Welcome back to another Developer Diary for The Legend of Khiimori! Previously, we’ve written quite a bit about our setting, why we chose it and how we’re designing our game world.
Today, however, we want to focus on the reason many of you are here to begin with: Horses and what you can do with them! Specifically, we’re going to have a closer look at Horse Training and Horse Care today—two crucial core features that are meant to make the horses in our game feel like living, individual creatures rather than simply speed upgrades in different colors.
In The Legend of Khiimori, you will be able to own several horses, choosing different ones for missions and exploration based on their abilities and individual strengths. What exactly that means for the game’s story about the titular black stallion and his connection to his one chosen rider is a topic we’ll explore on another day, but we can already tell you that there will be a variety of horses to ride in the game. 
🚧Work in Progress🚧
Horses as Individuals
We want horses in The Legend of Khiimori to have a certain mechanical weight to them, metaphorically speaking. While horses can be bought and sold, we don’t want taming and breeding to turn into a factory process where players have to acquire and load off dozens of horses until they get a perfect one. It’s about quality, not quantity!
This intention has an impact on our horse breeding mechanics—the player will be able to influence which genetic traits will be passed on, to avoid breeding the same pair again and again until getting the desired results—but it also informed our design choices in all related horse mechanics. Taming, Breeding, Training, Trust, Traits, and Care are all intertwined systems that need to work well with each other and come together for interesting gameplay, especially where they intersect with our other major gameplay elements, such as Courier Missions and Exploration.
We’re designing these systems—from stats and potential to learnable traits—so that there are a lot of axes for horses to differ from one another, in order to make them feel alive and distinct. Equine Realism is a core design pillar for the project, and one that deeply influences the way we’re tackling these features. We want our horses to have mechanical depth even as we keep the riding very accessible to young and casual players, and we want there to be additional challenge and significance in the exploration on horseback itself. 
🚧Work in Progress🚧
Stats and Potential
With The Legend of Khiimori, we’re building upon the successes and learnings from our very own horse games, the Windstorm series and Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch. With our stats and horse training system however, we’re taking a step in a new direction: Rather than being born with a fixed set of stats and traits, horses can be trained and taught throughout the game.
Every horse will have five stat values that influence their handling: Strength, Agility, Speed, Endurance, and Balance. These values affect how the horse’s movement works as well as how well it can carry the cargo from courier missions. In addition, every horse is born, bought or tamed with a certain “Potential”, which can then be invested—through training—into the aforementioned stats.
Now, what does that training look like?
Two of our core design principles come into play here: Equine Realism and Satisfying Exploration. While sending a horse off to a trainer might have been a realistic option to add in a modern equestrian setting, Mongolian ponies get their training outdoors. And what better way to make the traversal of steppe, forest and mountainside matter, than to ensure that the movement itself is what trains your horses.
Meaning: you ride around, and your horse gets better at riding around. Seems simple, right? Well, there’s a bit more complexity than that: When getting from A to B, you, the player, can make various choices regarding how to get there, from the path you chose, to the gait and speed you ride at. Those choices will then determine which attributes are trained.
For example, riding tight turns or winding around obstacles at a canter will train your horse’s agility, while moving through knee-high water or over deep, muddy ground will increase its strength. This can also mean that you might choose to stay on the road and preserve your horse’s potential for future speed training, rather than moving over ground that will train something else.
Horses in The Legend of Khiimori won’t grow old and die, but the Potential stat effectively shows you how much more training any horse is up for. A foal you’ve bred yourself will have high potential and none of it allocated to specific stats yet, while an adult horse you buy from a merchant or tame from a wild herd might already come with a set of skills that you can’t influence as freely. 
🚧Work in Progress🚧
Care and Consequences
In The Legend of Khiimori, every horse has Hunger, Thirst, Health and Stamina values that can get drained and filled through gameplay. Together, these values make up the horse’s overall Condition, which in turn influences how fast the horse gains trust or gets its attributes trained.
We want there to be more than one way to satisfy a horse’s hunger and thirst: A horse left alone near water or grass will simply begin to graze and drink by itself, whereas the player may have to carry food items such as hay or grain to feed by hand when crossing more barren terrain. Horses left at home in camp will be fed, so that the player needn’t worry about them starving when going on long journeys through the world.
One horse game staple feature that we’re very consciously avoiding with The Legend of Khiimori is the sort of care minigame that takes the player out of regular gameplay and has to be repeated for every owned horse. Our goal is that horse care interactions should add to making the horses feel alive, but not become overly tedious.
That doesn’t mean that horses can be neglected without consequence however: reckless riding or encounters with environmental hazards may have a negative impact on your horse’s health. This then needs to be taken care of through rest or medicine, or you’ll risk worsening the horse’s condition to the point where it becomes unrideable. Here too, our intention is to keep the gameplay accessible and fun, for health conditions to add a bit of complexity to the player’s exploration and traversal, but not make it punishing. 
🚧Work in Progress🚧
Intentions are well and good, but whether these conditions and care interactions are fun is something we’ll then of course evaluate with our early playtesters!
What do you think of our plans? What would YOU like to see in horse care and training in this game? Which mechanics do you not particularly care for? Let us know in the discussion below!
🚧Work in Progress🚧
Thank you for reading! We’ll be sharing more insight and some WIP footage on our socials, so make sure to give us a follow and join the official Aesir Interactive Discord server! Please also consider Wishlisting if you have not already! 🧡
If you too want to be part of future playtests, make sure to sign up right here!
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