Horse Club Adventures was created from scratch within approx. 18 months. My role consisted of managing/planning the project, programming game features and UI as well as porting the game to the Xbox One. Furthermore I was responsible for the release on Steam (PC) and the creation of a short playable demo, which would be released with the horse club magazine shortly before launch.

The main challenges encountered during development was the timeline. Having no prior experience with open world games or with console development, the team and I had to research a lot before being able to start working on the project.

Because of the short timeline we had to use various plugins for key aspects of the game, which we would have liked to develop ourselves, but couldn’t in the given time. One example of such plugin is Malber’s Animations which controls all the movements and animations of the horses and characters within the game.

Additionally we used Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline for the first time in order to gain performance for the Nintendo Switch, our main platform.
The combination of some plugins and the URP did not work straight away and we had to change our workflow a few times during the project.
Furthermore we had to replace the main game designer in the middle of the project, which resulted in a few chaotic months and a lot of features being cut in order to still reach the targeted release date.

Shortly before release I also 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.