Hey everyone! 🙋♂️
This is by far the biggest update of Horse Runner DX! The new starting herd system lets you begin each run with up to 3 horses and create your own herd builds right from the start. Together with many gameplay, graphics and technical improvements, the game now feels faster, smoother and better than ever.
Gameplay Improvements
New Herd Feature: You can now start every run with a custom herd of up to 3 horses instead of just one! Each horse contributes its own power-ups, allowing you to create different herd builds right from the start. This new feature should also make it possible to achieve some wild new high scores.
Demo Update: If you've only tried the demo so far, you'll now find all the new features and improvements from this update in the demo version as well. In addition, the demo's progression has been completely revamped so that players can now experience much more speed and action.
Horse Shuffling: The horses randomly swap positions within the herd. This has now been disabled at high speeds and on steep slopes so that the horses can react precisely at all times and no longer fall into obstacles by accident.
Power-Up Display: Since you can now accumulate many power-ups quickly, there's an improved and easier-to-read power-up display at the bottom of the screen. Power-ups are now grouped and displayed with their quantity shown as a number.
Achievement Adjustments: Several achievements have been rebalanced to match the new starting herd system.
Graphical Improvements
New Herd Screen: You can now assemble your new starting herd of up to 3 horses on a Mario Kart-style character screen. This screen also functions as a horse collection album where you can buy/unlock new horses.
Smoother Camera: The previous camera used to bounce up and down a lot on hilly terrain, which some players found unpleasant. Camera movement is now smoothed out across the landscape, eliminating those short up-and-down jitters. The new camera also has a larger dead zone, so minor up-and-down movements are often avoided entirely.
New Particle Effects: When collecting apples, a nicer particle effect with Super Mario-style stars is now displayed. All other particle effects and particle physics have also been completely revamped and improved (confetti, water, etc.).
Power-Up Effects: When the "Points +20%" power-up is used, the bonus points are now displayed separately as green flying numbers. There's also a special particle effect when that power-up is used. When the "Apples +50%" power-up is used, a flying icon appears whenever you collect additional bonus apples.
Enhanced Bonus Area: The bonus area between levels has been redesigned to stand out more clearly from the rest of the landscape, featuring more birds and cobblestones instead of the usual dirt road.
Technical Improvements
Support for High Refresh Rates: One of the most common pieces of feedback was that the game could feel a bit choppy on some systems. One reason for this was the mismatch between the FPS and the monitor's refresh rate. Since this update, the game is no longer limited to 60 FPS and now supports high-refresh-rate monitors, configurable VSync, and a new VRR mode for FreeSync and G-Sync displays. This results in noticeably smoother gameplay and smoother camera movement.
Saving and Loading: Save files are now updated more efficiently, reducing unnecessary file access and improving performance.
Bug Fixes: Various bugs have been fixed, including issues with particle physics, Magnet power-up behavior at high FPS, apple collection sounds, progress bar scaling and save game resets.
If you encounter any bugs or issues (this was a huge update!), please let me know in the community hub so I can fix it ;-)
Mat 🤗