Greetings! We’re so excited to announce some next steps for Horse Fable. We have an Exciting Thing coming and we’re diving right into preparations for it.

A Bit of History

Many of you know our story and have actually been along for at least some of the ride with us. Bedouin and I have worked together for 7 years now. Bedouin actually bought Eqcetera back in early 2012, back before she knew how to code. She hired an outside coder to help her complete the game so it could officially launch V1. With school and work and outside life getting in the way, she ended up selling the game to the admin at the time. Fast forward to 2015 where that admin transferred the game back to her. This is where I came in as I was a mod at the time of the transfer. 

In 2015, neither of us really knew anything about building or designing games. We had this outdated code base for a game that was quickly becoming more and more inactive. Between 2015 and 2018, we worked off and on to develop V2 but it was hard between other commitments for the both of us and sometimes months would pass between updates. In late 2018, Bedouin quit her full-time coding job to work as a freelancer which freed up a lot more time to work on Eqcetera. 

That began our wild ride of learning and growing as game developers. While Bedouin had worked on large client projects before, Eqcetera is single-handedly the largest, most complex project she’s ever worked on. Beginning with V2, she coded every bit of it herself. I, on the other hand, learned horse genetics from scratch. V2 launched in 2019. It helped define all the basic systems of the game and gather feedback from players. 

In 2020, the pandemic happened. Bedouin had started working on larger client projects that had a better code base than Eqcetera. So she decided to completely rebuild the game to be built in a framework that was an accepted industry standard. Hence V3 happened. During this time, I started to get more and more into game design and helped with the core functions of features. I also started to take over the community management side. 

Then in 2021, we came up with the wild idea of rebranding. Eqcetera had never been a name people could remember right away. Bedouin and I met in person and realized by giving the game a world and a background, we had a lot more freedom to add things we had always wanted to see in games. So Horse Fable was born.

In all this time, we’ve always been going fast, fast, fast to develop something newer, better, and that players could enjoy. You all have been at the receiving end of that with never-ending bugs as we throw new things at you without fully letting old things settle. We’ve never taken the time to just rest and look back at what we’ve done. 

For the first 3 months of this year, Bedouin and I both took a break from HoFa to handle personal things (Bedouin sold her house and I have been looking for a new job). Bedouin has never been paid for her work on HoFa and I, with my new job, have been able to opt to not be paid as well. We are both volunteering a large chunk of our time without much return for ourselves except the satisfaction of making our players happy. But by taking this break from the game, we took a look back at all that we’ve done and realized we were extremely proud of ourselves and all that we’ve accomplished. It’s not exactly where we want it to be but it’s getting closer every week! 

Usually, at this point in the year, you could expect us to make some huge announcement that we’re rebuilding the game yet again. We’re very, very happy to say that’s not the case this year. Horse Fable from a coding and branding standpoint is in a place we’re very content with, and we only hope to continue building up from now on. 

That brings us to now. We’ve never marketed the game because of the constant rebuilds, persistent bugs, and the nagging feeling that it was never ready to be marketable. Something was always incomplete or not working.  Sending out an unpolished game is setting ourselves up for failure and disappointing not only our players but those who may join later. 

… But now a huge opportunity has landed in our lap, and things will soon change. 

Horse Fable Goes to BreyerFest!

Breyer is a large model horse company that creates and sells beautiful models of equines and other animals. Breyer models are often collected and some are even custom painted or sculpted. To celebrate these models and the equines we all love, Breyer hosts a yearly in-person (and virtual!) event at Kentucky Horse Park called BreyerFest. BreyerFest includes live demonstrations, model horse sales, workshops and more! This year, it will be on July 14th-17th.

We are proud to announce Horse Fable has been selected as a virtual seller for the BreyerFest marketplace. This means that Breyer will promote Horse Fable before and during BreyerFest through blogs, social media posts, and a spot in their event program. Horse Fable will be seen by thousands of Breyer enthusiasts. We decided it was time to take that giant leap, and we mean giant, and open HoFa’s doors to a much…much..bigger audience. What better way to showcase HoFa to a large horse-loving audience than going to the biggest equine event of the year?

Not only will we be participating virtually, but some of the HoFa staff will also be attending in person! Both myself and moderator ERA are currently planning to attend BreyerFest. We both are Breyer collectors and have decided to attend our first BreyerFest! 

If you’d like to attend BreyerFest, event tickets are still on sale, as of today, from the Breyer website. We are in no way affiliated with Breyer nor give any guarantees pertaining to BreyerFest, we just wanted to let everyone know of the option to attend.

What does this mean for HoFa?

BreyerFest is held in July, and that gives us a very short amount of time to get Horse Fable ready for new players. We plan to speed up development in order to get HoFa ready. 

