“You have to achieve a certain level of quality within your resources” – Michael Hengst Talks about the Development of Horse Club Adventures

When I first posted about the upcoming release of Horse Club Adventures, I speculated about the development team behind the game, because these processes are often so intransparent. As a pleasant surprise, I received a comment from the game’s producer and lead designer Michael Hengst barely a day later. 

Those who pay attention to the Horses & Video Games Facebook Group and Discord Server will already have seen him around: after our first chat in April, Michael joined the community and has been actively participating in some conversations, supporting players and even giving away some steam keys. 

Now that I’ve played (and liked!) the game myself, I’m thrilled to give all of you some additional insight into how Horse Club Adventures was made, what we already know about its upcoming sequel, and what Michael thinks of the horse game genre in general. 

Early Production

Michael Hengst – whose last name is the German word for stallion, by the way – is a freelance game producer based in Austria with thirty years of experience in the games industry. He has been remotely overseeing the development of Horse Club Adventures at Wild River Games in Munich since May 2020. 

Although Michael has worked with Wild River Games before, this particular project was already well underway by the time he joined.  “There was still a lot to do in terms of design,” he says, adding that he would have handled budget and planning differently, had he been on board since the beginning of the process. 

The idea for a Horse Club Adventure game was initiated by Wild River Games and pitched to toy manufacturer Schleich. Previously functioning only as a publisher, Wild River first hired internal developers in 2019, with the development of Horse Club Adventures being kicked off in November of that year.  

“I was the only one on the team who had ever sat on a horse before,” Michael admits with a laugh. That was a tourist ride in the Hollywood Hills a decade ago, he elaborates, but even some real life experience to draw upon can help. 

Scope and Limitations

I ask if there were other horse games that inspired him, once he got into the project. “We took inspiration not so much from other games, but from various horse media such as books and TV shows.” 

Michael already worked with Wild River Games on the Windstorm games. Many horse games that he tried don’t impress him much.

The world and characters are based on the Schleich Horse Club toy line. Like the toys, the game primarily targets girls between the ages of six and twelve. That is quite the range for a video game, I note, and Michael agrees. “For a six or seven year old, there is a lot of text in the game,” he says,” but that was a risk we had to take. This way we were able to let the player enter names for their character and horse and include them in the dialogue.” 

Michael made sure to read the existing Horse Club books to familiarize himself with the residents of Lakeside and design the overall structure of the narrative. For the writing itself, Wild River hired Sabrina Schmidt. “Having a young woman as a writer made sense to us: she is much someone closer to the target audience,” Michael says. 

The development budget for Horse Club Adventures was around half a million Euro, Michael reveals. This puts it into the same range as the 2017 Windstorm game in terms of financial resources – a comparison that speaks favorably for the newer of the two games, as I’ve explained in my review. 

Wether you agree that Horse Club Adventures (right) is a prettier game than Windstorm (up) may be down to personal preference….

… but I find it quite obvious that the latter is a vastly more consistent and rounded out game.

Even so, Michael found the budget very limiting, for everything the game wanted to be and have. 

“There were a lot of things I would have liked to include, but which had to be cut during the development process,” he admits. One such thing was the addition of male player characters, but he sees a lot of room for improvement in the animations as well. “We also wanted to allow the player to lead their horse on foot, but the time and budget was just too tight. We’ll be looking at those ideas again for the second game.”

Said sequel was just in the process of getting greenlit when we talked in April, with pre-production well underway by now. Wild River Games was able to plan for a part two before part one was even released thanks to having high confidence in the project’s success. Why is that? 

“Preorders are looking very promising,” Michael told me in April. “And the initial feedback on our trailers is very positive – the game is getting real traction.”

When I follow up with Michael in early June, roughly a week after the game’s release, he confirms that the game has been selling very well, and that reviews have been favourable. 

“I’m proud of what we achieved within the constraints we had,” Michael explains. The game was content and feature complete as early as December 2020, allowing the team several months for bug fixing, polishing and quality assurance. Since the game is heavy on dialogue, localization was a big an important task as well. 

“We were happy to be able to get the original voice actresses from the Horse Club audiobooks for the German and English voice overs,” Michael tells me. A feature unlikely to get noticed by many, but a great extra for kids who are fans of the franchise.

