Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch is a stylized sandbox horse game where you play a young girl restoring her aunt’s horse ranch on an island while caring and managing horses.
For a faster in-game look, see this playthrough.
My work: Junior Unreal Programmer.
Duration: April 2023 – February 2024, 40h/week
Cooperation between NightinGames and Aesir Interactive. Unreal Engine 4.
Junior Unreal Programmer
During the time of NightinGames’ close cooperation with Aesir Interactive, our first major project was working on updates 1.5 – 1.7 and DLCs “Foal Care” and “Arabian Horse” for “Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch”.
Examples of my work:
- Lots of bugfixing in Unreal C++
- writing & implementing technical design sketches with blueprints, e.g. foal interactions
Key Learnings
For the first time I got into contact with a larger scale, recently created game codebase and content setup and a professional game dev environment. I learnt
- how a large-scale game architecture in Unreal Engine can work
- keywords are SOLID, dependency injection, actors as glue code
- working with a tech lead, producers and QA
- dynamics of release processes
Gregor Sönnichsen 