Horse Mechanics in Harvest Days – Decent Animations and Features, Inaccurate Terminology
Harvest Days is an upcoming farming simulation indie game inspired by genre classics such as Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley. It also promises somewhat more extensive horse features than either of these inspirations, so naturally I am keeping an eye on it.
In their latest dev log video, the team reveals details about the horse mechanics and unfortunately… well, let’s say it’s a mixed bag.
Features and Animation
In terms of horse-related features, the game sounds pretty promising: horses will need to be fed and watered, and they require affection in order to form a bond with the rider. Horses can grow up and be bred for offspring, and their speed and resistance stats will improve through riding.
The video also mentions being able to ride to neighboring farms, visit the village, or explore the forest, emphasizing the horse’s role as a means of transport. Obstacles and jumping also make an appearance in the dev log.
The horses’ animations are those of the Horse Animset Pro asset pack, which many of us are already familiar with, since it is by far the most varied and widely used pack of horse animation for game developers. And while the pack has been updated with significant improvements a while back – more on that here – some very noticeable issues remain, most notably the tendency for the horse to bend its front legs even when one or both should be bearing weight at the time.
It’s something that the average game developer might not notice, but which makes almost all of the pack’s movements look strangely wobbly to anyone with an eye for horse movement.
I’ll once again point to this tweet by animator Brendan Body for a wonderful illustration of the subject.
The Horse Animset Pro pack is a powerful asset, but unfortunately it is still not good enough in its current state to satisfy most horse lovers.
Besides the decent-but-not-great HAP animations, there are also a few glimpses of significantly worse-looking horse models and animations visible in the video, for example around the 1:03 time stamp. It’s of course possible that this is a placeholder asset, but I can just never be sure how far any game developers’ tendency to go “eh, nobody will look that closely at the horses” extends.
This interaction wheel shows commands such as making your horse go to eat, drink or sleep
The bent forelegs are a constant problem in Horse Animset Pro
Terminology
Now if all of this actually sounds pretty okay to you so far, it’s partly because I’ve completely rephrased the video’s language in order to summarize the features described above. If you watch the dev log yourself though, you’ll quickly notice some significant language problems.
Family Devs is a Spanish dev team, a father and son creating games together. They are obviously not native English speakers, and we know that horse terminology can be tricky. Unfortunately however, the words used to describe some of the horse features are inaccurate enough to be idadvertently hilarious: Foals are referred to as “horse pups” and the canter animation is described as “jogging”, and the backwards walk as “jogging backwards”. The entire “here’s our horse movements” section between 1:25 and 2:12 uncomfortably reminds me of the “Dave’s Horse Farm” parody video that a friend of mine made to mock the state of horse games.
Obviously a part of this is a translation issue. Upon turning on the video subtitles and looking at the original Spanish, we can see that the phrase used to describe breeding is “crías de caballo”, which seems to be the appropriate word for the context as far as I can tell.
The bit about the horse gaits remains wrong even in the original Spanish though: canter is called “trotar” (trotting) and the backwards walk as “trotar hacia atrás” (backwards trot). I’ll just leave the Spanish Wikipedia page on horse gaits here, in the hopes that Family Devs will go over this subject again, and include the actual walk, trot and canter/gallop options.
Time to do better
This comparison shot between in-game and real life footage grows disingenuous though, when one considers that these animations were part of the asset pack all along.
The Family Devs team sent a press release about this video to The Mane Quest after I reached out to them on Twitter a while back. In the video, they even talk of a visit to the countryside to observe horses in real life for research. Obviously, they are excited to share their horse mechanics with my readership.
And again, I sympathize with the language barrier. Promoting a game in a foreign language can be hard. But if Harvest Days wants to capture the attention of horse-loving players, they’ll have to do better than this, and either work with a translator with some sensitivity for the subject at hand, or ask the people in our horse game communities for feedback.
Because although I don’t expect this game to revolutionize anything, it sure would be nice to have a farming sim game with somewhat more elaborate horse mechanics than those of Stardew Valley and My Time at Portia.
And I’ll really need to get my plans to advertise horse game accuracy consulting off the ground…
UPDATE: Family Devs have reached out to The Mane Quest to acknowledge the mistakes and promise to work on the issues mentioned in this article.
Harvest Days does not have a release date yet. You can wishlist the game on Steam, or follow its Kickstarter launch this Summer. For more information visit the game’s website.
I was recently interviewed by renowned games journalist Stephen Totilo about my horse game work, including my involvement in the upcoming Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori.