Horse Games – History of a Neglected Genre and its Untapped Potential – Talk from Devcom 2024
I was a speaker at Devcom 2024 in Cologne, giving a presentation on my horse game work. The devcom team has generously permitted me to upload the recorded talk to my YouTube channel, and I’m thrilled to share it with you all:
Find the presentation slides including all relevant links right here!
Giving this overview of my six (!) years of horse game work was a lovely experience, the room was quite packed and I kept receiving appreciative comments for the talk all week at the conference. I can only recommend giving it a watch!
The Horse Club game series by developer and publisher Wild River Games announces its third entry! I’ve been in touch with the Wild River team before, and even consulted on the latest title: Horse Club: Ride West invites the player on a Western themed ranch vacation with the Horse Club characters and their horses. To celebrate the announcement, I sat down with Stefan Kummer and Daniel Boos from the Wild River team to learn more about their development process.
Indie horse game developers who make games out of a passion for the subject matter are becoming more common these days. Many of these up and coming horse game devs make basic mistakes in marketing and publishing. This article is aimed at those passionate newcomers: Guidelines, basic do’s and don’ts and things to keep in mind for anyone planning to make, announce and distribute a horse game of their own.
The Ranch of Rivershine stands out among the horse game niche. I’ve followed Rivershine and its creator Éloise Laroche of Cozy Bee Games for years and previously featured them on TMQ on multiple occasion. With the full release now a few weeks back, I sat down with Éloise once more to look back on five years of development, the lessons learned along the way, and of course, to learn what’s next in store for her one woman studio.
How To Market A Game is the website and blog of game marketing consultant and strategist Chris Zukowski. This week, Chris’ latest blog post is all about horse games, summarizing some insights into our niche from yours truly. Find and read the full blog post here.
Earlier this week I saw someone on Facebook claim that Red Dead Redemption 2 was the first video game to use motion capture for horses. While I was instantly sure that was not in fact true, the question of “What WAS the first video game to use motion capture for horses?” isn’t actually all that easy to answer.
Let’s take a look at what I’ve found:
I hope you’ll forgive me for what’s essentially just a “hey look, I’m doing my job!” post, but as it turns out I think my job (i.e. horse game consultation) is really fucking cool and I get to brag about it a little bit sometimes, as a treat.
Equinox: Homecoming combines dark mystery with horse-focused gameplay into one of the most promising new game announcements our genre has ever seen. Let’s have a look at the announcement trailer and dive into some juicy behind-the-scenes insight for how this game is getting made and why it took so long for someone to realize this potential.
I am stoked to share this interview with the thogli studios team and myself from Video Game Town: Bringing ‘Horses Of Hoofprint Bay’ To Life. Definitely take a look if you’re interested in a closer look at how thogli studios works, how Horses of Hoofprint Bay and some of its features came to be, and some teasers for what’s still to come.