Howrse

Howrse is a seventeen-year-old live management game about breeding, trading, and training horses for competitions. With a deep player-controlled economy and deep management mechanics, it is truly a game with many layers.

How to update the game and process to modern standards while keeping the existing community players engaged?

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Design challenges:

• How to add new mechanics interacting with ten years' worth of existing content?
• How to design for different countries, cultures, and player profiles?

Management challenges:

• How to assign tasks to optimize production time while keeping everyone involved in the creative process?
• How to update the process to optimize design and production, despite aging technology?

For everything you take, give something in return.

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We engaged many ambitious projects to keep the game entertaining to the existing players while making it more friendly and accessible to newcomers.

Namely:

• Update the game economy by tweaking the currencies conversion rate
• Create new progression features for new players
• Add fees to player-controlled markets
• Give more hard currency to new players
• Diversify monetization offers with starter and custom packs
• Release new content and features every three weeks
• Rebalance prices and values of existing items
• Add security features to limit spending in the game and give more control to the player

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Needless to say that the community did not immediately accept all those changes.

But with enough effort, iteration, and justifying every decision, we managed to keep players on board and attract new ones.

Identified via data, solved by design, adjusted with a prototype.

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We made changes based on either player feedbacks or data collected from the game.
Analyzing and crossing those data with other variables allowed us to detect possible issues or exploits.

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Precise balancing sheets and specs documents are then written based on those observations.

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When necessary, we programmed quick-prototypes with UNITY using C# language, GAMEMAKER, or other tools, to test the changes early and make the required changes.

Make changes meaningful, justified, and tangibles.

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One of the most challenging yet necessary changes we had to make was adding fees to player sales.
The idea was to avoid inflation by better controlling the flow of different currencies. But of course, as a player, it feels very different.
To give this change a more tangible impact, we added an in-game piggy bank filled with all the fees.
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Once full, the piggy bank triggers promotional offers on particular items to increase accessibility to those items to all players.

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But the most critical task this feature achieved for players was to answer the question, "what are you doing with my money?".
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(Haven't we all asked this question at some point?)
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Players can check the piggy bank content at any time, how much money is in, and where it came.