How do horses live? What does a stable look like? Splendid barn aesthetics are nice to have for humans, but what horses really need are the so-called three Fs: Friends, Forage and Freedom. Today I want to have a look at what meeting those needs looks like and how horse-focused media can play an important role in education and normalization when it comes to the question of “What should a cool, fancy, high quality stable look like?” 

Frustrated once again by indie game developers’ over-reliance on the massively flawed Horse Animset Pro, I have taken to Reddit like a proper “angry person online” and wrote a deep dive aimed at gamedevs on the gamedev subreddit showcasing why I can’t really recommend people use the most popular animated horse asset.

I was a speaker at Devcom 2024 in Cologne, giving a presentation on my horse game work. The recorded talk is now available on YouTube!

Horse Animation is really hard, I know. The purpose of this article is to summarize some common issues and provide helpful resources for how to do better. While I’m coming from a game dev perspective, I hope these tips and guides can also be useful to anyone animating horses for other media such as film or TV.

This article is aimed at game developers who want to include horses in their games without making the same couple of basic mistakes that make equestrians cry – to give game creators a starting point for further research and some ideas for how to add a bit of depth, variety and authenticity to their portrayal of horses. 

This article is an add-on to my recent post about upcoming Indie Horse Games: These tips were compiled while gathering info on upcoming games and noticing a few common areas of improvement. They don’t necessarily only apply to horse games but I do see it in almost every new horse game project launched by new creators without industry experience.

As a surprise to literally no one, I have a lot of thoughts on what the creators of games with horses in them could be doing better. Every horse game player has dreams and ideas and could start listing all the features that their ideal horse game would have in an instant. Let’s ignore the dream projects today and focus on a handful of fairly basic, relatively easily fixable* mistakes that horse game developers should really stop making.

Most horse-focused games feature brushing your horse and picking its hooves, feeding or combing mane and tail. Unfortunately, many of these horse care minigames quickly grow tedious or even frustrating: let’s take a look at why that is, what developers could do differently, and whether or not horse care mechanics are even necessary to begin with. 

We sometimes about “horse games” as if that term described a specific genre. In reality, while many classic horse games do fit into the farm buildup and simulation genre, the concept of “game that features horses prominently and has lots of mechanics relating to them” is not tied to that setup at all. In this article and the two previous volumes in this series, I try to broaden people’s horizons a little as to what could be cool horse games.

Welcome back to another round of Horse Games That Should Exist! This is where we like to fantasize about what horse-focused games we would want to have in our lives, if only the world were fair. This time featuring unicorns, cowboys and puns!

I am convinced that putting the focus on horses as a theme and setting and making a solid, well-executed game are not mutually exclusive. Or at least, they shouldn’t be. And while I would do many things for a good stable management game, that is far from the only genre in which a good horse game could be made.