June 2024 Update - Prologue 1.5 is Out Now

Back with another monthly update – and apologies for being a little late, I ended up busier than I was expecting to be last couple of days.

So a new version of Prologue is available right now, but today I also bring somewhat tragic news: after months of hard work on it, and on the many systems surrounding it, I have finally decided to scrap gravity from Tales From the Herd. It was just absolutely consuming my work schedule, and honestly with the amount of bugs it presented, the end of that was never really in sight. It sucks – but it's also felt like a huge weight off of my shoulders, and given me much more time to work on parts of the game that are arguably much more important: like the village itself. And technically, as you can see above, jumping has not been totally eradicated from the game. But more on that in a bit...

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.

The Jump is Dead, Long Live the Jump!

Last month, I was already getting sick of working on gravity, and literally said that I would be back-seating its development. Well, as June kicked off, that did not end up being the case.

For the first week or two, I continued to chase bugs related to the gravity system, haphazardly fixing collision issues with more spaghetti code, only for even more pressing bugs to rear their ugly heads. It all culminated in the construction of a new test scene where I was literally trying to rebuild the game in technical 3D that only appeared as 2D, when I finally had my breaking point. "Wtf am I doing" I thought to myself, as I tried collaborating a 3D physics simulation with a flat world – in a game that was literally just supposed to be about making pony friends.

And so, I've decided to cut my losses. Most of the systems related to gravity have been totally axed: characters and objects being able to fall, floors having "heights", walls having "heights", ramps that connect two floors of different "heights", and calculated drop shadows.

However, not all of the work is totally wasted. Jumping is still very much in the game, it's just a "pretend" jump; meaning it's an animation only, and doesn't actually factor any sort of physics or height differences. You can still hop up onto benches like at Atlas Station, but again, it doesn't change your height or make even higher platforms reachable, it's just a little visual trickery.

If you'd like to try the jumping out for yourself, it's available (along with the new sliding and crouching) in the latest iteration of the itch.io Prologue.

Village Progress

The rest is good news, promise! Take our village here, which has come along quite well I think. There have been several new acres added to the shuffle, that will be randomly spread out in your own village, including the addition of a new acre type: the forest's edge (down along the South edge of the map there). As you might be able to deduce from its foreboding color palette, ponies don't often care to enter this forest – though travelling along the edge may have its benefits, as the flora is completely unique from the rest of the village.

This has brought me up to 12 total acres so far for village generation, where I plan on calling it ready for Milestone Build 1 once I reach 20. That should leave you with quite a few things to explore and visit in the first build! 

Better Sliding

Like you can check out for yourself in Prologue 1.5, sliding has been improved! Sound effects have been added, that will be naturally cut off if you cancel your slide, and a neat little smoke trail now emits from behind your pony's hooves.

It's also been made more flexible, as you can cancel a slide either by tapping the gallop key again, or transition directly to a jump that will also end the slide. None of these actions interrupt your velocity either, so feel free to hop and crouch slide to your heart's content around the village.

Improved Sound Effects

I noticed I wasn't paying enough attention to how sfx sound outside of headphones, and so I tried to update those that felt lackluster when listening to them through a speaker. Audio engineering is still probably one of my weaker traits as a game dev, but I do think they're slowly getting better. And you'd be amazed at what a difference audio gives to the weight and impact of your character's actions.

Better Flora

Plants naturally bend around you now! It's small, but I think this is one of those things where you hardly notice if it's there, but you definitely notice when it's not. You expect bushes and weeds to react to your presence, and so they do, now.

Tons of Bug Fixing and Polish

There have been a lot of changes to how things run under the hood in the last few months, and with that of course have come a slew of bugs. I figured since I need to get ready for launching Prologue 1.5 anyway, it was a good opportunity to catch up with those and make the game presentable. I won't bore you with the details, but this included fixing things like:

• Controllers in general being kind of busted. The right stick no longer seemed to select radial menu options, and the game's UI was no longer reacting to input device changes.
• The mirror menu at the back of Atlas Station acting wonky when closing / opening the pause menu, and certain changes to your pony just... not showing up.
• Cooper no longer ever changing his position in the train station, which made me realize I had accidentally removed "true" randomness at Atlas Station.
• Dialogue being broken enough that you could get NPCs to say your lines back to you. Felt a little like them mocking me, tbh.
• The dang reflection in the mirror, which if you've been following these updates for a while, know has just been a general trouble maker. This time I had realized that it was just refusing to copy many animations, standing like a lifeless plank while your character jumps / crouches / slides.

If you'd like to try out any of the new actions, or even play around with the additional mane / tail / facial hair I added internally a few months back, you can of course do so with the new Prologue demo. The additional controls are as follows:

• Jump: default SPACE / A
• Crouch: default C / Click Left Stick
• Slide: default C / Click Left Stick while galloping
• Buck: default SPACE / A while crouched (Please don't buck Cooper in the face)
• Toggle Sit: default X / Down on D-Pad

If you run into any bugs or issues, please let me know either via email or a DM anywhere I am online. Oh and I'm sorry, but your old pony from Prologue 1.4 will not import if you have one! If that creates a conflict, go to Settings > General > Delete Save Data. There's also a "Locate Save Data" option if you'd like to create a manual backup. 

Coming Up...

The village is my biggest focus – seriously this time. I expect to have those 3 additional forest's edge acres done by the end of July, and would like to implement a system where you just start off in the last spot you were in the village when restarting the game. This is for player convivence as much as it is my own, as running a mile South every time I play test just to see my new assets in action is getting annoying.

The loss of a gravity system hurts; and honestly, I faced something in my real life last month that kind of just disabled my will to work for a few days. But with these things behind me now, I'm feeling a lot better again about development. Trust me when I say that I don't think I've ever put this much effort into a single project before, and that comes from a place of absolute love. Tales From the Herd is incredibly important to me.

Thank you as always, and I hope to see you on the next update.