Horse Crazy – The Screens

Day 1 – I registered the HorseCrazyGame.com domain name, wrote some test code for Horse Crazy (HC), and came up with the screens needed for the first version of the app.

This Is Horse Crazy

The game allows you to choose a horse, name it, and bring it into a stall where you can groom it — brush all the dirt off, use a hoof pick to get dirt and rocks from under its hooves, etc. Then you choose from all different kinds of tack (horse equipment) — bridles, bits, saddles, hackamores, etc., and put those on the horse (drag them around to the right spots).

You can also add glitter to your horse, polish on the hooves, feathers in the mane, braid the tail, etc. Bet you didn’t know you could do all that stuff to a horse, eh? 🙂

Once your horse is exactly the way you want it you can show it off via email or enter it into the weekly horse contest. By entering it into the contest you can earn Tack Dollars that can be used in the Tack Shack, a store with cooler bridles, saddles, and even more horses. You can also earn Tack Dollars by voting in each contest. (And in later versions of HC, you can buy more Tack Dollars with in-app purchases.)

When you enter a horse in a contest that horse gets a certificate to hang on the wall of its stall, and if it gets 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place it will get a trophy that shows up in the stall.

Plans For Later

That’s all I’m planning for the first version. In later versions I’d like to add a way to build your own avatar that can then ride your horse over a jumpers course, barrel racing, etc.

I even have plans that would allow you to expand your 3-stall stable to a barn, get more horses, hire farriers (they shoe horses), rent your horses for trail rides to make more money, etc. Kind of a Sim City/Farmville for horses.

Video Peek at Jay’s Whiteboard

If you don’t get seasick easy you can take a look at this video where I walk through the screens for HC. I know, I need to invest in a tripod.

The Initial Screens

The following are what I need to create for the first version. I’ll be using Director to bop from each of these screens to the other.

Main Menu

This will allow you to Choose Your Horse, Show Your Horse, visit The Tack Shack, and enter or view The Contest.

Choose Horse

Three horses looking over a fence or sticking their heads out of stalls. A black Friesian, a white Arabian, and a brown Morgan. Tap a horse to select that one to work with.

The Stall

A room with the horse standing in the middle. Along the top are tabs that say Papers, Tack, Groom. Tap one and it scrolls down to allow you to name the horse, choose a piece of tack, or a grooming tool. If the horse has been entered into a contest there will be a certificate in Papers that can be hung on the wall. If the horse has won a contest there will be a trophy on the shelf.

The Tack Shack

Looks like an old-west store with tack hanging on the walls, sitting on barrels, etc. Tap a piece of tack and it explains what it is and what it costs. Tap the Add to Cart button in the description and it’s added to your shopping cart. When you’re done click the Checkout button on the shopping cart and the amount is deducted from your total and the items you bought are put in your stall area for use with your horses.

Show Your Horse

Initially thought as a way to email a picture of your horse to someone, I’ve leaning toward having it post to the Horse Crazy web site and a link to that emailed out. Less hassle with trying to email attachments plus there are marketing benefits to having the horses online.

Sidebar: From a technical standpoint this is crazy cool, because I don’t have to upload anything other than a string of numbers to the web site. I won’t be storing pictures of horses, I’ll be storing horse #2, bridle #14, hoof paint #6, etc. Which means any horse can be store in probably less than 100 bytes including the name of the horse. To recreate that horse when someone wants to look at it just means I grab all those parts and put them on the screen.

Contest

This will start out as a weekly contest but hopefully we’ll see so many horse crazy girls start using the app that we’ll have to go to a daily contest. Enter your horse and also scroll through all the other horses that have been entered. Choose your three favorites and vote for them. You can vote once a day (based on local time, I think) and you earn Tack Dollars for voting. Top three vote getters will win trophies and another 3 will get “Honorable Mention” awards — those will be picked randomly among all entered horses that have never won before.

Artwork

That’s it, five main areas in the game (is it a game or is it an app?) so that’s not too bad.

But I’m going to need side views of three different horses (no animation) plus about a billion pieces of tack that have to fit on the horses. Okay, not a billion, and we can create different pieces of tack by changing the color, but there will be at least a couple dozen pieces.

And, the tack needs to be created in such a way that it can be placed on top of the horse and look like it’s on the horse. Well, in the case of things like saddles, saddle bags, etc., that will be fine, but for bridles there might have to be two versions — one that’s hanging, and one that can be placed on top of the horse.

Coming Up Next

Tomorrow I’ll be putting together a comprehensive list of all the artwork I need and throwing together some placeholder art so I’m not stalled by not having it yet. Once I have the list of needed art I’ll start looking for an artist who can do it all in a couple weeks or so.

I also plan on putting together the skeleton of the app, so you’ll be able to bop from one screen to another, even if you can’t do anything on each screen yet.