Shortly after publishing my latest article on Horse Isle 3, a summary of the game’s current state and some of its players’ common complaints, I was thrilled to receive a reply from Joe “Jor” Durbin, lead developer on all three Horse Isle games.

The original comment can be found below the article here, although with weird formatting that I don’t know how to fix without deleting the comment altogether.

Since then, Joe and I have exchanged a few emails about the development process of Horse Isle 3 and some of the thoughts that go into it. As Joe does not have the time for a full interview with TMQ, I am happy to be able to provide a bit of insight in this form nonetheless.

Process and Priorities

In his first email to me, Joe reveals just how tight their schedule has been: “We have two developers for HI3, and both of us had babies at the start of development 2 years ago. Between that and 80+ hour weeks working on HI3, it's been a long road.”

The whole team consists of 3 people working full time, and 4 part time folks, Joe writes in his comment. “We work every day as hard as we can. The game already has a huge amount of depth and content (and a huge debt).”

While I never had the impression that HI3’s problem was that anyone was not working hard enough, the schedule Joe mentions should remove any doubt in Horse Isle 3 being a passion project. Joe tells me he schedules his priorities in order to get the most playtime out of the least development time: “Biggest Bang for the Buck: If I spend ten hours on something and it provides one hundred hours of gameplay, that is worth it. However, If I spend a hundred hours for ten hours of gameplay, I will never catch up.”

It’s an approach often taken for the final stages of project management. Scheduling priorities in this way is a fire-fighting method, but unfortunately not how you generally create a well-rounded product.

As another way to determine dev priorities, Joe names the players themselves: “We've been taking polls on what players want, between 5-8 reasonable things that we could work on. Then we take that on, letting the players also direct some of the development.”

As a result, Horse Isle 3 is a sandbox: a tool to make your own game rather than a fully-fledged game itself. No doubt this is what some of the players want and are content with. But from looking at the comments of long-time Horse Isle fans that I gathered for my last article on this subject, many people expect Horse Isle 3 to offer a lot more concrete gameplay rather than just throwing a bunch of features at players and expecting them to find their own fun. An open world and freedom in terms of what to do next should not prevent a game from being intuitive to play and well tutorialized however, as dozens of well received indie games have proven before.