2024: Year In Review

Just over a year ago, I released the official reveal trailer of Tales From the Herd. Having extremely limited programming, animating, and game design skills, for some reason I thought I was ready to handle creating a full-scale adventure / narrative / life-sim video game by myself. Dream big, right?

Well the obvious reality is that I've seriously misjudged the amount of work that would be; which, from what I've seen, is a bit of a theme for newbie indie developers.

Having said that, I don't think that's any reason to undercut the amount of work I've accomplished on this project, which frankly far exceeds the amount of effort I've ever exerted on anything before – whether that be as a hobby, for school, or even a literal paying job. And I think that's the important part of all of this: despite the amount of work and time Tales From the Herd has demanded, despite all of the roadblocks I've encountered (there were NO shortage of roadblocks...), my love and commitment for the project has remained. And I can tell you, it will throughout 2025, as well.

But I understand that just over a year with no new playable content or even another trailer may make it hard to remain patient. I mean, I guess we haven't quite reached Hollow Knight: Silksong levels yet, but I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the game's progress so far all the same. Here are what I consider the "biggest" development milestones:

Realms and Villages

The reveal trailer, for all of its grandeur, is essentially a movie set. Everywhere I was "shooting" I made sure to get looking nice and polished, by take ten paces to the right of any frame, and your character would probably fall into an infinite void. Thus gave me my first development hurdle: making an actual world.

There are two layers I considered to this problem: the first was a technical one, as I had only ever run scenes in the game one at a time, and with no connection to one another. And since I want the game to feel as seamless as possible, I needed to develop a way to carry characters between these scenes like they weren't scenes at all, but instead interconnected regions of a world.

This led me to creating a system called "realms", which is like a collection of high level data that distinguishes regions by player controlled information, not just which scene they're in. Things like the village name, its seed (more on that in a bit), the local time, etc.. This data can also be easily accessed from the game or Windows, so that players can manually copy, move, or delete it, if need be.

The second layer was not so cerebral: I needed to make a ton of assets. Each village is composed of "acres", square jigsaw pieces that randomly fit together with one another, of which the game currently has 20. When fit together, that's roughly 20,480 ponies standing shoulder-to-shoulder with one another; and villages in the final game will be even bigger!

And while gameplay is limited in this current iteration of the village, I have made a conscious effort to give the world a believable tactility: running through bushes and weeds will cause the foliage to shake and bend, trees will drop branches when their trunks are bucked, and slipping into a pond will cause a splash and allow your pony to swim. It might be limited as a game right now, but as a simulation at least, I think it's fairing well.

Seeds and Random Generation

These villages weren't going to generate themselves; and so, another big task was designing a process to handle that.

Chances are you've run into the term 'seed' before in games, especially if you've played the ever popular genre of roguelikes (I suppose the biggest game on Earth, Minecraft, would also be a sound example). But in short, computers aren't really capable of generating true, literal randomness, and instead use something called a seed (a string of numbers basically) to simulate that randomness. Normally this process is hidden, but sometimes it's actually helpful for developers to expose this process to the player.

In Tales From the Herd for example, you can choose to manually enter this seed, which might just be one that your friend uses, too. That way, the normally "random" generation of your village will actually be entirely predictable – down to even the shade of a particular tree's canopy, or the placement of sunflowers on the ground. Below you can see two examples: the same exact acre, but with small variances in the plant sprites and colors just based on a different seed.

Smarter Ponies

The dialogue system is something I've always been proud of in Tales From the Herd, but it was also probably some of my messiest code. The basic idea was that you should be able to engage in conversation with another pony regardless of what physical action you're performing, because that's just how life works. You know, the world doesn't pause for two people to stop everything they're doing and have a conversation.

Cool idea on paper, but after overhauling basically the entire system like 3 or 4 times, I started to realize why more developers don't do dialogue this way.

So to help stay organized, I took inspiration from reality, and essentially gave ponies "brains". This is a central directory that attaches to virtually all functions of the pony, not only keeping things neat and organized in their own little subsections, but also quickly allowing any part of a pony's "brain" to communicate with another. Because as it turns out, they need to communicate with each other all the time.

I also fleshed out a system that very early on was basically only designed to allow characters to call each other by their names and understand pronouns, but ended up becoming a way more powerful tool than first imagined. I call it "Fancy Talk", and it allows simple text to be converted in real time to names of ponies and places, start and check on quests, recall memories, allow custom player-typed responses, and even allow for simple programming – all inside of a text box.

The system is much too detailed (and probably boring) to cover here, but I did a more in-depth writeup of its potential back in January, if you're interested. I would love to find a way to one day get this system into player hands, and see what they could come up with.

Time and Light

Like I mentioned about the simulation aspect of this game coming along nicely, each village also obeys the law of time and night & day. Time progresses as it does in real life, but, when you create a village you are given the option to offset that schedule; kind of like manually controlling the world's time zone.

In that month's blog, I described approaching game design as an artist first, and the sort of corner it backed me into with the shadows. Basically, I had to develop a system to update all of the shadows in the world in real-time, as the light shifted throughout the day. Which, silver lining, also led to me creating better optimizations for only rendering what was necessary (in view of the camera).

I think the fireflies that come out at night are really cute, too.

Maps and Doodling

Most recently, I've added a map to Tales From the Herd – which functions somewhat "non-traditionally".

Of course, like villages themselves, each map is unique and has to know how to stitch itself together. But the big "thing" I developed to make these maps standout was a drawing system, allowing players to freely sketch ideas, notes, and guidelines all over.

In that blog, I bemoaned how little faith modern games seem to have in our ability to navigate and figure things out for ourselves, which I show resistance to in this DIY approach to maps. And players may hate it and I'll have to pivot, who's to say. But it's definitely something I wanted to try out.

Etc....

That may be all of the "big" things I can think of from this year, but that doesn't even count for all of the bug fixes, animations, art, and smaller snippets of code developed. Swimming was fun, and in the very last post of the year I talked about adding a new character and giving the player something to do once they're in the village. And while time has mostly healed the wound, the months of labor spent on a full fledged gravity system before dropping it still brings the echo of a sting.

But that's game dev, I guess. Learned a lot of lessons in 2024, and as I hope you'll agree, got a lot done, too. In the beginning of the year I'm not so sure I was ready to consider myself an actual developer, but all of this experience has certainly changed that. And I'm excited to see where else this "little" pony project will lead me in 2025!

As always, I have you and the community to thank for the support. And so I hope next year is a great one for all of us, and that your endeavors – whether pony related or not – go well. Stay safe, enjoy your passions, and I'll see you again soon!