2025: A Year in Review

Happy New Year! 2025 has come and gone, and I'm sure like it has for you, the year has brought many changes and challenges for me. I moved... a few times, actually – changed jobs, travelled, lost contact with friends, and met new ones. Change was the name of the game in 2025, but one thing that absolutely hasn't changed, is of course my love and adoration of these tiny ponies and by extension, Tales From the Herd.

There have been 12 months of fully cataloged updates and changes I've made to the game, even as a shift in career and lifestyle made development a little more difficult to squeeze in to my schedule. This has included many fixes, updates, additions, prototypes, and more – but while each monthly update would often focus on the smaller details (and of course you can always read more about them in the "updates" collection), for this review I'd like to hone in on 3 "big" accomplishments of 2025. Starting with a pretty obvious one...

Milestone Build 1 Goes Live

In last year's review, I bemoaned not having anything new that was playable in 2024, but this was thankfully taken care of pretty early on in 2025. The first version of the village, and what I think could more reasonably be considered the game's "prologue" rather than just a tech demo, released in April for free on Itch.io.

This of course allows you to take your pony out of the otherwise very limited Atlas train station, generate full villages, experience a natural day-night cycle, and go on silly gem hunts for cosmetic rewards. It may not feel like it, but peeling back the layers of code and interworking systems will reveal what I think is a pretty monumental undertaking, and the work didn't stop when it released.

In the months following Milestone Build 1, I received plenty of fantastic feedback and bug reports, all of which was tracked and used to better everyone's experience in the game. Not only were there bug fixes, but optimizations were also made to the game's data and loading framework, the rendering pipeline – even a decent sized rework of the game's map drawing / erasing mechanic was sorted out, after player feedback. So if you were one of the players who logged a bug, made a suggestion, or even just played and enjoyed the build – thank you!

Lore Master

A can I was kicking down the road for a long time was just how rudimentary it felt to write dialogue for the game. It was clunky, prone to errors, and would require painstaking re-writes if I wanted to restructure the lines. So another big project of 2025 was the introduction of a little piece of software I've taken to calling "Lore Master"; essentially a program with the sole purpose of letting you write and manage dialogue in the game.

I have made many updates about this one, perhaps to an annoying degree, but the gist is that it's easy to use, easy to read, and much quicker / smarter about re-ordering the dialogue lines than trying to edit them in-engine has been. And while it'll make my job a lot easier, perhaps the most exciting bit is that I plan on releasing it for free alongside the launch of Milestone Build 2! Its release will be experimental, and probably prone to bugs – but hopefully also an exciting first look at the sort of modding potential Tales From the Herd may have one day.

Brightgloom: A Tale From