“We wanted to build a horse game that people could be passionate about” – The Inspirations, Research and Future Plans behind Star Equestrian

Star Equestrian is a mobile horse MMO recently released by Foxie Ventures. The game is now available for iOS and Android. If you haven’t heard anything about it yet, I highly recommend checking out my preview article or the corresponding video (left). This article itself is also available in video format (right)!

Foxie Ventures’ Founder and Director Dineth Abeynayake and Product Manager Steven Ready took some time before the release to show me a preview of what their newest game would offer, and to answer a few questions about Star Equestrian’s development and its future.

From Meadowcroft to Evervale

Dineth (left) and Steve (right) of Foxie Ventures, at their office

Thanks to a handful of conversations over the years – Steve first reached out to me not long after my Horse Riding Tales review – I was aware that Foxie Ventures was working on another horse game. Horse Riding Tales itself has gone through numerous updates since I had a closer look at it: A recent update even added a breeding feature, albeit one that is currently limited to the Friesian horses. But Star Equestrian was meant to be an entirely different beast, and something that could not fit into a simple addition for Horse Riding Tales.  

“Horse Riding Tales has been around for a few years,” Steve begins. “We now know more about horse games and what their fans are looking for, and we know more about the technical architecture required to build a game like this. It made a lot more sense to start from scratch and build this from the ground up so we could make the game we actually wanted to make.”

“Star Equestrian is an actually massive multiplayer game, where HRT was a lot more constrained,” he explains. “With our plans to expand into new areas over the coming months, the scope is really next level. You can play Star Equestrian as an adventure game, helping the people of Heartside and playing through the story, or you can play it as an eventing game and focus on the Championship, but I also believe that a number of players are just going to really enjoy going for social trail rides that they organize among themselves.”

The release of Star Equestrian does not necessarily mean that the further development of Horse Riding Tales will slow down: 

“The two games have already been developed in parallel for the past couple of years,” Steve explains, “and we plan to continue this post-release. After the recent breeding update for Horse Riding Tales, we also have plans to expand how you can interact with the world, and a ‘Sky Islands’ area on the roadmap.”

The Foxie team is not overly worried about losing the HRT player base to their newer project: “Of course there’s going to be a whole stack of people who play both,” Steve explains, “But we also view Horse Riding Tales fans as a slightly different market to Star Equestrian. There are things we wanted to do with Horse Riding Tales that were not received well by the fan base. And on the other hand we know there’s a whole genre of people who are really passionate about horses but who don’t like Horse Riding Tales. As we saw more and more views of what people wanted, and considering the foundation we had from other games we built in the meantime, we figured we could take all of that and build a horse game that these horse lovers could really get behind and be passionate about.”

Inspirations and Advice

To gather and analyse those learnings of what horse game players want, Foxie’s market research wasn’t limited to mobile games: “We looked at what the indie horse game crews are doing in their games, and also where they’re not quite hitting the mark in certain things. And yes, we looked at Red Dead Redemption and at why it’s such a popular horse game when it’s not ‘a horse game’.”

“We’ve read all these articles on this really good blog we found,” Steve continues in mock fascination, keeping a mostly straight face until I start cracking up, “which had all these really good critiques about horse games and what they should and should not do, so that was a really good resource.”

“I’m glad to hear it!” I laugh, and ask if there’s any concrete advice they took and applied from reading The Mane Quest. “The specificness of the horse animations is something that we took extra care with based on what we learned on The Mane Quest,” Steve goes on to explain. “We’ve gone to people like yourself and others to ask for feedback, and put the animations through several iterations to ensure it’s a realistic and genuine experience.” 

Braid concepts by Ken Pascual

Bridle concepts by Bonnie Lawson

He adds that my article on horse care minigames is one reason behind why Star Equestrian never forces the player to engage in brushing or hoof picking mechanics. “You can feed your horse via the menu,” Steve tells me, “or you can actually carry your food and feed it to your horse in the game itself for role play purposes. Beyond that, you will not be grinding away at repetitive horse care tasks.”

Instead, the feeding mechanics are part of the system to level up your horse, thereby offering an optional reward instead of imposing themselves as an obligatory task. 