Before July, our priorities include (in no particular order):

• Reduce the number of bugs in the game.
• Make sure the game is faster and can handle more players online at the same time.
• Fix quests and add the next quests.
• Make some changes to discipline and halter shows based on feedback we’ve seen. More details on this coming soon!
• Rebuild Herd Management so it works better for larger herds.
• Release the first version of the explore system.
• Add Hall of Fame back into the game with more categories than before.
• Complete the Feature Requests system.
• Add in referral prizes.
• Add in a tutorial email series for new accounts.
• … and more! (our list is quite long)

As you can see, we have a LOT to do. We’re going to try to get as much done as time allows, and we’ll need your support in helping squash all the bugs as we speed through this. We don’t have an update schedule for these updates and are just taking one week at a time to try to accomplish what we can. 

In addition to getting the game ready for new players, we also want to celebrate BreyerFest in-game. We’ll be releasing more details about this as we get closer to July.

We hope you are as excited as we are to see Horse Fable get some exposure!

Cheers,

Bedouin & Curly

Happy Tuesday, everyone! 

In this update, we’ve addressed some design issues with the Marketplace and added something new! We hope this will help stimulate the horse market and make it easier to both find and sell your desired horses. 

😍 New Item!

Will has been hard at work convincing Helix and a few others at the capital to make a new item. Word around town is that people want those beautiful variations to pass at a much higher rate! After some convincing and a few *cough cough* generous donations to Helix’s research fund, the Variation Pass Token has arrived!  

This is a valuable token that when equipped to your horse, its variations will pass at a 30% rate. This means it can be used when breeding to outside studs and broods but only will increase the chances of the horse with the item passing the variation. If both horses have a Variation Pass Token equipped, the item equipped to the mare will be used first.

❤️ Breeding Variation Pass

Something must be in the air..or the water…or maybe the hay? Anyway, it seems the chance of variations passing through breeding has increased by what appears to be 300%. Wow!

🏦 Marketplace Changes

As requested, there have been some fairly large changes to the Marketplace to help facilitate sales better. We’ve heard that trades are not the easiest way to find what you need in the market so we’ve brought back some of the older functionality.

The link to the Marketplace is now more of a “hub” page. Here, you can see auctions ending soon, newest trades, and random sales, studs, and broods. You can then navigate to each of those sections to search for what you need.

🤝 Trades

HoFa’s trading system (what we’ve been labeling as the Marketplace) is still intact. It has been relabeled as Trades.

Some small changes:

• Trades now have an expiration. The default expiration is 7 days.
• You can now select an ISO option for trades. This means that you don’t have to offer anything and the trade will be flagged as ISO instead of a regular trade. 

💰 Auctions

Horse auctions are back! Please note that item auctions haven’t made their way back yet. We’re still working on the best way to integrate this.

For those that weren’t around for the old version of the horse auctions, here’s a summary of how they work:

• You can auction one horse at a time.
• You can see horse images and details on the auction page.
• Auctions are always timed. The minimum time is 1 hour and the max time is 72 hours. 

Some small changes:

• Auctions no longer have the types: auction with autobuy, auction without autobuy, and autobuy only.
• You must have a starting bid but reserve and autobuy are optional. 
• If you have no reserve and no autobuy, you will be reminded that these aren’t in place. Auctions without a reserve and no autobuy will go to the highest bid for that auction regardless of the amount. 
• You can now search auctions by horse breed.

💕 Stud & Brood List

In the old horse market, there was a list of studs and broods. This has made its way back into the Marketplace. Studs and broods will only show if they have been fed and watered and are not currently resting from their last breeding. You can now search this list by breed as well as currency.

💸 Horse Sale List

Although searching for horses for sale is still an option, if you would just like to idly browse in the Marketplace, that’s now also an option. Like the Stud & Brood page, you can search by both breed and currency.

A LARGE change:

• You can now put horses up for sale for ingots.

🦟 Bug Fixes

Buzz buzz! As you can see, we’re slowly shifting away from bug fix-only posts. We’ll still include a few with every update as needed and are still working through the list.

• Foal training should now start at 0% instead of 14.29%.
• Search has been fixed so that if you’re filtering by breed and go past page 1, the breed filter stays in place.
• Shouts on pages have returned. If you have this turned on in your settings, you’ll now be able to see shouts. You can create a shout by going here.
• If you put in commas in bank transactions, money transfers, or ingot transfers, it will still be accepted.
• Breeding items should now work correctly if equipping them to the mare. Before, there was an issue where if stallions were equipped with anything, the mare’s items wouldn’t be taken under consideration.
• Rare breeds should now be able to continue retrievals after the live offspring limit has been met.
• Fees should now show up for club studs and broods.
• You should now be able to save your accounts settings without resetting your avatar if using a game avatar.
• Market trades containing eggs or straws from retired horses should no longer forever load.
• You can no longer accidentally put $0 and 0 ingots for the price of the trade.
• Some icons went missing while we were testing and we believe most of these are returned back where they belong. If a site icon is missing for you please report it to the Bug Box!

