Mobile Game

Released during Sweden's biggest equestrian sports event Falsterbo Horse Show 2024. It’s a horse riding mobile game aimed for kids 9-15 years old as a collaboration between The Swedish Equestrian Federation and Folksam.

Intensive development

I was part of the entire project taking it from pitch to release on iOS and Android in under 6 months. And with a tiny two-man dev team, I've worked both as a designer and a generalist developer and plenty of other hats to avoid any halts in the production. Including code, project planning, collaborating with stakeholders, and even jumping in on the art side when needed.

My focus areas was the core gameplay loop, level design, reward system, and UI menus. I also did the underlying systems such as save and load, highscore and had full ownership over the Android/GooglePlay configuration and builds.

Gameplay

It’s a casual racing game with plenty of hidden shortcuts and branching. The aim is to beat the clock by finding shortcuts, timing jumps, avoiding obstacles and using your boost in a tactical way. The aim was to design a game which was easy to get into, and easy improve and beat your own score in every upcoming run you play.

Designing intuitive controls and adding relatable challenges to the game world was essential to make the player able to start playing immediately without a tutorial.

Playtesting branching paths

In the extensive playtests we did, we could see that different players took different paths on the map, but on the following playthroughs the same players usually stuck to their first discovered path. To encourage exploration and find new paths every run, I randomised the position of big shiny xp-pickups at branching paths and crossings. 

By following these xp-pickup-breadcrumbs the player could find up to 38 shortcuts and branching paths in a single level. Significantly increasing replayability and helping the player finding quicker paths. To not create unfair randomization, the xp-pickup doesn't affect the actual run but only moves you up in the meta progression, making them more of an incentive rather than a must to pursue.

Level 2 has 38 hidden shortcuts and branching paths to encourage exploration and replayability.

UX / UI

Due to the casual nature of the game and a young target audience, we stream lined the user journey to be quite linear, following the core game loop.

Focusing on creating an interface that was easy to understand and interact with at the very first glance for the player. Setting up reusable UI components within Unreals UMG made menus a breeze to adjust and iterate on during the tight time frame we had. I also implemented for the save and high score system with the underling architecture.

Meta progression unlocks new skins and levels.