The development time for HCA2 was set to 2 years. During the first few months, the code of HC1 was optimized. We started removing any singleton and added services based on interfaces. This allowed us to build unit tests into the game, an aspect we did not have in the first instalment. The unit tests allowed us to quickly test our code when making changes and saved us a lot of time when refactoring the code.

While I still had a focus on the project management and overall planning of the project, I did way more game feature programming compared to HC1. Also a lot of my time went into refactoring existing systems to allow for more modularity. For example, I completely reworked the races from HC1 into a general minigame system. While the rework took a few weeks, in the end creating a new minigame type would take about 1 day. Within 1 day it would be possible to create a new minigame with highscores, medals, rewards, win-condition and so on… Since HCA2 was set to have a lot of different side hustles, this was a very important part of the project.

Next to the game features I also revamped the whole UI system to allow for some animations like simple fades or slides. In HC1 the UI would simply pop in or be deactivated without any transition.

A big issue was the port to the Xbox One. While I was expecting to build up on the HC1 code, the Xbox One SDK was now deprecated and I had to change the whole code to use the Game Core XDK instead. Fortunately since our game does not use a lot of console exclusive features I was able to change the base code within 2 weeks. Thankfully the Game Core XDK was a lot easier to work with than the older SDK.

The main challenge encountered during development was the story. While we had very strict deadlines the story was not finished on time and the whole team had to help to minimize the effect on the overall project timeline. Because the story was still being changed at later stages of development, the whole team had to jump in to test the game twice a week, basically costing every tester 1 full day of development per week. Furthermore because so many changes were being done every week, there were a lot of new bugs being reported. This hindered the development of the game a lot, basically turning the polishing phase into a bugfixing phase.

Because of that issue we had to cut a few features or did not improve some aspects of HC1 that we would have really loved to. For example the horse cleaning system was something we said we wanted to polish more from the beginning but did not manage to do.

Also since we were still only 3 programmers, we did not manage to implement our own solution for player movement and riding, so we still used the plugin “Malber’s Animations” which still created a lot of problems.

Thankfully for HCA2 we recruited new team members: An animator, a tech artist and a producer. This was a huge help as we could finally create our own custom animations. Also with the help of our tech artist we were able to optimize the game a lot, allowing for a much smoother experience on Nintendo Switch, while having a more lively world compared to HC1. Our producer also helped a lot testing the game every single week and reporting issues.

Similarly to HC1 I directed the QA process done by Quantic Lab, managing the communication between our developers and their QA Team, and making sure the issues found were fixed asap and included in new builds sent out to the QA Team regularly.
I also had the opportunity to direct the port of the game to PS5 with the help of developers from Merge Games.