I'm using Unreal Engine 5.6. I'm a novice with it, so this is going to be a long learning process for me, but at least the scripting is done in C++, my preferred language. And I think I've kept the scope of my game reasonable. UE is extremely cool; I'm amazed by some of the things it can do.

You buy and sell horses, hire trainers, build facilities, assign horses to them. Eventually you can breed horses and train them for specific disciplines. The game has an isometric view and you never directly control a horse or trainer; you just make assignments and watch what happens.

In short, it's an interesting problem to solve, and with the RNG element I'll have to modify my breeding program in each generation to account for what foals I actually got and what I'll have to work with in the next generation. Great fun.

I'm working on an achievement now to breed a foal with a certain coat coloration, and it's going to require a multi-generational breeding program. Some of the genes I need I don't have in my stable, so I'll have to acquire them. And then there's RNG in what genes the foals get.

You can buy horses at auction, but I preferred to capture wild horses (this is extremely fun and probably the best part of the game) or breed my own foals. Breeding is also pretty great.

There are lots of styles of play that work in this game. The one I settled into was acquiring horses, training them, campaigning them to increase their value, and selling them to buy various upgrades (if I didn't need them as breeding stock).

I got an in impromptu race with another player today. She started to pass me up and I was like "hell no," and sprinted ahead. There is no combat that I'm aware of. You're just riding around the island doing quests and story stuff and enjoying the scenery.

The gameplay is a bit MMO-like. You're on an island with your starter horse (it looks like you can buy more later?) and you ride around doing quests and progressing a story which is some kind of mystery. You're on a server with other people so you'll see other people riding too.

She does get a bit worried, so we only do one trial day per weekend right now. And she's still having some errors in the weaves that don't happen in training, which indicates she has some "tabs open" and doesn't feel able to fully focus on the weaves. Should improve with time. (3/3)

I've trialed Rogue sparingly so far. Each trial revealed some issues for us to work on, so we'd take a couple months to work on those and then enter another trial. Now I think she is finally ready to trial a bit more frequently. (2/3)

I was extremely happy with her work at the trial today. She's still very green, and we had a couple of broken start lines last trial, so we took a couple months off trialing to really work on those start lines and some other things. Today both of her start lines held. (2/2)