"Most horse games lack visual polish" – Behind the Scenes of Rival Stars Horse Racing with Art Lead Victoria Smith

I’ve been meaning to give you all a look into the creation of Rival Stars Horse Racing ever since I first got in touch with the team for a review key in June 2020. There’s been a bit of back and forth about the best interview format between New Zealand and Switzerland and a lot of “being busy otherwise” on both sides, but I’m more than happy to finally present you all with some insight – just in time for the game’s much-anticipated Jumping features being released on mobile. 

For those not familiar: Rival Stars Horse Racing is a racing and breeding game available on Mobile and PC, with a console version being sold as Phar Lap Horse Racing Challenge. I recommend a look at my review of the desktop edition as well as my short article on recent updates from March 2021.

Horse Game Origins

Rival Stars’ spiritual predecessor from 2006: Melbourne Cup Challenge

The company behind Rival Stars is called PikPok – a game developer and publisher based in Wellington, New Zealand. From a glance at their website, Rival Stars Horse Racing is just one of many projects, and so far the only one with equestrian themes. 

A closer look reveals some horse game history though: Back in 2013, PikPok had partnered with Adult Swim to create Robot Unicorn Attack 2, a sequel to the popular meme-y endless platformer. The beginning of PikPok’s horse game accomplishments dates back even further though: When the company still went by the name of Sidhe Interactive in 2006, they released the Melbourne Cup Challenge: a horse racing simulation game for PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC. 

The company’s Wikipedia page claims that Sidhe partnered with Weta Digital, the visual effects company behind the Lord of the Rings films, for some then-groundbreaking motion capture of galloping horses. Looking at gameplay footage of the 2006 game, one can definitely see its influences on Rival Stars, as well as fairly impressive horse animation quality for the time. 

After talking to PikPok’s Chief Publishing Officer Karah Sutton for the organization, my interview partner is Victoria Smith, Art Lead for Rival Stars Horse Racing and part of the PikPok team since 2017. Due to the time zone difference, we agree to a written Q&A, rather than a live call.

“I’m responsible for the development and implementation of the art in the game, and guiding the other artists on the team,” Victoria introduces herself. “My day to day work usually involves improving the UI of the game.”

Making Rival Stars Horse Racing

Victoria Smith is the Art Lead for Rival Stars Horse Racing at PikPok

One base game, but two titles and three different versions on five different platforms – unfortunately a common occurrence in niche games.

“During the early development, Melbourne Cup Challenge was one of the main reference points,” Victoria says, calling back to said first horse racing game made by the company years earlier. The dev crew also played various horse racing and horse riding games for reference.  “The team went to real life horse races too, and some even went horse riding themselves!”

PikPok’s takeaway from this competitor analysis?  “Most horse games lack visual polish,” says Victoria, “which can be difficult to get past even if they have engaging mechanics.”

That visual polish is very much a feature that makes Rival Stars Horse Racing stand out, as you know if you’ve read my review of it or play different horse racing games yourself.  “We really wanted to show the beauty and power of Thoroughbred horses through great art and animations, and bring horse racing games into the modern era.”

The first version of the game was created on behalf of publisher Tru Blu Entertainment, who had already published the Melbourne Cup Challenge a decade before. 

“When we entered into this partnership, Tru Blu’s intention was to release the game on console,” Victoria explains. And this is where we get to the heart of why this game is sold under the Phar Lap title on consoles today: “PikPok has a lot of expertise in mobile and Steam games, so the companies arranged for PikPok to publish the game themselves on those platforms. This means that Tru Blu owns the console game Phar Lap and determines future development, while PikPok owns Rival Stars Horse Racing on mobile and Steam.” 

It’s the sort of mess that horse game fans are only too familiar with, after about two decades of games being published under completely different titles on each platform or in each region.
“Unfortunately for equestrian fans, publishing deals and behind the scenes business decisions can lead to confusing situations like this,” Victoria acknowledges. 

Equine Peculiarities

When talking to experienced game devs, I like to ask them about what differentiates making games about horses from other games they’ve worked on. 

“There are a few issues with horses from a developer perspective,” Victoria begins, “one of the main ones being that they’re big and have four legs.”
Obvious as a fact by itself perhaps, but less so in terms of its impact on game development: “Humans are easier to animate and control in some ways: they take up much less space in the game environment and aren’t as likely to start clipping through the floor if they’re not on a perfectly flat surface. We’re lucky enough to have a large pool of realistic motion capture data we can use when we’re animating our horses, but we still run into issues with horse’s front legs sinking into the ground, for example.”

