There are bad months and there are good months. The past month has been amazing. A great video about the game has been published, the numbers on Steam and Discord are good, but most importantly, I have made a lot of progress.
First thing on my agenda this month was a system that lets you save and load your progress in the game. This might sound trivial, but especially in a game where every player has a wildly different experience with unique ranches, horses, progress, etc. the game needs to replicate the saved game accurately every time. This means whenever you load a game the game takes the information you saved and then rebuilds your ranch piece by piece (probably a little faster than you could do it 😉). Since this is finished, the game has felt a lot more like a real game and no longer like a prototype and when designing future systems, I can easily integrate them.
Next, I created a horse market that offers new horses every month as you progress. The number and skill of horses that show up in this market will depend on the reputation of your ranch. When you start out, you can only pick from a couple of cheaper horses, but as you gain reputation through competitions, guest satisfaction, horse trade… you will get offers for more and pricier horses. When you take a look at the market, (ignore the excessive amount of gray horses 😅) you can see that not all of the information about the horses is available before you buy one. Just like in real-life you don’t know offered horses as well as your own and must make your decision on limited information. The star rating gives you only an estimate of the horse’s current ability and potential. Besides, you can see some of the accomplishments, some strengths, weaknesses and achievements. Based on these, you can decide if the price is a good deal or you’re getting ripped off 😈.
The rest of my month was spent on fixing bugs and improving some smaller things. This made a lot of difference, and it is now much nicer to move through the many menus and switch between the different gameplay modes. I also added a part of the menu that lets you overview your ranch. This also opens after you buy a horse and lets you assign your horse to a stall.
Next up on my list are guests.
If you want to see the newest update and join thediscussio? You can already find another one on the EQUIRE Discord.