Hey guys, long time no see… hear… read…? Whatever, during the end of last year a lot of things in my personal life prevented me from working on EQUIRE. I started a new job, adopted a dog and was sick more than usual, but since the new year things finally took an upturn. My schedule is finally falling into place and I am working on the game with big motivation 😊 In the last month I worked mainly on some of the management aspects of the game so let’s get into what has changed.
Guests: Groups no more
One of the biggest changes is how guests are handled. The old system with multiple guest groups has been removed. Each group previously needed its own activity schedule, which quickly became tedious with many small groups, and surprisingly shallow with larger groups where preferences averaged out. In the end, schedule building stopped being engaging, so I decided to approach the problem from a different angle.
Guests now all follow a single shared activity schedule. Instead of micromanaging groups, the core decision-making now happens on an individual level through horse–guest matching. Every guest needs to be assigned a fitting horse, and these matches directly influence guest happiness, tips, and reputation gains.
The matching system considers several factors, each with its own impact:
Riding experience: Low-experience guests need horses that are easy and safe to ride, making discipline and courage especially important.
Personality compatibility: The temperament of guest and horse needs to match. Also, a guest’s empathy must be higher than the horse’s sensitivity for the match to feel comfortable.
Preferred disciplines: Guests are happier when matched with horses that fit their favorite disciplines.
Horses: The name is Bond
To work well with the new guest mechanics and present the horses better in management mechanics, I redesigned some of their UI elements. I wanted for stats like Speed and Acceleration to feel different from personality aspects like Temperament and Sensitivity. Stats are something that can be improved, that has a better and worse, but personality should be more of a feeling. A feeling that you get when you are around it and nothing that is good or bad. Besides, presenting all the information belonging to one horse has become difficult as it has increased and I felt the old presentation would overwhelm players. Horse personality is now represented through a color-mixing mechanic, blending blue (sensitivity) and red (temperament). The resulting color gives a quick, intuitive “vibe” for the horse and feels more like understanding a character than reading raw numbers.
Horse stats are now displayed in a radar chart. This keeps all information compact and well organized, and once you’re familiar with it, you can quickly get a sense of a horse’s strengths and weaknesses at a glance. While working on this, I also experimented with several new chart-based UI elements that will come in handy when I reuse them for other systems, such as finances.
Another new addition is the Bond mechanic. Bond starts at zero and can increase through:
Ridden competitions
Training segments
Time spent on the ranch while the horse is in good condition
Bond can also be lost through poor treatment. As Bond grows, more detailed information about the horse becomes visible, rewarding long-term care and encouraging players to build relationships instead of treating horses as purely statistical assets.
I’ve also added the first prototype of horse selling. While still fairly simple, it already enables interesting gameplay loops such as buying horses, training them, and reselling them. Future iterations will expand on this system and add more depth and decision-making.
Small improvements & bug-fixes
On the smaller side, there have been a number of fixes and improvements. The save system has been reworked to use save slots, including autosaving as well as the option to create custom save points. A first prototype of the main menu is now in place. Horses assigned to competitions or guests now correctly block their training schedules, and there have been various UI improvements and bug fixes across building and competition systems.
Courses: Your time to shine?
Finally, I created a new tool that allows me to add editor-built show-jumping courses to the game with a single click. I’ll be creating more courses for all five competition levels: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Professional, and Elite, but this is also an area where I’d love community input. If you’d like to contribute, you can create a course plan by drawing it or using any method you like, indicate the intended difficulty level, and post it in the new courses channel on the EQUIRE Discord.
Currently supported obstacles include standard obstacles and water jumps, with oxers and combinations working without issues, but don’t feel limited by what’s in the game right now. Feel free to suggest anything, even if it goes beyond what’s currently implemented.
I look forward to see your ideas and built some courses myself. That’s all for this update, thanks for reading!