As a User Interface expert, Victoria notes particularities in that regard too: “The UI of the game needs to accommodate the horses, and it can be tricky finding the right place to put a horse shaped hole for them. Humans are a lot skinnier and therefore easier to put windows and buttons around!”

“As our horses are all beautifully animated to feel as lively as real horses, they can upset some of my best laid plans for new features in the game. A screen that looks perfect in a static Photoshop image might end up very different when there’s a foal running around in the middle of it!”

The general shape of horses sounds like a manageable issue though, considering all of this was being taken into consideration from the start: “Almost all of the visuals in the game are designed in a very horse-centric way to avoid issues like this. We want to show off the player's horses as much as we can, instead of hiding them away somewhere.”

There’s also a fun side to these equine eccentricities, Victoria admits. “I think there’s something inherently goofy about horses that makes them fun to work with, even digitally. With a game as big as Rival Stars Horse Racing, there are always going to be things that get cut or things that break.”

“Animation glitches are always fun! We had a great time when we discovered that we could put the foal animations on an adult horse to create a strange little mini horse which shuffled around the game.” – many thanks for sending me a gif of that! –  “Then there’s always the wacky animation bugs that happen when you’re actually trying to make something work properly!”

In a game of this scope, the equine main characters will never be the only source of trouble though: When I ask for fun anecdotes from the dev process, Victoria explains the elusive “Flying Tree Bug” that the team had to teal with: “This bug caused random trees to zoom around the map each time you played a race. It was tricky to actually track down and fix, so we kept hearing people mention it but never seeing it ourselves. The flying trees became a bit of a cryptid, like Bigfoot but more leafy. We had the video team sending us blurry freeze frames of the tree flying across the racetrack going ‘See, it exists!’.”

I could insert a barrel racing starfishing joke here but I’m sure some people would get mad at me for that.

The aforementioned “foal animation on adult horse body” abonination. Absolutely delightful.

Design Choices

As you might remember from my review, one of my favorite sources of amusement in the game is the randomly generated names and the commentator calling them out. Needless to say, I had to ask Victoria how that feature came to be part of the game. 

“The name generator was actually part of PikPok’s previous game Melbourne Cup Challenge!” Victoria reveals. “The naming system got brought across to Rival Stars Horse Racing. We even got Matthew Hill, a veteran racing commentator, back to re-record all of the audio clips.”

More complex naming systems were on the table at some point during development, but the team ended up sticking with the idea of combining two words. “That gave us some of the funniest results,” Victoria says. “A horse’s registered name can be quite strange compared to their barn name. There is a long history of wacky horse racing names that can be a fun entry point for people unfamiliar with the sport.”

I played a race for a new screenshot of some fun names and Snail’s Blog is already a favorite again.

Some of the fictional billboards are well visible in tracks’ intro shots

And Victoria’s personal favorites in terms of commentary-friendly horse names? “Egg Egg” and “Sad Sand”. 

Another detail I decided to ask the team about are the billboards placed across the race tracks. Displaying real brands on in-game advertisement spaces is not unheard of, after all. 

“The in game billboards are all advertising fictional brands,” Victoria clarifies. “We had fun coming up with the names; Julie’s Pantry is named after one of our Product Owners who loves cooking. I managed to get the final racecourse named after myself!” 

Although there’s no real product placement in the game at the moment, there have been such arrangements in the past: “When we first launched Rival Stars Horse Racing on mobile, we worked with RideTV on a cross promotion to have their branding on the game’s billboards. I think this sort of thing can be a good strategy that is mutually beneficial.”

Genetics

When I play Rival Stars, I tend to pay more attention to stats than looks, and tend to tolerate a fast horse with markings I don’t like over a cute one with bad stats. It’s just the opposite for some other players though, and getting a foal that doesn’t look like you might have expected from the breeding pair you chose can be a cause of frustration. 

When I told my community about being able to ask the PikPok team some questions, something that quickly came up was a general sentiment of “how does inheritance work in the game and why”.  Victoria was able to give me some fascinating insight about the role of the breeding mechanics in Rival Stars Horse Racing: “Early in development the main draw was intended to be training and racing your horses, so we didn’t consider breeding a major aspect of the game.”

That people who play horse games would love to dive deep into horse genetics may not be a surprise to the TMQ audience – but it was not what PikPok expected: “We initially thought it was going to appeal more to players who loved the competition, the betting,” says Victoria. “But as the fanbase for the game grew, we saw that breeding horses was one of the main things that was engaging our players, and it is what most of our social media comments are about!”

