November 2024 Update – Fancy Maps

Here we are again, another month gone by, and another update. Like I mentioned last month, I'm still in the process going through a bit of a change in my living situation, and so development has been slowed a bit. I'll talk a little more about that at the end of the blog if you're interested, but until then, let's take a look at these maps.

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Full Drawing Functionality

In October I made a proof-of-concept map item that you, the player, could literally draw on. But this is exactly what it was: a proof-of-concept. There was no interface, no settings, no saving, nor even a way to undo lines. This month, I set out to get these features operating.

Pressing either the UI options on the right, or the keyboard shortcuts for menu swapping (default Q and E) will change the size of your pencil tip. Holding gallop (default Shift) and pressing these same buttons will instead rotate your pencil's color between a small selection of them. Does this make it a suitable Photoshop / Krita / Procreate replacement? No, but it is sure nice when you need a way to differentiate between landmarks you've drawn on your map, and guides, notes, etc..

Erasing

While I think it's sometimes important to embrace being imperfect and rolling with the hand you're given, not being able to undo a line you just accidentally scratched onto the map would be pretty hardcore: so feel free to undo mistakes with the eraser.

And if things are REALLY messed up or you just want a do-over, holding the button will erase all of your current color's lines. Easy!

New Interface

It's been a while since I've actually worked on a "soft menu" like the one that appears in the dressing room when customizing your character (that is, a menu that is meant to help the player interact with something that physically exists in the world, and not to interface with game and system level settings). And like the dressing room menu, I wanted the map UI to feel similarly tactile:

Pressing F will now toggle drawing mode, either hiding or revealing these icons on the right of the screenshot here. Your cursor changes too when in draw mode, from the default system cursor to a ring approximately the size of your brush / pencil, and in the color you're currently drawing with. Similarly the eraser in the bottom right corner will reflect whatever color is accurate, hopefully communicating to the player that they're only erasing lines of that shade without needing to show a tooltip or hint text.

Saving / Loading

I've learned so far that there are basically three types of data you can save to a computer's hard drive when making a Unity game: a bool (true or false statement), string (text), or a float (number). So... where does a bunch of player created artwork fit into that?

When you press down on one of these maps and draw a swirl, what is actually happening in the background is that the engine is rendering a line based on dozens of points. E.g., a straight line has a beginning and end point, and each of those points has an X and Y coordinate. So saving this art wasn't anything crazy to figure out: that straight line for example would probably save as something like X:0, Y:0 (first point) then X:3, Y:0 (second point).

Loading that data back into the game though was a little trickier to figure out, and I doubt I even found the most graceful solution. But basically, the game does the exact same thing to create the lines it did the first time around: it draws them. When loaded, it just re-draws them very quickly. Theoretically since there is no limit to the amount of lines you can draw this could slow things down quite a bit as the game rushes to re-draw like 12,000 lines, but I haven't noticed any issues with saving and loading a modest (100-ish) amount of lines, so I'll kick that can down the road for now.

Oh and by the way, each village has its own map with its own artwork; so you don't have to worry about saving over the notes you took in one town when visiting another.

Tracking

In my initial take on this map concept, I had no plans for the map to ever show the player's position on it. And were that map to come with more detailed information and placement of landmarks, I don't think it would be necessary, navigation would technically be possible by moving between those landmarks. However not only did the original map not have the player's position, it also expected them to draw the landmarks, which is... pretty brutal. How would you even know you were drawing the landmark at the right spot?

So I conceded there, and introduced a very hi-tech solution: a pebble. You're the pebble. Where you go, the pebble will follow.

Take a look at our pebble friend alongside some rough test sketches I made on one of my maps:

Coming Up...

I definitely agree with the group consensus last month that the map could benefit from a pin / stamp system, and I'd like to eventually add that. But for now I think I've done more than enough work on the map to make it functional, and I'd like move on to perhaps more critical areas of development: namely, that besides exploring, ponies don't really have a lot to do in these villages right now. So providing small tasks that work well with this DIY map system is probably next on the docket. And hopefully, finally, I can start eyeing the final stretch to Milestone Build 1 after that.

Development news aside, if you'd like some more context to the ongoing slowdown, I will get into that here at the bottom. Otherwise, I'll see you next month!

...

To try and be concise, I had started to develop many concerns and frustrations in my personal life, perhaps the biggest being that I felt that I had run out of room to grow at my job; and that the years of my life I had given them started to turn into a bit of a slog.

Last month I talked about "moving" out of my apartment, but there was an unspoken part of that word that was more along the lines of "traveling the country without a solid plan for a bit". I have savings and took a chunk of them to purchase a vehicle in much better condition than my current 30 year old whip.

Well I thought that was what I was doing, but just weeks after the purchase the newer car revealed to me that it needed a tremendous amount of work – like, more than the value I had even purchased it for kind of work.

So long story short, I'm back to the vintage car, wallet a little thinner, and without a way to "travel" the way I intended to. But it's not all bad as I have picked myself back up, bought a plane ticket, and will be heading out very soon to getting a bit of a reset while I stay with family. Whether or not I can still manage a miniature version of my travelling "plans" remains to be seen, and how I can stretch these savings.

This is suffice to say, that December will likely be yet another slowed development month. Obviously in a perfect world Tales From the Herd would be not just my passion but my livelihood, but as I've often reiterated, I am not pushing this out into even a pre-alpha state until I'm satisfied. So right now that does unfortunately mean it remains on a backburner while I scramble to figure out my next moves in life and in career.

Anyway, sorry about the long-winded explanation, but I feel like as this wrinkle has carried on for a while now, it's owed. We're getting there though, I promise! One update at a time.