December 2025 Blog: A Year In Review

And with that, another whole year is behind us! 2025 was a year of medieval fantasy, sunny summer days, and the sweet sound of braying mules. It was also a year focused on improving our internal tools and processes, and on laying the groundwork for great things to come.

My name is Stacy, and I’m the Game Director for Star Stable Online. I’ll be highlighting some of the coolest things we did this year, even if it might not have been visible on your side of the screen!

We should lead off with the horses! I’ve never been more proud of the horses we released, with the team really bringing their best to every breed. The Criollo, Hanoverian, Mule, Jorvik Mountain, Andalusian, and Black Forest packed the schedule, along with a beautiful array of magical horses and coat variations! While the Hanoverian was the most popular horse of 2025, the Mule was a wonderfully pleasant surprise, and we’re so happy we took a leap (and extra efforts on sounds and animations) to bring it to you!

Trying to explain to my own Hanoverian, Marigold, why we need to take even more pictures.

Speaking of horses, we finally rolled out our new tack system! If you recall, this system allows us to eliminate the need for retrofitting each horse breed every time we introduce new tack types. The first batch took a long time, but now we’ll be rolling out more fully retrofitted breeds as fast as we’re able to test them (which, to be fair, is not a super fast process right now). But each breed we release is one step closer to new items, so we’re really overjoyed by the progress.

Speaking of items….there is SO MUCH going on in the direction of new item types in the game. A significant number of our current projects contribute to this goal, with the new tack system being just one example. We also ran the “Equipment Manager Refactor” project (which overhauled how we handle items in the game and will give designers control over adding new item slots and item types). As part of our process improvements around items, we created a new item workflow for implementing them. Previously, the team worked with a massive, unruly, and tedious Excel sheet, but now we have a proper system that handles items, making it much easier to manage. Our item artists are incredibly happy!

Simultaneously, we’ve been preparing the wardrobe and the horse and character sheets to accommodate new items (the wardrobe has some other great feature improvements coming along with it as well - bulk moving, custom page names, and saved sets!). More time is needed for the tech projects that enable these new features, so I can’t say yet when you’ll see them in the game.

A glimpse at the WIP wardrobe update!

Leading our discussion over to festivals, you got to see some improvements this year on the Western Festival, and the addition of our new Summer Daze Festival. Not to mention the cauldron activity at Halloween and those wild gnomes during Winter! What you didn’t see was that we also worked on improving our internal processes and best practices for festivals. Content was updated, fixed, and generally improved to make it easier to activate again in the future and hopefully improve performance, too. Our designers took extra time to conduct in-depth investigations into each festival, assessing what was working, what wasn’t, and what actually needed to be removed or fixed. This year was a big step toward making festivals more efficient and enjoyable for our developers to work on!

Our QA Lead, Caro, incorrectly guessed what Bruce ate.

Another behind-the-scenes project has been the “Render Refactor,” where we have been rebuilding the back end of the render pipeline. This means the part that takes the models and textures and translates them into things your graphics card or mobile phone can draw on screen. As you all know, we are targeting a wide range of platforms, each with its own rendering methods. To help with that, we are now using SPIR-V as a translation layer to ensure compatibility with all kinds of devices without doing a lot of manual work (or being very limited in the capabilities). This is exciting because it allows us to move more work onto the graphics cards going forward, which should improve performance on most devices. We can also do fun things, like drawing many more particles (fire, smoke, magical effects, dust, etc.) without slowing the game to a crawl. This coming year, we hope to start dipping our toes into lighting improvements next!

Another refactor project (another?! Yes, lots of refactoring going on this year!) is the “Competition Manager Refactor.” Before I lose your attention, this work allows us to introduce new types of equestrian activities into the game! Some of you may have tried our new show jumping mechanic, but we can’t implement it properly and permanently until we’ve redone the foundation for how the game works with competitions. After that, we can start thinking about improved dressage, maybe some new types of western gameplay, and more!

We certainly can’t forget our main story drop earlier this year, Eldritch Awakenings. The team on this project delivered a fantastic experience, and I especially want to call out the visuals and animations, as I know they were quite a tentacled beast to tackle. The main story is not over, but we’re still aiming to move toward an end to the current chapter so we can explore other things. I’m still incredibly interested in what the Nightmare Institute could be as an expanded experience, for example, and what dark doors we could open there.

The Dark Ceremony has failed…this time…

This year, we had the opportunity to work with our friends at All In Equestrian again! This meant we could bring back H&M All In and introduce his half-sibling, H&M Indiana! The equestrian side of H&M is huge here in Sweden, and our team is always excited to incorporate their content into the game. I’m not good at show jumping by any means, but I love how colorful and creative the obstacles are, so I take my time and enjoy each race anyway. And best of all, we’re able to keep this content in-game for the foreseeable future, so you have plenty of time to experience everything.

Just look at this beautiful obstacle!

This is just a brief glimpse of some of the things we’ve done this year, but it certainly isn’t everything! As I write this, the team is within the depths of Marchenghast, has just closed out the Equestrian Festival investigation, and is wrapping up to go on winter break.

Thank you all for being with us in 2025, and we look forward to an even more exciting 2026!