April 2025 Update – Fixes to Milestone Build 1, and the Road to Milestone Build 2

Well! Here we are: the first milestone build has been out for a little while now, and I'm glad to have seen so many fans enjoy their time in this little sneak peak of what Tales From the Herd will have to offer. Some enthusiastic little explorers have probably even gotten to know this village better than I have, to be honest. Bug hunters, thank you for putting this game through its paces! You improve the experience for everyone.

Speaking of, and true to my word, this month of development has been spent almost exclusively on fixes and optimizations, so it's going to be a little feature lite. Still, I did find time to add a few things between all of the patching and panicking – though in the latter case, I'm happy to say things have gone down smoother than I feared! There's nothing really new in this report if you've been following along with the patch notes, but I might still recommend hopping down to the bottom if you'd like to hear about future plans.

As a reminder, if you are subscribed as a Wayfinder, your payment should have finally gone through today, and your copy of the eventual Steam release reserved. You should also see your name in the game's credits – check it out from "About" on the pause menu, and let me know if there are any issues. And thank you!

Extra Menu Functionality

One of the first requests I got after launching MB1 was the ability to not have to hold a key to gallop / sprint, which, fair enough, the village is large enough at this point that holding down shift the entire time might get annoying. So this can be toggled in the game's control settings, now.

Furthermore, you might notice a little build indicator button in the bottom right, which going forward should be an easy way to hop on over to the patch notes and see what's new / what's been fixed.

Improvements to the Gem Hunt

There had been some confusion over Violet's quest, and what exactly she meant by "try again tomorrow" after asking for more gem coordinates. This is totally fair, because "tomorrow" in this instance really only meant exactly 24 hours after you've found the last gems. This isn't typically how peoples' (or ponies') schedules work!

Now, with changes to how quests and time events handle this data, Violet will in fact finish her work for the day late at night, which is when gems will again be available. A much needed change, and I'm glad someone said something about that.

Stick Snapping

A clear instance of me underestimating player curiosity has involved the little sticks that drop from trees after bucking them. My "brilliant" plan of preventing trees from spawning more branches in at least a 24 hour window has not deterred at least one pony from instead maxing out their stick collection by bucking every single tree in the village. This... led to some performance issues, and as the sticks were immortal, there was no way to discard them and save the village.

(Recreation, not the actual incident. Can't call it a "dramatization", though)

While this has revealed a flaw in how the game handles large amount of object data, and will be the subject of future optimization efforts, my panic fix was to introduce the simple ability for ponies to snap branches like this by walking over them. This removes the object's save data from your village, and effectively disposes of the stick entirely. They even visually break in half, and make a satisfyingly snap sound when doing so.

Better Erasing

While in general I've been pretty proud of my work on the game's unconventional map mechanic, it's not without its flaws. One of the largest being: the erase feature simply wasn't good enough.

The old eraser was bound to a key press, and would effectively function like CTRL-Z in other drawing software: removing the last pen stroke you made. While quick and easy, it also meant that you never had any say in what gets erased, and if you wanted to erase a line drawn particularly long ago, you would need to erase through a lot of other lines along the way. Couple this with complex controls for the player to learn, an "erase all" function that was all too easy to accidentally trigger by holding R, and it became clear to me that I needed to take a second look at the inputs here.

With the new system, erasing is effectively its own "tool", and it can be toggled with a simple mouse click. Once in erase mode, you are free to scan any line you'd like to erase from anywhere on the canvas, including very old ones. The transparent highlight functionality helps better communicate what's going on too, and erasing a bunch of lines at once by scrubbing back and forth with the mouse even has the additional benefit of feeling somewhat like erasing a whole page of art in real life does; or at least like cleaning off a whiteboard.

Fancier Customization Menu Animations

While I generally like to take a somewhat "hands off" approach to guiding the player to inessential gameplay features and options, I did notice a non-trivial amount of players miss the fact that there are drop down menus and sliders in the mirror – which is a shame, because they house quite a few other customization options like side manes and voice pitch!

My solution: just a quick little animation for those two elements whenever they have extra options available. Not too intrusive, but hopefully noticeable enough that players engage with them on a more regular basis!

HEAPS of Bug Fixes

The real meat and potatoes of April's progress. I won't recount them all here because they've all already been covered in patch notes, but if you'd like to see the entire list of added features and fixes, you can do so over here.

Goodbye butt-scooting, water-walking, and land-swimming! You were... certainly something.

Coming Up...

Well for me, personally? I am looking forward to my first break in a while on development. In fact, by the time this is posting, I will most likely already be on the road – taking a personal trip that has been delayed for so long now, for one reason or another.

Never the less, I'll be back next month with another progress update, as the first work on Milestone Build 2 begins in earnest. I know some of this work will be less than glamourous: data handling and rendering is starting to get a little out of hand, so restructuring the code there is high on my list of priorities; but more exciting are the planned additions to customization: mane and tail patterns, face patterns, and all new cosmetics to earn. Plus with more questing, natural food growth in the village, and gameplay benefits from eating it – there should be quite a bit of new content to sink your teeth into in the next build, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, thank you as always for your support. I can't believe that this project started life as a single piece of concept art sometimes, and I'm not so sure I would've made it this far if not for the love and excitement Tales From the Herd has received. I know I say it a lot, but genuinely: thank you.