Thoughts on Unstabled

Ludum Dare is a biannual game jam competition that I love to partake in. I participate in the “Compo” which is the hardest version. You have 48 hours to make a game from (mostly) scratch. The theme for LD49 was “Unstable”. As you can see, I had a pretty literal idea…

My game Unstabled placed 161st out of nearly 3000 submissions (735 of which where done under the compo ruleset). This is my best finish ever and I was thrilled with the results. In my opinion this game did so well due to its tight game loop, and surprisingly deep strategy. In Unstabled you manage a stable of horses. Your goal is to let them out into the pasture to collect the required amount of food. But there’s a catch, each horse has its own unique personality, abilities, and stats. You might have a horse named Lucky, who is well trained and always goes where you tell him to. Or you might have a horse named Duster, who is a fussy eater and doesn’t eat as much food in the pasture as he should. If your horses don’t eat enough food. You lose!

As game designer, I think I did a great job at not only designing a game with a fun loop that has enough variance to be interesting. But also keeping the scope of the game in check. With only 48 hours I knew that the hook had to be incredibly simple, yet effective. I took some inspiration from slot machines, especially with the stampede mechanic. The stampede mechanic is a screen clearing horses stampede that collects all the food in the pasture. You can trigger it by collecting three horseshoes. Be careful though! As horseshoes can be placed in places where there are holes in the fence. If your horse escapes through a hole then they will run away.

Lastly, I was pretty happy with how the pixel art turned out. I think I ended up with a cohesive and charming look for the game. Despite how hard it is to draw a organic thing like a horse, I think the horse sprites are convincing.

What went well…

What went wrong…

With only 48 hours to do everything that is required for a complete game. Not everything can be perfect. Unfortunately I ran out of time to make a proper tutorial. I still had to explain how to play the game so I went with the wall of text method. This did not work well as the player is immediately overwhelmed with a large paragraph of text explaining how to play the game. I would have preferred to introduce the rules, systems, and mechanics one at a time, and allowed for play sessions in-between for the player to cement their knowledge. This is the #1 biggest flaw and something that I think had I been able to implement better, would have allowed the game to rank even higher.

“Didn’t expect such a well thought-out strategy game, but this is what it is. Had a lot of fun managing this horse ranch”

— applegat (Ludum Dare Feedback)

Play Unstabled For Free!