May 2024 Update - More Physics, Gravity Stuff, Sliding – and the Return of a Side Project

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Here we are once again; I hope things have been well for you.

The overwhelming focus of work on the game this month has continued to be on gravity and jumping, which I'll have a note about in a second. But attention has also been given to another acrobatic feet your pony can perform with sliding, and to the little side project I like to mess with when Tales From the Herd is frustrating me. I'll talk about that at the end, but first, the situation with gravity.

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Gravity... Again...

Okay, I've learned a lot – and if I were starting over, I'm sure there are quite a few things I'd do differently. But I'm not starting over, and so instead of come to a bit of a crossroads: try as a I might, I have not been able to polish the gravity system as much as I want it to be. Every time I fix a weird jitter in the shadow, or a particular set of walls that seems to just outright ignore collisions with the player, a dozen more things break somewhere else in the whole tangled mess that gravity has become. And it's getting harder and harder to justify spending all of this time on it.

SO, here is my plan: backseat gravity development a little, and instead just head into Milestone Build 1 with the expectation that it may not quite be up to snuff. As the Milestone Builds are early access and intended to be experimental anyway, I think they're also a good opportunity to get feedback on systems I don't have 100% faith in. If you or anyone else who tries that experimental build doesn't like the feel of it, and / or thinks it does very little to enrich the overall experience, I will be fine with making cuts.

During this experimental phase however, also know I've put in certain safety measures to prevent complete game-breaking scenarios. Say like, if you end up falling into the void, your pony will be reset to their last "safe" position, and there is also a new "help" tab from the pause menu with the big red emergency button option of leaving your village all together and instantly returning to the train station.

Having bemoaned the situation enough however, I can at least say that improvements have been made to the feel of a jump arc, the shadow that tracks underneath ponies, and objects have been themselves gifted with the ability to plummet towards the abyss.

Sliding / Crouching

In the initial Tales From the Herd reveal trailer, I teased your pony being able to creep around on the ground and crawl under stuff. Secretly, one of the biggest reasons why I even wanted to add crouching into a top-down game in the first place was to do this:

Heck yeah, crouch sliding.

Crouch sliding, as you might imagine, is triggered by hitting the crouch button in the middle of sprinting / galloping. If you continue to hold the gallop button through a slide, your pony will just transition right back into a gallop without loss of speed, but if you release the button, you will instead transition into a crouch. You can also do 180s. Does it serve a real purpose right now? No. But it does look and feel pretty sweet, dude. Definitely needs some smoke / particle effects, though.

Oh and crouching, sitting, and jumping have all of course been added to the input settings screen for you to modify to your heart's content.

I've also added a couple new acres of land to the village, but want to keep a little mystery to their appearance! One at least does make what I'd consider a pretty clear fandom homage...

Itty-Bitty Pony & Me!

Yeah... it's a working title, but that's the little pony pet project I've been quietly tinkering with on the side. I think the inspiration for this project is obvious, and I'll say I'm taking great care in simulating the physicality of owning a cute device with a tiny digital horse on it, which I think has a very distinct charm. Here's some footage:

Coming Up...

I wish I had something flashy to mention for next month, but it'll probably just be more of the same: trying to keep up with bugs, adding more parts of the village in, then discovering more bugs. Taking a guess, I'd say I have about half of the acres necessary for what I'd consider a complete village in Milestone Build 1... so we're getting there, promise. And where the silly little side project goes next is anyone's guess.

Thanks for stopping by – and as always, for your patience and support!