March 2025 Update – Milestone Build 1 Release

Wow! This was a long time coming. But the first milestone build, and your first chance to enter a proper village in Tales From the Herd, is finally here. I've already written a post detailing how MB1 will be distributed, and plans for future milestone builds, which you can read here. But the most important details are this:

• If you are subscribed to the Wayfinder tier on April 4th, 2025, you will be charged $5, and given access to Milestone Build 1 on itch.io.

• I will probably need up to 24 hours on April 4th to make sure everything goes according to plan, and all Wayfinders have access.

• I will add the name you use on Patreon to the in-game credits. If you'd like to go by a different name, or if you'd rather not have your name in the game at all, please contact me so that I can get that taken care of.

• I will save your email to a contact list, and when the game finally launches onto Steam, will send a key for you to access it (reminder that currently there are only plans for a Windows build, and that a Steam launch is still at least a year away). Again if there's another way you'd like to be contacted in the future, let me know.

• This release is two weeks before it will be free to the public on April 18th; so, if you'd rather wait and see, make sure to remove yourself off of the Wayfinder tier so that you are not charged.

Please don't hesitate to ask if you have any other questions about the game, its release, or how you will be accessing it. Otherwise, read on for the updates in March I've made!

Animation Improvements

Since last month was the last time I'd be working on the game before its public release, pretty much the entirety of that time was spent on bug-fixing and polish. One such area I've been meaning to polish up is the sitting / laying down animations:

 (Old animation on the left, new on the right)

These are all new frames of animation and better adjusted to work with clothing, whether on your pony's chest, neck, or legs. Sitting and lying down also make noises now, when your pony's rump hits whatever surface is beneath them. Small, but important details.

Better Dialogue Windows

A long time coming is this adjustment: originally, dialogue windows would print words one character at a time, and this annoying thing would happen where a word would be half-typed near the right side of the window, and then have to be dropped down to the next line to finish being typed, because it needed more space.

Well, after a ton of experimenting, I've finally got it to pre-emptively drop to a new line when a word isn't going to fit:

This is another one of those things that you probably wouldn't notice when it's working, but you'll definitely start to notice when it's not. Pretty cool solution too, as the game is basically testing the length of each word before it types it, to see if it would hypothetically fit in the remainder of the line.

Better Response Menu

There has been some longstanding friction for testers on how exactly the radial response menu works. I've noticed that many didn't understand they can remain silent during any question they otherwise might not like the responses to; and this is on me for not properly communicating that option. Now, however, remaining silent shows up as its own option, when you mouse into the center of your radial response wheel:

 You also no longer need to close the radial menu, then click once to "continue listening" without responding, as closing the menu from the center now automatically does that for you.

In general, the amount of inputs you need to perform in dialogue are being reduced all around. Where before to respond you had to hold to open the radial menu, then click the appropriate response; clicking the talk button when a character is asking you a question will now automatically open the menu straight away.

It was a question I got asked several times: why ever make it "hold to respond" in the first place? And I suppose my reasoning back then was that I wanted the actions of listening and speaking to be distinct – like I was imagining a world where you could engage the "speak" action at any point, even if another character was talking, and even if they weren't asking a question. Because, y'know, sometimes we talk over each other in real life, or interject a comment that may not be directly related to the conversation.

As it stands now though, the only option you have to "interject" when talking with another pony is to leave the conversation – which you'll perform automatically anyway when you walk too far away. So ultimately I ended up giving up on this weird little quirk of the conversation system, and I really do think it feels better for it. Maybe also just a tad more like a traditional video game dialogue tree, which is something I don't want to fall too much into the trap of, but the benefits totally outweigh the cost.

Floaty Physics

This is such a goofy and small detail I put in, especially at this stage in development, but if you manage to get ahold of a stick and drop it in the water, it will splash and float now.

I say "goofy" because sticks don't even serve a purpose currently – I have a very "if you think that's how something should work, then it should" attitude about developing, and that's led to the ability to crouch, to the ability to buck, to be able to hit trees, which drop sticks, which can then be picked up and dropped off in the water where you'll see them "float" – just because I feel like any one of those actions failing to work the way you'd expect it to would hinder the player's immersion in this world.

Nicer Looking Water

Not much to say here. The pond has been gussied up with some more wet flora, and the lakeshore to the East has this additional smooth looking gradient near the sand, which I think adds quite a nice touch:

New "About" Screen With Credits

Don't worry if you see your name up there, you haven't been charged yet. But if you plan on becoming or staying a Wayfinder by April 4th, this is how you and your fellow supporters will appear in the game's credits. And again, if you'd like to have a different name displayed or anything, just let me know!

Bugs and Playtesting

About halfway through the month I felt confident enough to start testing real builds of the game, and getting as much feedback as possible. Among the many bugs that were fixed are:

• Fixed being able to perfectly clip into the divide between ground and water, giving your pony the ability to swim on land.

• Fixed ponies not looking in the right direction when they're in conversation with one another.

• Gave cloud shadows the ability to shift their entire colors based on the time of day, not just their opacity. This is because they would originally look fine during the day, and then take on this strange green hue at night.

• Fixed the purple flower patches not having proper interactivity with ponies, nor even sorting right against other sprites.

• Pulled the camera out a little in the village, so you can see more of the environment around you.

• Added shadows underneath mushrooms.

• Licensed better earth trotting sound effects to replace the shoddy ones I created.

• Added true randomness to a character's walking pattern in the village, which was previously the same every time you returned there.

• Redrew certain art assets in the village, that I made a long time ago with a different brush that no longer matched the other assets.

• Fixed being able to duplicate gems by spamming the pickup / drop key.

• HOPEFULLY fixed maybe the most annoying bug I've encountered, where playtesters were suddenly unable to properly grab the color sliders when customizing their pony. Being unable to recreate a bug on your own hardware is the most frustrating experience.

Coming Up...

Milestone Build 1! Remember, if you're subscribed to the Wayfinder tier, you will be charged on April 4th, and subsequently given access to the build within 24 hours. If you'd rather wait, it will be available to download for free on April 18th. In either case, you can use an in-game emailing service from the pause menu (pause > settings > help > report a bug), or leave feedback here on Patreon, or on the itch.io page when it goes up.

April is almost certainly going to be filled with me chasing bugs players discover in this build. But after that, I hope to get back to work adding features for Milestone Build 2 as soon as possible – features that include more customization options, saving multiple pony characters, and finding some tasty food for your pony to eat! I'll repost the roadmap down below so you can see all the tentative plans I have right now.

I'm happy to finally be releasing this build into the wild, but trust me: we're just getting started!