“We also addressed multiple points from your ‘8 Common Horse Mistakes’ article,” says Steve, citing their careful animation work, controls for individual gaits, free camera mode and lack of repetitive horse care as evidence. “Taking off your saddle for horses in your ranch is on our wishlist for when we get time. But you can already carry your saddle around, which is fun.” He adds: “I really do use The Mane Quest as my go-to authority for horse mechanics and game systems.”
On the topic of horse story tropes, Steve adds that he found one of the many “every horse story” parody posts on our community Discord. “I passed it around the office and we all laughed. With the Star Equestrian story we tried hard to find the balance between not fitting into that typical stereotype story mold while still making it very horse centric. It is a horse game for horse lovers so the story needs to be focused on horses and the people that love them. Hence the overarching storyline about trying to find Snowdrop again.”

The free camera definitely helps in taking pretty screenshots - though an option to hide the UI would be fantastic for that!

Petting your horse is a cute optional interaction instead of a chore to get over with.

Ads, Titles, Testing

Foxie’s early tests caused confusion in the Community.

Star Equestrian was officially announced on Foxie Ventures’ social media sites in November 2022. Before that, the game managed to raise a handful of eyebrows in the horse game communities on Facebook: Users reported seeing ads for a new horse game – which didn't actually exist yet. Different players reported seeing the same game images but claiming the game had a different title. Before long, users were warning each other not to engage with these ads, suspecting a scam.

What looked shady to community members is actually an incredibly common tactic in mobile game marketing however: while pretend-announcing a game under different titles and seeing which gets the most clicks is practically unheard of (though not inexistent, see here) in PC and Console games, the mobile games market is incredibly data-driven and relies on such methods more often than not. 

Foxie’s founder Dineth is aware of the irritation their tests caused, but considers the findings and results more valuable than the harm done by the initial confusion. “I think it was worth it, yes,” Dineth confirms when I ask about this. “For every confused Facebook post, there are thousands of actual data points that helped us decide on our marketing messaging.”

So while a dozen people in the community may agree that they dislike this tactic and are less inclined to trust the game for it, they are the vocal minority. A few thousand users still silently provides the valuable insight into which game ads or titles get clicked and which get ignored.

“If we were to do anything differently,” Dineth adds, “we might have announced the game before running our tests, so anyone confused could easily check the authenticity of the game”.
“I was actually surprised to see those posts of people’s irritation,” he concedes. “We didn’t really expect people to communicate and be so confused about this. The timing of us officially announcing the game actually had a lot to do with alleviating that confusion as quickly as we could”

The game’s official announcement was expediated to alleviate these concerns.

The admission confirms a thought I had ever since initially seeing people talk about those marketing tests: mobile game developers are not really used to their players talking to each other. While mobile games with dedicated communities certainly exist, app gamers don’t usually gather in general gaming spaces to discuss what they’re playing. The Horses & Video Games communities that I’ve built up over the years are united by thematic content and not limited to specific platform however, giving these discussions more room to grow. 

In the case of Star Equestrian, the game’s title itself was subject to extensive A-B-testing preceding the game’s announcement. “So what, did you just go and combine Star Stable with Equestrian the Game?” I prompt, only half-joking. Steve laughs and hands the question over to Foxie’s founder. 

“The title choice was largely based on testing,” Dineth explains. “The winning test isn’t necessarily going to be the final title, but it’s definitely inspiration for the direction we can go in. ‘Star Equestrian’ beat all the other variants we tried by a large margin, so we knew that had potential, and it does fit the game and the star championship setting.”

I add that Star Stable Online is hardly the first or only popular horse game to use that particular celestial connotation either, considering the past and present successes of Mary King’s Riding Star and Rival Stars Horse Racing. 

“Everything’s all about listings and rankings in the app stores, that’s massive,” adds Steve on the topic of title choice. “There is a danger of using a title with more generic keywords, but it’s outweighed by the benefits of ranking for keywords people actually search for. I think you said this in one of your articles, you could name your game something really unique and then you’d easily be found on google, but if it’s not a horse term, no one is every going to type that in. It’s a balance, really.”
While marketing and keyword testing are a standard part of the process, Star Equestrian is the first of Foxie’s titles that got beta-tested by players before release. “It’s absolutely been a good experience, and worth it,” Steve says. “There have been a few suggestions and requests where players said they’d like to be able to do something and we could respond by saying ‘you can do this by doing that’. So obviously our tutorialization wasn’t quite clear enough here or there. And that’s all part of what player testing is for.”

