Insights, Release Timeline, Playtesting Plans and More!

Lovely people, it's been a few very exciting weeks for us at thogli studios and The Mane Quest, and we want to give you a few updates!

Demo Reception

The Demo for Horses of Hoofprint Bay has been out for a bit over a month now, and we could not be happier with how it's going. We've received a ton of lovely feedback and praise, as well as a lot of useful pointers and minor reports that will let us improve the game in the future.

Some numbers that we're particularly proud of:

• Our demo has been played by over 32'000 people in total, and downloaded about 40'000 times

• The median playtime is 3h and 26min, which is a lot, we love that you're all spending that much time with the game already!

• Over the past four weeks, the demo had over 2000 players every day on average, and about 5300 players on February 22nd

• We got Overwhelmingly Positive reviews from players and have stayed at 99% positive reviews throughout, this is amazing.

• We've about tripled our Wishlists since the demo went live, we have about 36'000 now

Thank you all so much for playing, for leaving reviews, for talking about the game on social media, for creating videos and let's plays, and for being an absolutely wonderful audience in general! 💖

We were at GG Bavaria!

We exhibited Horses of Hoofprint Bay at a local gaming convention in Munich, near where our programmer Theresa lives! This wasn't just an opportunity for all three of us to actually meet in person for the first time, we also had an absolute eye-catcher of a booth with our home-made Riding Simulator!

Steam post image Steam post image

The saddle you see here isn't just a fun way to sit, but is an actually functioning controller that registers leg, seat and rein input! Our programmer Theresa built it from scratch using a few different sensors and an Arduino computer. If you want to see the thing in action, make sure to check out the videos we posted on our Bluesky, Instagram and Tiktok!

Release Timeline

While we were in Munich, we also took some time to put our heads together for a big project planning session. There's a lot we still want to do before releasing the game, and we'll need some time to do it.

Our planned release window is End of 2026.

Playtest Plans

To prepare our game for release and to test new features as they're implemented, we'll be running Playtests through Steam over the Summer.

We'll share more details as we get closer to launching new tests, but most likely you'll be able to sign up through Steam and Steam will randomly pick players for us.

You currently cannot yet sign up for Playtests, we'll let you know when registration opens. Remember that you can sign up to our Newsletter, where we'll make sure to inform people when anything important happens!

What We're Working On

Our To-Do list is long, and includes a lot of iteration on things that are already fundamentally there, as well as a few entirely new features. We don't want to publish our complete planned feature list because we might have to cut things if they don't work out as we expect them, and we'd rather promise less and deliver more than the other way around.

Our immediate priorities include a big Balancing Overhaul to adjust the overall progression speed through breeding and training, finishing all the yard upgrades, stables in various stages etc., adding new backgrounds for different buildings per each upgrade stage (e.g. horse care screen, training arena background, breeding station) and designing and implementing new forest trail rides.

We also want to start experimenting with a few completely new features that have been suggested (or that we really want to do ourselves), but we'll talk more about that when we're further along in the process 🙂

Tiny teaser for our upgraded stables:

Steam post image Steam post image

Save Game Compatibility

Due to the aforementioned plans of overhauling the game's balancing quite fundamentally, as well as other small structural changes that are planned, we can now also say that Demo save games will not be compatible with the main game once it releases. Thank you all for understanding! ❤️

Demo Plans

For the foreseeable future, our Demo will stay available, but we don't plan on adding more content to it at this time. The Day Limit will also stay. The Demo has done its job of giving you all a taste of what to expect from the game incredibly well, and we'll now focus on getting the rest of the game to live up to that. 😊

Thank you so much for reading, thank you for joining us on this ride, and stay tuned for occasional updates as we do our best to make the full game live up to the Demo's excellent reception! 🥰