nightly: version 2

hello again everypony,

i have been working on heart by hoof this week! yippee! i am hoping to continue working on it at a half decent pace in the future, but as always i am a very fickle horse.

but, if i can keep up the work, my plan is tentatively to do a weekly release. i don't know for sure if pushing new builds will itself put anything in your feed -- but if so, a weekly release lets me avoid completely spamming your feeds, while still being able to regularly push updates and even write changelogs, which is nice.

edit: from what it looks like, not only does the project update not show up in the feed, but neither does this post. i could swear i read somewhere that itch rate limits the posts it shows; that is probably what i'm running in to here. maybe i need to reduce my changelog posting rate to once every two weeks.

double edit: it looks like this post does show up in the feed after all. let me know if one thing in your feed once per week is too often.

if you would like to keep up with the changes in more detail i have been posting a bit about them on bsky. mostly this is posts of new card arts and other rambling, as you might expect.

important notes on saves

due to the way cards are implemented, i think it is possible that certain cards may break when upgrading between versions. this means that if you upgrade during a run, you might experience a game crash. i have implemented some safeguards to hopefully prevent this from happening, but if you run into it: you should be able to recover by just hitting "abandon run." i trust nobody would have had any run that was too incredibly interesting (or if you do, consider finishing it before upgrading!)

changelog

so what are the changes for this version?

• perhaps the #1: the starting deck has changed! this might be a temporary change, but it is a direction i think is necessary to explore. specifically, the status quo for heart by hoof. is that the first encounter is essentially always the same. this simply seems bad to me from a fun and replayability perspective; i'm sure this is why most other deckbuilders have you make some deckbuilding choices before the first encounter. so, i may eventually also do something like a card reward or some other kinds of deckbuilding before the first encounter. but for now, you get one random card added to your deck, and your deck also starts with an additional copy of thrust in.
  • all encounters have been buffed by 5 max tension to offset the boost in starting power.
  • i think it is very likely that you can roll some very bad cards (such as invigorate!) and lose the first encounter without any counterplay. i have not yet encountered this so i haven't playtested it. again, this will probably eventually be fixed by the way this new feature evolves in the future.
    • also, thrust in. is arguably a good addition to the starting deck. we will just have to see how it plays...
• more card arts ported to the new system: combo!, bouncy?, calm nerves? and electrified. i may have honestly missed some, but i believe that's basically right. 
  • for better or for worse, i have switched the shading function from being something a bit custom to the exact "interpolation 2x" blending mode from krita. it was becoming too difficult to keep up with the sometimes pretty severe visual differences between krita and the final product, so now they are (in theory) exactly the same. this does, perhaps, make the main menu art and some card arts look worse, i'm not really sure. but it seemed necessary for me due to some of the new card arts i was drawing.
  • i am also trying a new(ish) style on a couple of them -- i took the existing new card art, added a layer on top where i drew some line art, and then added this to the "interpolation" layer. i think that having a (sort of) line art may make them look nicer, but i'm not sure. the good news is it is pretty easy for me to tweak them between these styles so i will have ways to play with it and figure out what i want.
• other new art: card frames! i'm trying out some new visuals for the card frames, that are based on your palette colors (of course). i do kind of like these new card frames a bit but as always they are subject to change.
  • i wanted to make the card art itself less cropped given that i am now spending even more time  on it.
• there are five new cards, three with (hopefully) finished card art: whimsy!, whimsical thrust?, vulva veneration~, play with tail~, , and all out!
  • play with tail~ has unfinished card art, while all out! has essentially no card art.
  • i am trying out some new effects with the whimsy cards. they may undergo some serious changes.
  • i quite like the vulva veneration~ card in a lot of ways. the card art was drawn on a whim, and i had to come up with a name and effect that seemed remotely relevant. i think it is fun.
• misc balance changes.
  • visualize! tweaked to draw 2, cost 1. i'm not sure exactly what i want from this card but i figured i would try out this version of it for a bit.
  • take it slow. tweaked to have no stamina cost, but cause you to gain 6 horny. this honestly still might be too weak; i originally tried it at gain 15 horny which was completely unplayable. i will have to run into this card more to see how it plays.
  • intimacy. tweaked to remove 16 horny from your partner after playing it instead of exhausting. i played a couple times with this card and i honestly think the old version may have been strong enough anyway, so this might make it overpowered. but, i thought it would at least be nice to be able to play it more than once.
• the sex scene now has actual semen, which was kind of fun to animate, although i had forgotten how absolutely painful it is to export glb's from blender. maybe the brand new blender version fixed this, i don't know. i would like to do some additional animations but i think i will need to figure out a better workflow and also hopefully stop fighting so much with blender's NLA editor.
• you can now zoom in or out on the 3d scene by scrolling the mouse.
• some audio changes:
  • there is a new "night theme" track. this actually plays for both the "sunset" time and the "night" time for now, although i would maybe like to have a sunset theme in the future. this track may also get some tweaks.
  • i am trying out some new sound effects for the buttons. not sure i love these either.
    • i want to probably create some new sounds for some of the main gameplay actions too, such as applying/receiving statuses.

feedback

if you have any feedback at all on the changes made to the game, let me know. or, if you even have feedback on how you would like to communicate feedback, let me know. i don't really know how most game devs collect feedback--is it through discord? some other way? maybe just nobody has anything they want to say?

the closest thing i got to any feedback on the changes so far is:

• the nightly version has 69 downloads total (nice!)
  • there does not seem to be any overwhelming interest in a web upload.
    • i am sure that nonetheless, were i to figure out what i want to do for a web upload, it would get as many plays as the existing jam version.
    • annoyingly, the game is still deindexed, so i still don't know if it is somehow breaking the rules to upload a new version on a separate page.
• i uploaded some of the art to newgrounds and the uploads were rated 1.78 and 2.16 stars respectively (...after i gave each one a 5...) which suggests the art is not well received, but i really have no idea.
  • i am just going to keep doing whatever i want in lieu of any actionable feedback. maybe the art is really bad, but it doesn't seem that way to me, and i have no concrete reasons to believe otherwise (e.g. nobody who plays the game has actually said to me anything negative about it).

meta

as of the writing of this post, i have in theory cashed out all of my itch.io balance. so, to the people who bought my games: thank you! it is very cool to me that i have actually made money from making art. it has not happened to me before.

i know everyone is still worried about the status of itch.io, and i am too, so i thought it would be good to throw my info in the ring: it took ~20 days from payout initiation for the payout to go through. and, this is my first ever payout. so, do with that information what you will.

i do hope that one day the payment processors will let me sell stuff again. in theory i could actually re-enable payments, given that my game is deindexed anyway -- but here's the thing: i have seen other "feral" games actually taken down from itch after re-enabling payments. i would like to avoid a ban if possible, so for now the payments will remain off. oh well.

conclusion

who knows what next week will bring. hopefully, more cool changes. possibly, not that. we'll see. as always, thanks everyone for playing, and hope you enjoy the new changes!