Behind the scenes of Star Equestrian: screenshot from the Unity Editor where the game is made.

Balancing and Mechanics

We discuss a few more features that – at the time of our call – I only had a superficial impression of. That bonding with your horse unlocks a few additional interactions, that you level up your horse by feeding, that you can access everything in the game without any paywall whatsoever. Now that the game is out, you can try all of those things by yourself. 

One additional tidbit that I found interesting, and which may not be immediately obvious from simply trying the game yourself, is how your horse’s stats will affect its handling. 

“Levelling up your horse is going to affect your actual controls”, Steve tells me. “And as you level up, some challenges will become noticeably easier, you’ll really feel the difference in riding around that track.”

That your horse gets “better” to control – faster acceleration, higher top speed, tighter turns, feeling more responsive overall – is something many horse games do, but it is also a very delicate balance: if you’re able to improve your horse’s handling, that means what you start out with will be the “worst” that the game has to offer. This can be in significant conflict with the general interest of game creators to provide a satisfying first time experience to new players. Those first five, ten, fifteen minutes of play is what many players will judge your game by, and if they have a negative first impression of the controls and overall experience, they may not ever come back.

Your first moments of riding in the game serve as an “Abilitease”.

I tell Steve about my initial experiences with Star Stable Online and how I initially turned away from the game pretty quickly being dissatisfied with horse handling – until I realized how much better that handling would get over time, thanks to trying a friend’s levelled up account and horse. 

“It’s an interesting problem,” Steve agrees, “and one we’ve debated a lot. Snowdrop is actually much easier to control than your starter horse. You then get a few intro riding missions that let you try your starter horse for comparison – we added those missions after the initial Beta testing. ”

The method of giving the player an overpowered thing or ability (or horse, in this case) early on and then taking it away again is tried and true: The player gets an early taste for what is possible later in the game, while still getting to play the whole process of levelling up and gaining additional skills or powers. This is sometimes referred to as an “Abilitease”. Snowdrop is the first example of it I’ve seen in a horse game however.

Snowdrop concept art by Foxie’s art department head Oliver Kriel.

The Future of Star Equestrian

Foxie Ventures runs several mobile live service games – Dino Tamers, Wolf Tales and Virtual Sim Story being their non-horsie projects. Over 20 people are currently working on Star Equestrian specifically, though the team size has shifted quite a lot through the development process. 

The Foxie team at their Christmas party in late 2022.

Star Equestrian was released worldwide for iOS devices on March 13th 2023, with Android following on March 28th. The reception I’ve seen in my communities in the time since the game has gone live is generally positive, though I’ve also seen some frustration from players at the lootbox system and the fact that you can only gamble for horses, never buy a specific one. Foxie tells me they are currently looking at options for selling specific horses to cater to players more likely to engage this way. 

Several eager players have already played through the currently available story content and are now waiting for more. I myself have ended up playing a little bit every day since release, despite the initially hesitant conclusion of my review. I’m at 91% Competition in the main story, with a handful of side quests left to do. I ask the team how ‘complete’ the game is in its current state. 

“It really depends on how it’s received and how it performs,” Dineth tells me. “We’ve had a generally very positive reaction so far, so we are already working on the next batch of content. I see so much room for improvement in all aspects of the game, especially with the horses and making them feel unique and alive, rather than just vehicles you control. Graphics, world, narrative and how you interact with other players can all be developed further as well.”

“Having said that,” adds Steve, “we also hope that what we’ve released now is seen as a complete experience. The quests, missions and events at release add up to about 20-25 hours of gameplay. But we’re going to build on what we have, and anyone who joins Star Equestrian in three years time will play a significantly bigger version of it.” 

Playing Star Equestrian and talking to Foxie has proven to me that the team have done their homework: they know their market and the competition, and have an awareness of what the adult horse fan audience is looking for that I’ve not often seen in our niche, especially from professional and established studios. I’m thrilled that my work on The Mane Quest has helped bridge that gap, and I am definitely looking forward to seeing how the game develops further from here.