Saturday @ Second Half #2 — HORSE JAM
Happy Saturday! (it's actually Monday)
This week, we had an internal game jam that we called HORSE JAM!
The only constraint was that we had to make a game using our in-house engine in one week, within our normal working hours. Beyond that, we had no theme and no idea what we were going to make until the jam started.
In the end, we made a goofy Oregon Trail/Slay the Spire hybrid called Shanty of the Stallion.
You can play the game right now on itch.io!
You should definitely also join our Discord server where we post about all of the awesome things we're working on regularly.
Prep
Over the weekend, I set up a starter project by cloning our main game's repo and scooping out all of the game-y bits. Cyrtanthus isn't built to be reusable — it's pretty purpose-built for MS80 — so I just copied the folder and trimmed everything out that we probably wouldn't need.
I rigged the project with some fantastic horse-themed placeholder content for folks to stumble into on Monday morning:
The title screen played really loud horse noises on loop, too. It was a treat. I am truly one of the greatest minds of my generation.
Monday
For Monday, we only had one goal: figure out what we're making. Laura, Harry, and Rasmus start their days before I do, so I left it up to them to decide.
By the time I rolled in, we had a list of pretty much every game genre, setting, and theme anyone could think of. From there, we started vetoing ideas.
The first idea vetoed? Horses. Big bummer for HORSE JAM 2025, honestly.
In the end, there were a few insanely attractive mashups in the running:
- Wizard Cooking Autobattler
- Wizard Bowling
- Wizard Farming Typing Game
- Roguelike Heist Game
- Pirate Oregon Trail (with magic!)
There was a debate about wizards versus pirates. The team voted 3-1 in favor of pirates. I really wanted Wizard Bowling.
Rasmus was out for most of the week, so unfortunately we'll never know how he might've voted. Probably Wizard Bowling.
We played a run of Organ Trail, the hit zombie Oregon Trail knockoff with the studio team. The game has hilarious emergent storytelling by the way and I highly recommend it!
It was decided. Pirate Oregon Trail. And also a card game with magic. As a bonus, Laura gets to draw a cool pirate map.
By the end of the day, we had a couple mockups and a little bit of art:
Tuesday
On day two, we sorted out roughly what everyone would be working on:
- Laura would do most of our art: cool parallax background illustrations, the map, and all our textures.
- Harry would build our setting, write everything, and do sound design.
- Eryn would create all our models.
- Rasmus would fill in and polish stuff where he could, since he was unavailable for part of the week.
- I'd code everything up and integrate the rest of the team's work!
We sorted out the game's scope and tried to make it manageable for a week. As everyone knows, scoping a game is incredibly easy.
There'd be a traveling mechanic and a card game, and some way to interlink them. The crew composition would impact what cards you could cast. We'd make a fun and balanced card game with varied encounters and interesting mechanics. No sweat — maybe we should add more stuff!
Everyone on the ship's crew would have a hyper-realistic role on the ship (medic-carpenter hybrid, sorcerers, etc.) and we'd have cards themed after each role.
Laura did a sketch mockup of the player ship and started illustrating some slick parallax scrolling backgrounds.
Illustrating the cards fell to me. I'm not sure how that happened, but it made me realize that I have a lot of latent potential as an artist.
We also gathered a bunch of references. Harry and Laura looked at a few related games and gathered up a bunch of possibilities for mechanics for both the Oregon Trail and card battling sides of the game.
It turns out there are a lot of indie deckbuilder roguelikes
Wednesday
On day 3, things were starting to come together!
Eryn finished our player ship, Laura made some backgrounds, and Rasmus made a sweet water shader overnight. It was starting to look like a game!
I add mana costs to the cards to give us some more design flexibility. The card game was fully my responsibility now and it was confusing to play and not very fun.
Laura and Harry carved out the map, encounters, and settings. The player would be a cursed idol that has comandeered a existing pirate ship and set them on a path to take over the world.
We'd get the Oregon Trail-style "name your party" mechanic because of forced amnesia on the crew. Instead of heading to Oregon, you're bound for Dragon's Tooth!
We wanted sirens and sea hags and crab raves! Krakens, navy forts, and uniquely memorable cities! We also only had like two days left.
Thursday
Day 4 — Thursday! Things were coming to a close.
Laura drew the game's incredible map, which really set the stage for the home stretch working on the game.
A hasty working implementation of Laura's mockup of the travel screen.
The travel screen gained working UI with your crew, resources, and some details about your journey.
A hasty working implementation of Laura's mockup of the travel screen.
I added card rewards to the game so that the player could start building a deck. We didn't have a big enough card pool for this to be very powerful yet.
Friday
Friday is the day when pretty much everything came together. All of Eryn's ships came in, Laura finished up the backgrounds, Harry charted our course and wrote limericks to show at the end of the game.
Laura made new textures for some of the ships and Eryn made a square-rigged ship for the first fight.
This encounter is called "Your Former Friends" internally
I scripted the first special encounter, the sirens, with placeholder UI but wasn't certain I'd get around to any of the others.
Special encounters! Well, one of them at least. Sorta.
We had some typos.
Eryn made some awesome ships, including this huge ship of the line inspired by the HMS Victory:
The game gained crew naming and role assignment. Your starting deck is based on the roles you have in your crew!
Eryn also got us our first office pet, a kraken!
I contributed a very detailed enemy, the iceberg:
I'm not sure why the Titanic didn't just shoot the iceberg.
Bonus Round: Saturday
Every Saturday, I join a nice coworking session with some folks from The Game Collective on Discord. It's a lovely time!
I'd spend the day polishing the game and making sure everyone's work ended up making it into the game. Everyone else would be off for the weekend, so I could add all sorts of silly stuff without anyone noticing until Monday!
I started with some of the special encounters I hadn't gotten around to by Friday. Surely the team wouldn't mind some historical figure cameos!
There was a bunch of resource balancing and I added a shop and around a dozen new cards. At this point I was pretty certain I was the funniest person on Earth.
Yes, this excellent card art was all done by me. Commissions are open!
One of the last things we were missing was the Oregon Trail-like random event system. While you're sailing the high seas, sometimes-fortunate events befall the crew. It's a great source of emergent storytelling and sometimes extreme inconvenience.
Harry had written about a dozen limericks but none of them were visible in the game yet. I added a system that would use them to tell the story of your crew if you won the game.
Monday: Wrapping Up
After Saturday, I was shot. It was a long week. I didn't even end up writing a "Saturday @ Second Half" post until Sunday night! You're probably seeing this on a Monday, or worse, a Tuesday. Ah well.
We spent Monday cleaning everything up, fixing a bunch of bugs, and expanding on all of the nonsense I did on Saturday.
Overall, Horse Jam 2025 was a success, and a lot of fun! We got to get some practice working as a team, use our normal technology and processes, and get a break from the hard sci-fi we've been soaked in for so long.
You're still here! Go away and play Shanty of the Stallion on itch.io. You can leave a comment to tell us what you think, or join our Discord server!