Show Jumping

Some of Star Stable's most appreciated features ever released were born during Passion weeks. During our Passion weeks, happening a couple of times a year, we have the opportunity to explore things we might not usually have in our pipeline. During one of these weeks last year, a group of people (including our CEO, who has a game design background) came together in hopes of improving the Show Jumping experience in Star Stable and make it even more fun and compelling.

The idea behind this project was to bring the rules of real-life show jumping to Jorvik. In real-life competitions, you'll get faults for knocking down obstacles/stepping in water obstacles, the horse refusing to jump, and exceeding the time limit. After a week of experiments and presenting a proof of concept, this project was picked up to be tried out for real.

The new Show Jumping team brought together code and game design to cement the new system to count the faults, new UI elements to present the gameplay, and, of course, design and art to construct the Show Jumping course with plenty of new, pretty obstacles. As all of these pieces came together, our QA team did a lot of testing – and trust us, when you're building brand new systems in a game that's been running for over a decade, there is always lots of testing! In this first iteration, we decided to skip a couple of features to make sure we could focus on the foundations of the system, but in short, we're hoping to later on be able to add faults by stepping in water and disqualification after a certain amount of refusals, to mirror real life. We're still happy with the system's current version; it works well and is fun to play with!

Another thing we decided to try out, which was very much not realistic, was to remove the green arrows you usually see at the top of the screen to show you where to go and instead try to show you the path to the next obstacle on the ground.

It's been great fun to see you enjoy the new Show Jumping experience these past few weeks, and now it's up to us to discuss the next steps. Are you ready to jump into the future of Show Jumping with us?