🔮 Coming Soon

Big Announcement

Around the HoFa studio, we tend to think big and push the boundaries of what we have ever done before. We have something quite exciting in store that we have been hard at work to make a reality for the past few months. Look for a news post dedicated to this in the next few days!

Quests

Our next focus will be fixing current quests and starting to look at entering the next batch. This will take us more time than a usual update but we expect to have this done next week.

More Items

With the release of today's new item, we can now let everyone know the Eqcetera locals have convinced those at the capital to make quite a few new items. We’ve been cooking up some ideas for items that you’ll find interesting. 👀

New Art

Mark your calendars and get ready to “oooh” and “ahhh” at what we have coming on May 28th! Any guesses as to what it is?

Cheers,

Bedouin & Curly

Hello everyone!

🌼 Spring Fling Winners!

After a week of contests and lots of creativity, our first annual spring fling has now ended. Everyone did a wonderful job in all of our contests and we hope you all had fun! We enjoyed reading all of our story entries, seeing such wonderful photos, and looking at everyone's creative drawings.

Our Spring Fling 2022 winners are:

Hide N’ Seek:

1. Spider
2. Oaken Fields
3. Itsjusthayley

Photo Contest:

1. Fluffy Horror
2. Itsjusthayley
3. SweetChinMusic

Short Story Contest:

Advanced: Fluffy Horror

Novice: DeathKnell

Coloring Contest:

Digital: Ray

Traditional: Brumby

Splash of Color:

Brumby

 🥳 Congrats to the winners of our 2022 Spring Fling! 🥳

A message will be sent shortly to those who won.

Tomorrow we will have an exciting update for everyone surrounding the marketplace and something new that is coming...

Have a wonderful rest of the week everyone!

Cheers,

Bedouin & Curly

Spring is in the air and everything is beginning to bloom. This means it's time to host our first annual, Spring Fling!

🌈 Theme

No spring fling is complete without a theme! This year we have decided on the theme A World of Color! This year's theme is centered around the colors of spring and those unique colors of horses we all love. Contests will be based on this theme from the coloring contest to the scavenger hunt. This year's prizes will also pay homage to our theme through special colored rare horses and even some magic of gene editing…

✨ Contests

Our 2022 Spring Fling has a variety of contests available that cater to an array of talents. Visit each contest page for details.

• Short Story
• Writing a short story based on the writing prompt.
• Coloring Contest
• Color digitally and/or traditionally on the provided coloring page.
• Splash of Color!
• New splash genes will be added soon, create what you think they should look like.
• Photography
• Take a daily photo based on a specified inspiration. 
• Hide And Seek
• Hunt down a horse hiding a specific item to win a daily prize! Shhh… the fewer who find, the bigger your prize. 👀

🥇 Prizes

Each contest will have a specified prize ranging from items to specialty gene changes and even some hidden goodies. Top prizes for contests include a choice of gene change for one horse, a choice of variation change for one horse, and even subscriptions. Specific exclusions apply and can be viewed on each contest page.

💰 Specialty Sales

During the spring fling, specialty sales will be going live in the marketplace. These sales have no specified start or end date and will be posted and accepted on a random basis. Check back often to see what is new and be sure to get in bids! 

Have a wonderful weekend everyone!

Cheers,

Bedouin & Curly

Flash Sale!

For 24 hours only ingots are on flash sale for up to 35% off! This sale will last for only 24 hours from now until April 25th at 11:59 PM EST/game time. 

Rare Gene Auction

With our most recent update, leopard variations have expanded for breeds that have leopard genes. However, Tennessee Walking Horses and Irish Cobs both have limited leopard genes as their genes are extremely rare. Earlier today Aren spotted two unusual spotty equines out in the wilds and has brought them into town. Turns out one is a Tennessee Walker and one is an Irish Cob!

To raise funds for an upcoming event, Aren is auctioning off leopard variation mares of the Tennessee Walker and Irish Cob breeds. These mares are the only variation #4 of their kind that will ever be released. 

The auction begins now until Tuesday, April 26th at 9 PM EST/game time.

Breed Update Poll

As a reminder, we have a poll open to vote for the next breed to update! We have quite a few more breeds to update and our second round of voting is now open. Our next set of breeds up for voting are American Paint Horse, Thoroughbred, Mustang, and Irish Draught. 

To vote click here!

Have a wonderful weekend everyone!

Cheers,

Bedouin & Curly