February 2025 Update – Looking Sharp

Hi! Another month of progress for you here, and a pretty good deal of it at that – I'm glad things seem to be going at a steady pace again. And that may just be because finally, after over a year of updates, I feel like the publication of Milestone Build 1 is finally in sight. I don't intend to be working on any big new features for the next month or two, and instead just focusing on rigorous playtesting and bug fixes. Hopefully this means the build will be in your hands very soon!

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 month out. An announcement will be made when a release date has been selected.

Cosmetic Rewards

Last month I talked about the little gem hunt you can play in the village, and wanting to implement some kind of reward system for that. Lo and behold, your hard earned gems can now be spent at any time in a small shop accessible from the main menu:

These rewards and the gems used to purchase them are available at any time to you, in any of your villages. The cosmetics themselves are a mix of items that have appeared in earlier dev logs, in my gamejam title, The Legend of Mareghoul, new original outfits, and of course: as little nods to the show and fandom we love. You'll see them throughout this update!

As much as I wish I could say setting all of these items up to be worn by ponies was easy, it actually involved quite a bit more work than I expected. For one thing, not every item of the same type has the same rules: e.g., most of the hats cover your pony's mane, but some – say, like a crown – shouldn't cover it at all. So I've basically designed a tagging system that each item uses, that the game can then react accordingly to.

The game currently also features 20+ unique animations, and for each of these I need to setup and make sure all attire options animate right. That's a hat, neck item, bags, chest item, etc., for every jump, gallop, slide, and kick in the game. This is even more of a pain for special cases like shirts, which don't just animate on the chest, but with bending sleeves, too.

If I've done my work properly, none of this stuff will likely even get noticed. But that's my hope! I want these ponies and this world to feel as natural to the player as possible.

Rare Gems 

So one way to collect gems is to get information of their whereabouts from the other pony in the village with you; but there are a few gems that she will never tell you about. These are in more hidden locations around the village, more valuable once collected, and will require a little more exploration and curiosity.

I don't want to just spoil that search for you obviously, but I can show a hint. Also worth mentioning is that one in particular is really obscured, and I'm curious to see how quickly players dig that one up.

Schedules

You wouldn't typically expect a person to do the same thing all the time, especially if it doesn't involve sleeping. Well thanks to a new part of my ponies' brains, they don't have to.

When you visit Violet Spade's camp in the village, what exactly is occurring there will change based on the time you arrive. She may be a hardworking pony, but Violet will eventually start to get sleepy, and lay down for some rest. There's no trickery, either: you can watch her fall asleep (at the cost of being a little creepy) in real-time, and if you wake her up to talk, she'll take a few minutes to drift back off again.

When I do need tricks, another new script allows me to postpone these scheduled events until they're off camera. This is a tried and tested method games have been using for decades, and allows me to schedule much larger changes and events, without necessitating the need for a complex animation 99% of players wouldn't see anyway. Granted, I'd still like to avoid using this whenever I can in the final game; but it's a nice bit of extra security to have.

Dynamic Shadows

Another in a long list of features that made an appearance in the reveal trailer, but weren't nearly put together enough at the time to function on their own are dynamic shadows.

These watch nearby light sources, and reveal themselves under characters and objects when appropriate. As you can see above, they also flicker a little from natural lights like this campfire.

These shadows automatically stop rendering when off-camera, update their appearance based on the current time of day (they're barely visible in daylight); ponies themselves will even actually render up to four shadows simultaneously, all from separate light sources.

I think it's pretty cool looking, but also recognize that it's probably one of those "neat, but not necessary" features. So if you're playing on a more lightweight machine, there is a setting to adjust dynamic shadows between "off", "characters only", and "characters and objects". And of course like all settings in the game, this can be adjusted on the fly without restarting.

Smarter Camera

Tales From the Herd used to only have a sort of "lazy follow" camera that drags behind the player when they're moving fast, to make it feel more natural or whatever. But since this update, you'll actually be given a choice between that style, or a newer "smarter" style of following, where galloping will actually make the camera lead a little ahead of your pony, so it's easier to see what's coming before you run into it.

Here's what galloping looks like with the old camera:

And here's the same scenario, but with this new camera setting enabled: 

You can see that it allows for a noticeable improvement in visibility when running around!

Smarter Load Screen 

A simple, but helpful new feature. See originally my "splash screen", the first thing you see when booting the game up, would only ever load the train station. However, if the last place you played in was a village – which, I figure in most cases will be – this boot screen will now load and take you straight there.

Furthermore, a little notice in the bottom-right corner of the screen will now show that the game's loading, if that process takes more than a few seconds. I have a more ambitious plan for hiding most load screens in the final game, but for now, this feels somewhat necessary.

Drawing with a Controller

Yeah, you can do that now! This brings the controller to complete parity with a mouse & keyboard (except when you need to type something in, like naming a village or pony). It's unlikely to be a surprise to anyone that I opted to have the cursor controlled by the right analog stick here, but if you wanna get wild and switch that to the d-pad or something, you're free to.

It works surprisingly well. I feel like in some ways, it actually feels smoother than trying to draw with a mouse:

Slide Pickups

Sliding is something I've had in the game for a while that just sort of looks cool, with no further application. But I think I've finally found one actual advantage to sliding:

  So under normal circumstances, you're travelling too fast to grab items off of the ground when galloping. However while sliding, with speed that matches a full gallop, you can now actually quickly nab stuff off the ground if you time it right. It's probably the trickiest input to handle in the game right now, but because it's completely optional and will only ever save you like 1 second, I don't mind that being the case. Could be a strat for speed-running though I guess!

Oh in a similar vein, crouching now actually lets you crawl underneath things in the game.

Floating Flora

The lilies in the pond in town now move away from you in a somewhat realistic manner now, instead of just being frozen in place. This isn't a simple collision either, but an actual force that's attempting to emulate the effect of a character or object creating ripples in the water that expand outward.

Misc. 

As always, this month came with a bevy of bug fixes and polish, too. Some of those include:

• Characters will now greet one another on occasion based on the actual time of day. Saying "good morning" and "good evening", as an example.
• Hints can now be toggled on and off in the settings.
• Fixed an issue where if you would put your map away, you could actually walk like an acre to the south and see the physical map hovering over the village.
• Fixed creating a new village with a time between 12:00 to 12:59 am, and the game getting that confused as pm.
• If you use "skip player responses", I fixed an issue where that would skip even the ESSENTIAL responses, like when you need to type in the name of a new village, or select an item from a dialogue list.
• Fixed a bizarre bug where a tree you've already bucked would just randomly play the buck sound effect again, after returning to it later.

Coming Up...

Okay so like I mentioned, development on Milestone Build 1 is finally moving away from additional features, and instead more towards making sure everything is working properly and in good shape. I've got a couple little touches I want to add here or there, but I expect March to be primarily concerned with testing and squashing the last of the known bugs I have. After that, I will likely start playtesting to a small group of family and close friends, and figuring out how to work with the Steam API so I can actually get game files onto the store page.

But after that – you will finally be able to explore this world yourself! Like I've said before, I'm not going to just shadow drop the build and surprise charge everyone in the Wayfinder tier; I've still got work to do next month, and proceeding that, whenever I become confident enough for a launch, you will get a date and full notice at least a week in advanced.

So the first playable build is finally visible on the horizon!