December 2023 Update - Seeds, Villages, and Pony Brains

Hey there! I hope you've had a nice holiday, and are looking forward to the new year.  I've been pretty busy between the game, work, and trying to spend time with family, but have made some progress to report on for Tales From the Herd all the same. Some of this stuff might be pretty boring, but if you're interested in the development side of things, let's jump right into the big one:

Village Generation

This is something I knew would be a hurdle at the end of last month, and while it has involved a lot of research, code, scrapped code, and then new code – I am pretty happy with the progress so far.

Take that image up there. That is a (very rough) visualization program I've made to demonstrate the creation of a village, as well as a tool to help me refine the code in a rapid-test environment. The philosophy behind the generation is relatively simple: give it a seed – a string of random numbers (or characters) – and then the program will follow through a "checklist" of sorts to randomly create your village's layout, based on that seed. Those stars on the map might represent landmarks you've already seen: like the town hall, or library from the trailer. And the open ended nature of this environment means that these landmarks can be arranged in pretty much any fashion, giving a random element to every village on a macro level, while still allowing me as an artist and designer to create interesting environments at a micro level. 

I'm sure you've heard the term "seed" in the sense of a mechanic, as it is used in a ton of games with random elements; but in case you're unsure of how it works, using a specific seed will always guarantee the same outcome in random generation. You don't have to select one of course, if you want a "true" random experience, but one of the most important aspects to me of actually letting you set the seed is that sharing villages between players – at least, in a limited sense – will be a feature available at launch, since you only need to enter another village's seed.

The generator can do some other interesting things like have its width and height adjusted, and I'm looking into it generating more advanced features like rivers; but for now, I don't want to drag this section on for too long.

Organized Pony Brains

In case I haven't made this clear yet, I am a novice coder. Working on this game has already taught me so much about coding and game development, and I'm sure I will continue to learn all throughout my time with this project. But being frank – I've made some screwups. 

One of my regrets has been just how sloppy the ponies themselves are organized, as game objects. So this month I took some time to try and rectify that, leading to me giving them brain directories: like a... little filing cabinet with color coded tabs and what not organizing all of the scripts on a pony. This was big for me because getting references from one script to the other in the past was an often complicated affair of things like reaching out to an object, then its 3rd child object, getting a component on that child, writing them a letter in the mail and then waiting 5 - 7 business days for a method to change the pony's mane color to green. It was gross, overcomplicated, and fragile.

Well now getting references and calling methods on other pony scripts is as easy as typing "brain.dialogue.Whatever()". This has not only helped for clarity, but given me the courage to go back and fix up some other blunders: like how you can now simply drag-and-drop a NPC pony into the scene, and they're already wired up and ready to interact with the player, where previously they would need quite a bit of setup work.

While this is all great, and will likely help future development a lot, it also initially broke a staggering amount of code... which is my hubris for gluing everything together so clumsily. So while I had spent a decent amount of my time on cleanup, I at least encountered some pretty funny bugs along the way. My favorites were definitely the ghost pony, and being able to talk with your own reflection; both of which you can admire below:

Memories

Here's an interesting little piece of tech I've started developing: ponies can remember things now. Currently, this is used in conversation so that you can meet the new character at Atlas Station, and then go talk to Cooper to get his perspective on this other pony. These memories are of course saved between sessions, as well. Maybe a simple implementation, but you can imagine what sort of things a feature like this could be used for in the future.

Plan B Assets

Naturally, the legal situation has remained on my mind. I don't want to go into too much detail here (full blog post on my thoughts), but suffice it to say that this month work was made to... better arm myself for any potential trouble. I'm sure this will remain to be an ongoing discussion surrounding the game, but one point I want to make clear is that this project may suddenly change appearance. It's always a possibility, and I don't want to have the rug swept out from under you if you're only interested in playing alongside say... Eventide Spark as she appears in her current form. Something to keep in mind if you're looking at supporting.

FAQ

I've also updated the Steam community page to contain a FAQ – so check that out here if interested, and I'll try to keep it updated as more questions and concerns come in.

Coming Up...

Plans for the near future right now are to further advance the village generation, round out the newcomer in the station and their interactions with the player, and maybe take a peek at translating your real-world time into the game itself.

As a reminder, subscribing as a premium patron will not charge you until the release of the first playable milestone build, which I am still trying to target as an April 2024 release.

Otherwise, I hope to see you in January with more updates!