#microhorses

i'm glad my game glitches out the way the games i played as a kid glitched out lmao

UPD: here we fucking go

Good news: i got rid of the cursor jitter on zoom!! The cursor is now pixel perfect all the time. Also most menus work again as i move their operation to the new GUI subsystem. You can zoom in on your horse eating an apple, very very cute <3

Did you know why microhorse sprites have no eyes? It's a deliberate choice with a strange explanation. The game is meant to feel explicitly like a simple fantasy - a game, a toy.. a doll? The GUI design is inspired by fabrics, paper, postcards, and so on. And where i grew up, a lot of traditional fabric or fiber dolls have no eyes (or no face altogether) because it's believed that evil spirits may inhabit the doll and curse the kid if it has eyes to look with. As a person of many a horse plushie with eyes that actively makes my life better, i'm not taking this superstition to heart, but I used its impact on doll design to emphasise microhorses not existing in our real life and being a computer game to us, and link them to the fabric inspired GUI. Not evil spirits though - from microhorse world's inhabitants' perspective they are just local horses, lovely and nice as usual - all the style and linking and stuff is for the player.

After this microhorse-inspired piece of art by Sobcat, though, i've been thinking.. maybe i should give microhorse sprites eyes? Maybe they will feel warmer and cuter like this? They could be of different colours too.. but then real horses have such expressive eyes and these would be single-pixel dots, forever square regardless?