I have been hard at work on putting the finishing touches on Milestone Build 1 – Tales From the Herd’s first major alpha release – and you can still expect a regularly scheduled update on development at the beginning of April. But there’s something else I wanted to make a separate announcement about: that you will be able to play an early version of the game very soon.

Enter, Tales From the Herd: Prologue. This was originally just a simple proof of concept demo that will now be expanded to encompass Milestone Build 1, Milestone Build 2 – and all other future milestone builds from now until launch of the game on Steam.

Prologue will be available to download on itch.io on April 18th, with a “pay what you want” model – including if you’d like it for free. Once acquired, you will own Prologue outright, and will not need to take further action to receive new milestone builds when they eventually arrive.

Furthermore, if you’d still like to support the project through Patreon, you can pledge to the Wayfinder Tier ($5), and gain access to the Milestone Build two weeks in advance (April 4th), a Steam key when the game eventually launches on Steam, plus your name in the credits. A charge will only happen per milestone release (each likely about 3-6 months apart), but even pledging just once will guarantee that you eventually receive a Steam key – you do not need to be active as a premium patron more than once for that.[www.patreon.com]

Obviously with the change to milestone builds being available for free, it will be a lot easier for you to check the game out with low risk as it develops. But I still want to be clear about what Prologue is (and what it isn’t), especially if you’re considering becoming a Wayfinder on Patreon:

* The milestone builds are an alpha state of the game, and likely to contain bugs, or play differently from the final game.

* While I wish the tremendous amount of work I’ve put into it said otherwise, Milestone Build 1 is light on content, and I suspect most players will feel “finished” with it within an hour of gameplay.

* Milestone Build 1 does not feature Eventide Spark.

* On the matter of Eventide, while I still haven’t been contacted by a lawyer or anything, remember that the appearance of the game and notably the characters may need to be changed on short notice – do not pledge if you suspect you wouldn’t enjoy the game if she ends up looking differently than she does in the reveal trailer.

So in essence, Milestone Build 1 and Prologue as a whole is designed as sort of an early look at the game, and focuses mostly on building up the world and mechanics. This is because during this phase things are likely to undergo changes based on player feedback or even just a change of heart I might have, and I want all of that to be settled before I start unfurling this grander narrative for the player.

Check out a rough plan for future developments below:

* To be clear plans may deviate from this roadmap, depending on the circumstances.

It is not because of my forgetfulness that there are no dates on this map – missing one date was already a lesson learned well enough for me to avoid using them. The hope though is that these chunk sized milestone builds will provide a consistent enough stream of content until the game arrives in its proper form on Steam; which is tragically but almost certainly still more than a year away. At least as it stands now, with my current job and abilities as a solo developer.

And you might be left wondering: why an itch.io release, and not just straight into Steam Early Access?

In short, expectations. Even though Early Access is clear about being a “pre-launch” version of the game, I don't think milestone build 1 has quite enough “game” to justify a Steam launch. I expect most people are looking to play Tales From the Herd when it already has a compelling narrative and a fair amount of life sim aspects, and so I don't want to ruin their first impression with a super early experimental alpha build.

Prologue then, is for those who can’t wait to check this world out, and who would like to have their voices heard in its development. And if that sounds like you: I hope to see you in the village very soon!

I have to admit something to you: while I have been posting regular monthly updates to social media for the game, I haven't been good – at all – about posting them here on Steam. Originally I wasn't sure if I even should post small dev updates here, if there were rules against it, if it would annoy people who just want to wishlist the game and only know when it comes out, etc., etc.. And truth be told, Steam documentation and navigating this environment as a dev has been a lot more complex than posting onto social media, but considering this is where the game will eventually launch, that's hardly an excuse!

So now that it's been brought to my attention that there may be many fans who only have the game on their Steam wishlist, and have otherwise been in the dark about development for the past year, I want to make a few things clear:

1. Development is absolutely still continuing. I am a solo dev, and I made the rookie mistake of severely underestimating my workload, but that doesn't change that I have been working tirelessly on the game all year, and that this work will continue into 2025.
   
2. I don't have a specific release date in mind, and I think even trying to estimate one anymore is a mistake. All I can say is that you will be notified when the game enters early access.
   
3. I have a FAQ posted that I do highly recommend reading before posting in the forums, as it covers a lot of often asked questions like animations for the character moving up and down, multiplayer, lawsuits, etc.. As more frequently asked questions come in I will try to keep this list updated.

I want to apologize for my lack of presence here on the Steam forums, and let you know that I will be making more of an attempt to stay on top of it. Development has certainly had its ups and downs, but one thing I always wanted to commit to regardless was being transparent, and showing those curious pretty much as much of the process they'd like to see.

With that being said, continue reading below if you'd like to see what's been happening with these ponies in the last 12 months!

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.[www.patreon.com]

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.[www.patreon.com] 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.[www.patreon.com] 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[www.patreon.com], 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[www.patreon.com]. 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[www.patreon.com].

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!