January 2025 Update – Questing

Here's the first update of the new year, and I'm pretty happy with the momentum I've regained in the last month... especially after 2024 ending in a bit of a slump. No point in wasting more time getting around to it, so let's talk about what's new in the village!

Oh also, a lot of the work this month went into designing a character, their dialogue, and the quests they'll send you on as a player – so if you'd rather experience that for yourself at launch without spoilers, maybe skip the read this month!

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.

Gem Collecting

Last month I talked about giving you, the player, a little bit more to do than just explore in milestone build 1. I talked about the setup of introducing you to the map, leading you to a pony, and for her to eventually be a sort of guide for your experience out in the village.

Well, 'eventually' has come to pass, and Violet Spade now has a job for you.

To Violet, the gems she comes across aren't even worth putting in her bag, and hunting down the dregs of her fieldwork might at first seem like a pointless task. But in spite of its simplicity, this job has a couple not-so-subtle purposes for the player: one is that it forces you to explore the village's open expanse, and hopefully familiarizing you with its layout. The second is to highly encourage use of the map's features, its most standout of such being able to draw notes onto it, which of course I've already discussed.

Incredible drawings I've made here, I know.

The gem hunts Violet sends you on grow in complexity, until eventually, (spoiler alert), she'll describe some of the gem's locations in description of their surroundings, rather than a simple coordinate. This too, should encourage drawing on the map for navigation, as you might not otherwise know the location she describes.

And don't worry, these gems won't be worthless once you collect them. I have plans to offer in-game rewards for them, likely a variety of fun attire your pony can wear. Expect to hear more about that soon!

New Shaders and Effects

So you want to let the player know something's important, can be picked up, but also don't want to have an annoying pop-up every time they're close to an object like this. Enter the humble shader.

If you're not aware, a shader is a tool used in game design to create (predominately) visual effects, whether that be to make an object shine like that map, flora to blow in the wind like that tree, or I'm sure, a ton of other more advanced things that Tales From the Herd just doesn't have the need for right now.

Other than also shining this way, the gems you collect also make use of new particle effects and animation to vanish in kind of a fun and magic-y way, rather than just disappear once they're in your pony's mouth.

Tutorials and Hints

As much as I hate breaking immersion, there's really no way to tell the player how to open the map without explaining the key on their keyboard they need to press. Considering this, there is now a pretty encompassing set of tips that will guide you from your first journey to a village, though they only appear when absolutely relevant.

And like everything else in this game, the hint system has grown in flexibility since its conception, and can now even chain together multiple instructions for the more complex actions.

And if you're a purist, not to worry – I do fully intend to make hints something you can turn off entirely from the game's settings.

Updated Pause Menu 

All this talk about each village having its own seed, and how you can share this code with your friends for them to visit it and I've forgotten something crucial: that seed wasn't even visible in the game lol. Now, pausing the game in the village will show two new pieces of information: your current village code at the top, and the total gems you've collected between all of your villages.

Oh and for added convenience, you can click the code for it to flash green and copy itself directly to your pasteboard. How quaint!

New Dialogue and Lore

A muscle I haven't really gotten to work on recently in Tales From the Herd is that of writing, but with the introduction of our new friend in the village, this has changed. This month I've written a little over 7 pages of dialogue for Violet, which I think is more impressive than it sounds when considering how I have to structure dialogue in Tales From the Herd. I mean what technically goes into it is like, incomprehensible compared to what the game actually spits out. Just look at what an instance of four words in-game looks like behind the scenes:

0 : [?/Hmm. Let me think...
/[i]Did[r] I see any...?
/Right, gems...]
[if/{{"!self"/The gems are gone/Bool}>0}/[redirect/3]]

I also don't really want to just drop all of the dialogue on you here, without ceremony – but suffice it to say that a big chunk of January was fleshing out Violet as a character, designing her quests, and performing rigorous (and boring) tests.

Why are there Holes in the Ground... 

I've run into no shortage of bugs on this project, but last month I dealt with one of the most strange and annoying yet. My grass tiles started showing random holes in between them...

This was strangest because I never remembered seeing this issue on my last PC, but recently after I switched to another monitor and PC, these lines started appearing everywhere. Conventional wisdom led me to installing a pixel perfect camera in the game – a tool developed by Unity to make sure every pixel in your game is displayed properly, on any device or resolution – but then this led to another problem where my zoom was broken. Okay sure, I can make a new zoom function, but now if it's in zoomed by anything not divisible by 2, the holes return, and when every step of the zoom IS divisible by 2, everything's super choppy, and just on and on and on and –

Turns out, the solution was rather simple. I mean I refused to believe something was wrong with the grass tiles themselves, because they shared the same exact dimensions and settings as every other tile in the game, but recreating them did fix the problem.

The consequence of that was that my village's grass tiles needed to be entirely repainted again with the new tiles – approximately all 20,480 of them. Yeah, I was a rookie back when I made all of these acres, and manually dropped in every single grass tile, but I'm not as much as a rookie now! "Let's just design a script to do it", I think to myself.

Tile Randomization

So I did just that, the acres fill themselves with grass. Furthermore, it uses your village's code / seed to randomize the ground, so the placement of every blade of grass is unironically unique to your village. Would anyone notice this if I hadn't said anything? Probably not. Still think it's cool, though.

(Pictured: the exact same acre's grass and how it appears between two separate villages)

Bug Fixes and Polish

Working all day to fix such a ridiculous bug segues great into my final section, which is that January saw a larger than usual amount of fixes in general. Some of the "highlights" being:

You can no longer put characters like ':' in your village name, because Windows apparently HATES when you name a file with that.

Prevented gems from choosing a location to spawn in that is outside of the bounds of what I provided for them (I'm bad at math).

Fixed Violet Spade just like, forgetting all of her memories after restarting the game.

Fixed the player character's first name from being saved as their first name + last name, so they're like: "Hello, my name is John Smith Smith”.

Fixed an issue with my so-called "randomization", where the 4th and 6th gems to collect for the day would spawn right on top of each other.

And a few, more boring bugs. Oh! And one more final thing I was able to do this month was upload another short video, which I had been neglecting for a while. These are fun, and I hope to keep on top of that this year.

Coming Up...

Part of the reason I did so much bug-fixing this month is that we're actually sort of getting close to the release of milestone build 1! I hope. While not the most exhilarating thing in the world, the gem hunts are actually an infinitely generatable quest, and once I bring in some rewards to chase down with them, I think this will really start to feel like a game, instead of just an artsy simulation.

Those rewards will definitely be a focus next month, as well as I think rounding out Violet to feel more believable as a character. Poor mare can't even sleep, right now.

As always, thank you so much for your support and sense of community that's been happening in the comments; here, and on places like YouTube of course. I try to read every single one, and it's kind of amazing (knowing the internet) that not once have I needed to remove a comment – everyone's just so nice!

With that said, I'll see you soon!