August 2024 Update - The First Complete Village!

Hello! Here we are once more, with another update on Tales From the Herd – and this is exciting, because complete villages now generate in my development build! There are 20 unique acres of land (and now water), each 32 x 32 tiles in size, meaning in Milestone Build 1 you will have about 20,480 tiles of space to frolic around in when it eventually launches. And while there's still plenty for me to do before that launch, this feels like a pretty big achievement to have reached; and a bit of a relief if I'm being honest!

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.

Swimming

I had mentioned last month that I was putting off work on a number of village acres simply because they had water in them, and I hadn't even begun to figure out how to work with the mechanics of that. Perhaps appropriately for the last month of summer, this is almost all August ended up being about for me, as I worked to avoid having to put invisible walls up around any body of water. Here is the result:

I guess swimming is one of those "wouldn't be the end of the world if it didn't make the cut" sort of things, but I'm going through great lengths to make everything in this world seem natural – and horses are natural swimmers, after all!

Mechanically, swimming works how you'd imagine it to. The way your character handles is a little "heavier" feeling, and most actions like resting, crouching, etc., are blocked. Some surfaces like the dock on the lakeshore also cannot be stepped onto from the water, and are approachable only from higher ground. There is potential here for small amounts of platforming, perhaps where my months long experiment with gravity failed me.

Speaking of spending too long on a feature, I almost got stuck up on another frustrating aspect of the game design here – the water was originally supposed to be semi-translucent. I even animated pony's little legs kicking to keep themselves afloat, but, as you can see, the water is currently opaque. This is because there seems to be a particular way that transparent materials render on top of one another in Unity.

You see to achieve the effect of a pony looking like they're partially submerged, I actually tilt their entire bodies so that they "clip" halfway through the water / ground texture. This is technically a 3D rotation, but it's such a slight angle (less than 1 degree iirc) that I don't imagine anyone would ever notice a change in the character's dimensions. However, attempting to use this technique with transparent water always fails, as the sprite-based character consistently seems to render on top.

Forgive my technical whining for a moment, but I've tried changing the render queue of the water's shader, using masks to simulate the effect of partial submerging without needing to clip any materials through each other, and even making water essentially one big screen that renders the pixels behind it – but nothing looked satisfactory. So, to prevent this becoming another incredibly long and strange use of my time like gravity was, I've made piece with having opaque water.

Having said that, if you're really comfortable with Unity / material and shading rendering and think you might have a solution, hit me up. I would love to eventually bring the water transparency back.

Lakeshore Acres

Rounding off the last border of the village is the lakeshore, which necessitated some new assets:

For fans of long walks on the beaches, the lakeshore spans from the train tracks up North, to the forest down South, where muddy grass and algae keep you from drifting too far. It can be pretty relaxing to just splash your hooves along the edge of the water, listening to lake's gentle tides along the way.

Including the pond, 5 new watery acres have been added to the village generation, rounding out the complete Milestone Build 1 village like I mentioned earlier. And I think I already said this in a previous update, but the MB1 village is about half the size of what I'm intending for the official Steam launch. When MB1 is ready to launch first, I'll make a summarizing post about what you can (and can't) expect to see in this build.

Prologue Version 1.5.1

This is about the smallest update you will probably ever see, but I noticed a fairly critical bug in the game's character customization. For some reason, changing the length of your side mane seemed to break you being able to ever change the length again, so I made sure this was fixed. It's a fairly niche error, and so I can't imagine a ton of people experienced it, but if you had played the prologue on itch and ran into this, I'm sorry; but it's fixed!

The Demo Mechanic / Shorts

If you hadn't caught it, I actually uploaded a short video demonstrating the water earlier this month on YouTube and now TikTok. This is a great way to see the new assets and sfx in action, but it also led me to creating a kind of neat development tool. Instead of needing to stich together multiple shots to show the layers of assets / effects that going into making a new mechanic, I can easily toggle them on or off with a single in-game button press. I call them "Demo Events", and you will probably see them in action again, as I think short little videos like that really help break up these more comprehensive development logs.

Yeah, water was probably about 90% of my development time this month, but it had to be done! And with that finished, and no more village acres needing to be created, you might be asking yourself: what's next?

Coming Up...

I've honestly been excited to work on the realtime day / night cycle for a while now, and happy to dedicate next month almost entirely to it. If you're not yet aware, Tales From the Herd is going to have an actual 24 hour day / night cycle based on your local time, and seamlessly transition between the two. I mean I write that with confidence, but I can almost guarantee that figuring it out will also cause me caffeine desperation and many a headache.

Never the less, unlike weird pseudo-3D gravity, the day cycle is crucial to Tales From the Herd, so I will be back in September with my progress on it. As always, hope to see you there!