Tiny Horse Game Jam: 8 Adorable New Horse Games you Can Play For Free

The TMQ Community on Discord is at this point quite sensitized to the dread and skepticism I feel whenever some brand new game developer without experience announces how they’re going to make their own big, beautiful, realistic horse game. We’ve even made a bingo card for it. The advice I end up giving people boils down to “make and finish tiny games first”.

Well, a bunch of community members have taken this to heart in the best of ways: They organized the first official TMQ Tiny Horse Game Jam: Over the whole month of May, people spent their free time making a tiny horse game. Of the 8 resulting games, several were made by people who had never made a game before, but who now made their small but wonderful debut titles available for all to play.

Chonks & Donks lets you create a horse by morphing various body types and painting in its markings.

Pony Jump is all about optimizing your time on a showjumping course

The Games

You can find and play the 8 finished jam submissions right here on itch.io. Chonks and Donks is a horse creator toy that morphs different types of equine 3D models. A Horse Life Story - A Pony Day proves that you don’t need high tech to make create interactive experiences, but lets you experience a day in the life of a horse through a set of choices, made entirely in Microsoft PowerPoint. Trail Escape, a side scroller with Quick Time Events, stands out as the tiniest of tiny horse games through its impressive 256kb file size. Stable Care is a simple horse care game made by a late joiner to the jam and impressive for being made in an even shorter timeframe than everyone else, and Pony Jump is a straightforward showjumping experience that’s easy to understand but quite tricky to master. Blackberry Paddock is a cozy, anti-capitalist incremental clicker game based on producing horse poop and using it for gardening. In short: there’s a lot of good stuff here.

Personally though, I particularly loved the cute Hidden Object game Hide-a-neigh, and the absolutely adorable 2D Adventure game Squirrel Horse. Hide-a-neigh convinces with adorable illustration, an easy and intuitive core mechanic and a simple but satisfying user experience, while Squirrel Horse is a short narrative adventure that oozes charm in its dialogues and drawings of horse and squirrel nuzzling each other.

Squirrel Horse: features include travelling across islands, picking up helpful objects, and making horrified facial expressions in dialogue.

Blackberry Paddock: features include communal buildup and fertilizer-based progression.

Impact

I adore that this jam took place and I’m incredibly proud of the community effort despite being only superficially involved myself. While we might not see any of these tiny horse games go viral and make huge waves, each developer has achieved something quite crucial on their own game-making journey: they made and finished and uploaded their first (in some cases second or third, admittedly) playable horse game and can now apply a lot of learnings to their next project.

And I think that deserves at least as much celebration, respect and excitement as any overly ambitious debut title announcement for someone’s dream horse game.

Give these 8 Tiny Horse Games a try completely for free right here. And if you want to hear about it should another such jam take place, make sure to join our Discord.