July 2025 Update - Food Benefits, Detriments; and a Brand New Dialogue Compiler

Hello once again. As work on Milestone Build 2 continues, the village is getting just a little more robust. Apples and mushrooms will be freely available to pick, and now they actually affect the ponies who consume them, instead of just being a cute cosmetic thing. Just avoid the rotten ones!

As a reminder, this Patreon does not charge monthly, but only after the release of "Milestone Builds", of which I am currently working on the 2nd. No release date for this build is known at the moment.

Button Mushrooms

In addition to the apples I talked about last month, you'll soon start to see these little guys sprout up in your next visit to the village. Unlike apples, you don't need to hunt a tree down and then buck it to retrieve them – they can easily be plucked from the earth. However they also contain fewer calories, spoil faster, and you can even accidentally trample them – or perhaps purposely trample them, who am I to judge?

The real difference between these two however are their effects: a brand new system that utilizes the calories I introduced last month to give your pony temporary benefits. These effects are quite simple – don't expect the ability to suddenly double-jump or fly or anything like that – but they're a quick and easy way to help you navigate the world more efficiently.

Eat something rotten however, and not only will that would-be benefit be lost, but it will actually revoke calories from your stomach. So, if you have a little bonus from eating a fresh apple, good for about an hour or so, and then you eat a rotten fruit, you'll lose a significant chunk of the benefit the fresh apple was providing you with. Perhaps even worse, your pony will get a wicked bad tummy ache:

Better Items / Pickup Mechanic

You might've noticed some frustrating things about items and picking them up in Milestone Build 1. One of these frustrations was the lack of animations for picking things up and setting them down while in any stance but standing, which I talked about fixing last month. But I've realized the accuracy of the mechanic is just kind of... bad. So in the new build, you should have a much easier time gauging where items will be picked up from when there are a lot nearby, and exactly where your pony will set them down when done with them.

Also these items are now sorted onto the Objects layer, which ponies and trees and stuff reside on, meaning they will appear "in front" of those things when you'd expect them to, and not just always be flattened to the ground layer.

Also also, your pony will no longer just slide along the ground when picking stuff up while on the move:

Like the new chewing animation, this "quick pickup" animation can be layered on top of others, so the movement of the pony's legs still looks natural while they're performing it. The drawback is that the pony will not lean all the way to the ground, but I think most players will find the compromise worth it, as this feels a bit more natural than the ice-skating pose of Milestone Build 1. And believe me... I tried getting the best of both worlds. Lot of lost hours, there.

Dialogue Compiler

Now here's something different. I decided to get some early work done on a system I've thought about for a long time.

Normally, the way I would write dialogue scripts for this game is to have an external document, write the lines / branches there like how I imagined them to go, the painstakingly copy+paste each one of those lines into the game, on each character. It was scrappy, error-prone, and while it got the job done for the early Prologue builds, I know I was only making my job harder the longer I put a better solution off.

Well, enter this solution:

...It makes sense, I promise.

Basically, I sat down and thought about a simple way of organizing dialogue that would work for me, and then taught Tales From the Herd to understand and convert this into usable in-game dialogue scripts. Like, instantly.

Here's the above script after being imported onto this test character:

With one click, all lines are converted, all player responses connected, and you can even do some whackier things like nesting responses inside one another, or providing character dialogue for when the player doesn't speak. It'll be a huge weight off my shoulders to cut out the middleman like this, frankly.

But it doesn't just affect me and development. This also opens the door for fan-made translations, which is one of the most common feature requests I get for the game. Because the compiler converts from a Markdown text file, which can be edited in basically any text software, this should pave the way for people editing / creating their own dialogue scripts; and by extension, the game's dialogue in other languages.

Now there are still a few kinks to work out, and tests to run, so this for sure isn't the last you'll hear about the system. But I think it's an exciting look at what could be possible in the future.

Oh, and that needlessly complex "Fancy Talk" system I mentioned adding to the game a while ago? Player-made dialogue scripts means you'd have access to all of that, technically. And while I don't quite know how to prevent players from just data-mining all of the game's dialogue this way, or writing a single line that skips an otherwise lengthy and richly detailed quest – might be worth it if someone can get DOOM to boot into a pony's text box. (I kid, it's not that powerful)

Coming Up...

And with that, we're at the end of another month. Like I said, the dialogue compiler is a pretty big deal, so its work will carry over into August I'm sure. And while it's true food provides ponies with effects in my current dev build, there's no way to actually view that in-game, so I might start drafting out some new UI for that, too. All as immersive and non-intrusive for the player as possible, of course.

Otherwise, that about wraps it up for now, and I hope you have a great morning / afternoon / evening! And as always, I appreciate all of the feedback and excitement. It means a lot!