“There is no need to do anything differently” — Insights from Horse Isle 3 Lead Developer Joe ‘Jor’ Durbin

Shortly after publishing my latest article on Horse Isle 3, a summary of the game’s current state and some of its players’ common complaints, I was thrilled to receive a reply from Joe “Jor” Durbin, lead developer on all three Horse Isle games. 

The original comment can be found below the article here, although with weird formatting that I don’t know how to fix without deleting the comment altogether. 

Since then, Joe and I have exchanged a few emails about the development process of Horse Isle 3 and some of the thoughts that go into it. As Joe does not have the time for a full interview with TMQ, I am happy to be able to provide a bit of insight in this form nonetheless.

Process and Priorities

In his first email to me, Joe reveals just how tight their schedule has been: “We have two developers for HI3, and both of us had babies at the start of development 2 years ago. Between that and 80+ hour weeks working on HI3, it's been a long road.”

The whole team consists of 3 people working full time, and 4 part time folks, Joe writes in his comment. “We work every day as hard as we can. The game already has a huge amount of depth and content (and a huge debt).”

While I never had the impression that HI3’s problem was that anyone was not working hard enough, the schedule Joe mentions should remove any doubt in Horse Isle 3 being a passion project. Joe tells me he schedules his priorities in order to get the most playtime out of the least development time: “Biggest Bang for the Buck: If I spend ten hours on something and it provides one hundred hours of gameplay,  that is worth it. However, If I spend a hundred hours for ten hours of gameplay, I will never catch up.”

It’s an approach often taken for the final stages of project management. Scheduling priorities in this way is a fire-fighting method, but unfortunately not how you generally create a well-rounded product. 

As another way to determine dev priorities, Joe names the players themselves: “We've been taking polls on what players want, between 5-8 reasonable things that we could work on. Then we take that on, letting the players also direct some of the development.”

As a result, Horse Isle 3 is a sandbox: a tool to make your own game rather than a fully-fledged game itself. No doubt this is what some of the players want and are content with. But from looking at the comments of long-time Horse Isle fans that I gathered for my last article on this subject, many people expect Horse Isle 3 to offer a lot more concrete gameplay rather than just throwing a bunch of features at players and expecting them to find their own fun. An open world and freedom in terms of what to do next should not prevent a game from being intuitive to play and well tutorialized however, as dozens of well received indie games have proven before. 

Like almost anything else in the game, courses and challenges are player-made.

In the huge world, any player can claim their own spot of land and build a farm.

Gameplay Impressions

In the meantime, I’ve taken the time to actually play Horse Isle 3 and found pretty much what I expected: it does a subpar job of onboarding its players, of tutorializing and giving proper guidance and of providing an enjoyable user experience in general, in my opinion. 

While I used quests as an example of a core aspect being missing for my last article, actually trying the game makes other severe issues very clear: I found the controls unintuitive, the interface visually grating and the general understandability of what to do in the game very lacking. 

I did not play the game alone: I streamed my experience on Twitch and had several experienced Horse Isle 3 players giving me advice, and one community member even showing me around in the game itself. Without them, I would not have had the first clue of where to begin, what to do, what to aim for. And no wonder: When the prioritization of features relies so heavily on the input of long-term players, it’s not surprising that new players end up being utterly overwhelmed. 

In one of his emails, Joe tells me that “HI3 is already enjoyable to many folks. The only concession we make is to not shoot for AAA graphics.”

While the graphics no doubt leave something to be desired, I indeed found them one of HI3’s least pressing problems compared to the sheer tediousness of almost anything that you can do in the game. 

“We will always choose gameplay over minor polish,” Joe explains. It is a take I generally agree with. On the other hand though, games that focus solely on depth in gameplay rather than accessibility often end up having trouble drawing in new players. And this may be very relevant:

Old and New Players

Poll in a HI3 fan group with 700+ members.

Horse Isle 3 has recently introduced a referral system which rewards players for bringing along new people. A clear indicator that the game is looking for new players - and payers. 

In my research into the game and its community, I have gotten the impression that most of the passionate players have been part of the Horse Isle community for years. Many name HI1 as their first played entry in the franchise. Such players are invaluable members of the community, but their desires and wishes for the game may differ greatly from those who are entirely new to the franchise. 

If the game wants to grow beyond this old and established core, the team will have to think about how to appeal to new players. Unfortunately, the onboarding of new players, i.e. the consideration of what pulls new people in, how their first 10 ingame minutes look and feel, is something that won’t become a priority if development time is allocated solely by what creates the most play time and what existing players vote for.

The Player Referral Program as described in the game’s manual.

Business Plans

Anyone who reads The Mane Quest knows how badly I want good horse games to succeed, to prove that putting in the effort to please horse game fans is a worthwhile investment of time and funds. 

As a twelve year old franchise with a big existing player base and an — in its particular niche — well known intellectual property, Horse Isle 3 should have potential not only as a creatively interesting project, but also as a viable business. 

I’ve suggested as much to Joe and asked him if he’s ever considered approaching game publishers or investors for funding, after his mentions of massive debt that the development has already racked up. 

His response was simple, and final: “We're doing the project exactly as we'd like and everything is turning out as we'd like. There is no need to do anything differently. We're happy and the players we are targeting are happy, so all is good.”

In my book, a game amassing a huge debt, requiring a development time of a decade, and the constant input of 80h work weeks by its core team is not a testament to passion, it is a failure of project management. Such absurd amounts of work are referred to as “crunch time” in the gaming industry. Regardless of whether it happens because a publisher asks for too many changes too close to release or because an independent team has set its own goals too high, such workloads are not sustainable in the long run, and they are one of many causes of why so many game developers experience burnouts or leave the industry altogether. 

To my ears, Joe’s assurance about being happy with how everything is going, and his statements that the team has been working intense crunch time for several years clash with each other.

Many players I’ve talked to mention a sense of community among the players as something they appreciate.

The immense variety in findable and breedable horse shapes and colors is a selling point for many Horse Isle fans.

Outlook

At the moment, Horse Isle 3 is a project of contradictions: there’s the development team putting themselves into financial debt and intense crunch time, but assuring me that everything is just fine and according to plan. The existing player base being the only people relevant to the game’s future, but the obvious need to draw in new users. 

For Horse Isle 3 to succeed in growing its player base and its revenue, appealing to new players is unavoidable. To do so, the game need not have AAA visuals, but things like a proper landing page for those yet unfamiliar with the game, an overhaul of the ingame user interface and proper guidance for those looking to get started with playing are crucial in my opinion. 

Whether the Horse Isle 3 team finds a way to balance longtime fan expectations and new player acquisition into a well rounded game remains to be seen. I will definitely keep my eyes on the game’s community and its development.
In the meantime, I do hope that other horse game fans looking into development can learn from the situation and better fit their project scope to their skill, time, team size and budget. 

All in-game screenshots in this article were taken from the official Screenshot gallery on Horse Isle' 3’s website. They were taken and originally uploaded by players.

Horse Isle 3 is free to play and can be downloaded here once you’ve created an account.