Your vacation at your aunt’s turns out to be far from what you expected. Your once grand family property has fallen into ruins and you find yourself facing a huge challenge.
Fact Sheet
Company: Aesir Interactive
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Platforms: Steam, Epic Games, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch
Release: Nov 3, 2022
Team Size: 15-20
Systems I owned: Breeding, Missions, Dialogues, River & Terrain Tooling
My Work
This was my first project at Aesir, where I worked officially as a gameplay programmer, and it's the most gameplay-systems-heavy work I've done.
Mission and dialogue systems. I owned most of the mission system. It built on the system from Aesir's Ostwind games but added support for missions running in parallel, for mission-specific resources in the world that became available only while a given mission was active, and a dialogue system that the mission system could drive directly. I also supported the outsourced content creators who used the system to author missions, which meant designing it to be usable by people who weren't engineers.
Horse AI and movement. I built the horse AI and its autonomous movement. Epic's CharacterMovement and built-in pathfinding are designed for humanoid characters and looked unnatural on a horse, so I wrote custom implementations of both to get believable locomotion and pathing, with the AI itself running on behavior trees. One of the trickier features was letting the player call their horse from any distance: the horse might be in a region that was currently streamed out or otherwise inaccessible, so the system had to bring it to the player gracefully no matter where it was in the world.
Breeding and genetics. I took over the breeding system after its previous owner left the company, with little documentation behind it. It's a detailed genetics simulation built on phenotypes and gene patterns, so I spent time reading my way into it before extending it. I added new phenotypes, made the system DLC-able so new coats and breeds could be layered on later, and added validation and automated tests. The tests surfaced a real problem nobody had caught: a number of phenotypes were impossible to produce given the existing gene-pattern setup, meaning certain horse coats could never appear in game.
Nintendo Switch port and optimization. I maintained the game's Switch port, which meant a lot of optimization across foliage, streaming, and meshes, along with managing memory and save-game size, both of which were tight on the platform.
Post Mortem
Horse Tales had a fair amount of feature creep. We had no shortage of ideas and systems, but several of them ended up shallow, barely used, and not well connected to each other. With hindsight I'd push for fewer features built deeper and tied more tightly together, where each one clearly supports the core gameplay rather than standing on its own.
Some of that traces back to direction. The game began as a sandbox and grew a mission-driven layer partway through development, so the open-ended and structured sides ended up developed somewhat in parallel rather than as one coherent vision from day one. If we'd committed to a single clear direction earlier, we could have built more deliberately around it, supported content creation even further, and chased the fun down that path instead of splitting our attention.
That said, I'm very happy with how the game turned out. It came together well and seems to have become something of a fan favorite, which is a credit to the work the whole team put in.
