be a little finicky near walls, so I'm sure I'll be spending more time on it next month. But it's nice to be able to hop up onto the bench with Cooper and have a more natural conversation with him now.

And don't even get me STARTED on how difficult it was to make characters' drop shadows track beneath them during jumps...

Random

Obviously I'm trimming the fat a bit on these updates, there were of course a handful of new bugs and optimizations I've made. Also, this is only somewhat related to the game, but I finally got around to drawing the big tree library during Summer time:

This was a fun project I've worked on over the years, where I'd draw this location in each of the four seasons. All of them can be found on social media.

Coming Up... 

More acres are coming to the village naturally, with additional assets and things to explore (and climb on, now). To stop myself from spending another 8 months on this stuff, I think the villages in Milestone Build 1 will be roughly half the size of those at launch, but they'll still be plenty to see. As mentioned, jumping and gravity still needs some polish, and I think I'd start to look at bringing crawling and sliding into the mix. I guess ultimately we'll see!