Beach Rides, Leopard Patterns and Staff Overhaul - Dev Update

Last week we announced that our Beta Playtests are slowly kicking off now and we already got so many signups that we can only add a tiny portion of applicants! So now we want to show some of the exciting feature and content additions we've been working on to all of you here, at least!

Note that these additions won't make it to the Demo, but they'll be available for everyone in the full game at release later this year. Without further ado, here's some cool stuff we've been making:

Leopard Patterns

A lot of you asked, we deliver: Horses in our game can now have spotted leopard patterns like you know them from the Appaloosa or Knabstrupper breeds! Three separate layers allow for everything from snowcap blankets, spotted blankets, full body leopard spots of various sizes, and snowflake leopard dots!

Here's a preview of how that will look in the horse creator as well as in the riding sequences!

Note: the odd texture at the very end of the video is a bit of behind the scenes insight of how we do these patterns and how we ensure that patterns get applied to all animation without having to manually draw them for each frame. See this video if you're curious about how that works!

Beach Trail Rides

Who doesn't fantasize about a gallop along the seaside? We sure do! Here's a first look at how beach trail rides will look in Horses of Hoofprint Bay:

Staff Overhaul

In the time-limited Demo, the management and hiring aspects of the game have not gotten the most attention yet. But as you'll grow your stable and get more and more horses, hiring staff to help with care and training becomes essential!

We've given the hiring and staff management screens a makeover and added some new options for how you can assign horses to staff for care, training and lessons.

Balancing and Caprilli Tests

The biggest change we've made in terms of gameplay recently is a complete rebalancing of our starter horses! We might still tweak this further, but they now start with much lower stats so that breeding for horses with perfect stats becomes more of a long term goal.

Since the first showjumping competition is therefore no longer in the ability range of a fully trained starter horse, we've added a "Caprilli" style test: if you're not familiar with the term, this is a style of test that combines precise gait transitions with low jumping obstacles. Perfect to get started on your show journey!

New Buildings and Backgrounds

Our illustrator has also been catching up on a ton of building visuals and background art! In the full game, the backgrounds of your horse care view, riding arena and breeding station will change depending on the building's upgrade level, reflecting your growth from a shabby shack to a fancy barn!

And of course, later stages for all buildings also had to be added, to really take your yard overview to the next level. Since we get the question a lot: You'll be able to have up to 20 horses in your fully upgraded stable, plus 13 yearlings in your yearling paddock. (numbers are subject to change, as is everything else!) We know that won't be enough for some of you though, so you can board additional horses at the breeder in town - as many as you can afford to pay board for!

Steam post image

In short: things are happening, the game is making lots of important progress! Thank you for your patience and stay tuned 💖