One Year of Development

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.

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