Displaying noteworthy flexibility, PikPok shifted their development priorities to serve the fans they had, rather than sticking closely to their original intentions. The breeding system was updated to better suit these players needs. 

“We did a lot of research into how horse genetics work,” Victoria explains, “But we opted for a simplified genetics system to work with the game’s horse shader system. This system has far less restrictions than real life breeding, leading to the more ‘unrealistic’ breeding outcomes. Nearly any base colour, dilution and pattern can be combined in the backend system of the game, which can create what may seem to be random outcomes.” 

The system is predictable though, Victoria stresses. “I know there are some fans on social media who already have this system all figured out!”

To help breeding enthusiasts, PikPok has added updates like the Genetics tab that reveals some of the relevant information. There are limits to what can be improved though: “We are working with a system that was never designed to mimic fully realistic genetics. Changing it to reflect real-life genetics would be unfeasible at this point, but we try to make it accessible and fun. We know that breeding is important to our players, and will keep improving that aspect of the game in the future.”

The “genetics” tab with further info is not available yet in the desktop version unfortunately.

Not all inheritance makes sense at first glance.

Success

The Desktop Edition of Rival Stars Horse Racing has been out for over a year now, and the mobile game is in its third and fourth year of life on iOS and Android respectively. The Google Play Store page reveals 5+ Million downloads on Android, and with over 85k ratings on the App Store we can assume at least as many installs on iOS. 

On Steamspy, Rival Stars is placed in the 20k-50k owners range, while just about every other horse game I can find on the stats service is below 20k owners. Unfortunately, these rough estimates are all we have to go on in terms of guessing at the game’s sales – PikPok does not answer my question about sales numbers. 

“Rival Stars Horse Racing has become a flagship title for us,” Victoria can tell me though. “We invested several years of work into its quality and depth, so we certainly had hopes it would do well.”

“The main shift in expectations really came from how players engaged with the game,” Victoria adds, referring to the player enthusiasm regarding breeding and management over competing and betting. “We’ve developed a lot of new content to better support that side of the game, and we’re really excited to have a game that presents a variety of features to engage with!”

Victoria goes on to give some insight into why not all of that variety is available everywhere, even among the mobile and desktop versions under PikPok’s direct control: “On App Store and Google Play, we have restrictions around gambling content that limits some of the features we can have in the game. The PC version of Rival Stars Horse Racing has online and local multiplayer, both which are separate systems to the mobile game’s Live Events system.”

These differences are expected to remain as they are: “Due to various technical reasons, we don’t have any plans to unify the multiplayer features of either platform.”

There’s other features that Rival Stars players can look forward to though. At the time of writing, PikPok has just released an update to their Free Roam mode that lets you try the jump mechanics for the first time. “We want to use the new Jump and Agility stats to expand the range of activities you can do with your horses,” says Victoria. “The new mode will continue to develop, and we have many other things we’d like to add in future updates.”

Audience and Outlook

Naturally, I add my favorite question to this interview: what does PikPok think of the teen/adult horse game audience and its market potential? 

“I grew up loving horses, and took regular riding lessons as a child,” Victoria begins. “I played a few horse games when I was younger, but as an adult none of them have really appealed to me. I’ve had to settle for realistic horses in games that don’t focus on riding, such as the Red Dead Redemption series. I personally feel like there is a market for modern, grounded games that focus on working with horses, without needing any fantastical elements. I also think that too many horse games become a simulation of the mechanical parts of horse care, instead of connecting the player with their horse and the emotional highs of riding and competing.”

To many of my regular readers, Victoria’s words will ring incredibly true – I know they do to me. While the inclusion or exclusion of fantastical elements is a matter of taste, most TMQ readers will agree that there is a lot of potential in the exact aspects that Victoria mentions. And although Rival Stars Horse Racing may not be able to scratch each and everyone of our itches in that regard, it’s sure nice to have an ongoing project of this kind: With its recent adjustments and new addition, PikPok has proven that they try to cater to players’ desires within the game’s scope. 

Personally, I’ll be watching Rival Stars’ further development with great interest – and I would buy a spinoff with a focus on showjumping or dressage in a heartbeat. And with Victoria and the PikPok team, it sounds like the project is in good hands. 

“I’ve been working on Rival Stars Horse Racing since early in its development,” Victoria adds for closing words, “and it’s been a lot of fun to see it grow into the game it is today. We’ve tried hard to make a grounded and engaging equestrian game for adults, and let the beautiful horses really be the stars of the show. The team loves seeing what our fans post on social media, and we’re all excited about the features and ideas we have planned for the future.”