Horse Club Adventures 2

The funding page for HCA2 promises an open world action adventure with numerous new areas and characters

The German Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure BMVI, which also invested in the My Riding Stables series, has pledged financial support for a sequel to Horse Club Adventures. The BMVI funds roughly 550k Euro, and Wild River Games matches that investment for a total budget of about 1.1M Euro. 

This time, Michael will be managing the project from the start, and therefore better able to shape it. Horse Club Adventures 2 is scheduled for release in Q4 2022, and will aim to improve on some of the things that had to be cut from the first game. 

“The Horse Club girls will of course be back,” Michael says, “as well as parts of the Lakeside world.”

He intends to prioritize quality over quantity: better to have a slightly smaller world with more to do in it. Even though the budget is better suited to the task this time around, Michael already has to rein in the biggest ideas to keep the scope contained. 

As some more examples of what they might be able to do this time, he names having things like more than one sidequest giver NPC, or quests that last multiple days. Adding a gender choice instead of only letting players be a girl is back up for discussion too. 

“We are carefully listening to the feedback for part one to set priorities for part two,” Michael tells me. He plans to organize early playtesting sessions this time, and to make use of the Horses & Video Games Communities for opinions. 

He also intends to take the whole team to visit a barn and get people into the saddle themselves. “We wanted to do that for part one already, but had to delay the visit due to Covid restrictions. It’s firmly planned this time around.”

The Horse Game Market

I point out that with its half million budget, Horse Club Adventures is already one of the bigger projects in the genre – Michael is familiar with the scopes and budgets of games like those made by Markt + Technik. 

“To be honest, I wonder why anyone even tries to make a game like that for such a budget,” he observes. “A realistic budget is automatically higher. 

Michael believes that customer expectations have grown in the past years. This used to be different: “The audience was seen as easy to satisfy – it’s just a few horse girls after all. But that sort of attitude tends to backfire,” he says. “Of course we can’t make a Red Dead Redemption. But you have to achieve a certain level of quality within your resources.”

That the games he makes are “just” for kids is not an excuse for low quality in Michael’s opinion. “Especially for kids, of course I want to make something that’s as good as we can make it. I want to deliver a good game, my name is going to be on it after all. “Cheaply made products are bad for the whole genre.”

I explicitly ask about the game’s more direct competitor: DreamWorks’ Spirit Lucky’s Big Adventure, released for the same platforms and within a few weeks of Horse Club Adventures.

“We’re not too worried about that,” Michael shrugs. “The Spirit brand is bigger, but there is also a chance for the two games to profit off each other’s reception.”

As our talk nears its end, I bring up my favorite question: does Michael believe there is a market for a horse game for adults? His answer is a pleasant surprise, not only because he agrees that this audience deserves to be addressed, but because he adds a perspective I haven’t really considered before: 

“A ‘horse game for adults’ is not good enough as a pitch. For publishers, you need a better hook than that.” Instead of basing a game idea on the niche genre of horse games, Michael suggests the approach should be “This or that game concept, but with horses.”

The idea instantly makes so much sense to me that I wonder how it did not occur to me before. I implicitly met this particular piece of advice with my own “Stardew Valley but with horses” prototype, but I had never consciously articulated that this might be the way to go about actually getting industry people excited for game concepts. 

“There’s never really been a ‘Pokemon with Horses’ or a ‘Football Manager with Horses’,” Michael muses. “And many companies who do make horse games cannot imagine what a successful ‘horse game for adults’ – or a ‘horse game for men’, for that matter could look like.”  

He mentions once again that he would really have liked to include male player characters in Horse Club Adventures, had the time and budget allowed it. 

Outlook

You will not be surprised that I came away from this conversation with a vastly more positive perspective than many of the publisher interviews I’ve had in the past two and a half years. Michael Hengst and Wild River Games have obviously learned from the Windstorm games and from their competition. 

With the intent to listen to feedback in order to produce a quality sequel, Wild River Games is set on an incredibly promising trajectory. And with the apparent success of Horse Club Adventures, I have hope that the market will realize that investing more than the bare minimum can pay off. 

Has this conversation piqued your interest into Horse Club Adventures and Michael Hengst’s work? Do you perhaps even have follow up questions to some of the things mentioned here? Well let me tell you my friends, you are in luck! Michael will be answering some community questions this week on our Discord – find the details right here.