Development & UX Redesign: Comparison Tool for the Community of a Horse Browser Game

How it came about

While I was actively playing a horse-breeding browser game during my studies, I kept running into the same problem: I never knew which horses to breed together, because the pool of breeding horses kept growing. The game had no way to compare suitable breeding horses, and a horse's stats (e.g. interior and exterior) weren't shown numerically at all. To compare several horses, I had to lay them all out side by side in browser tabs and weigh them up by hand. With thirty to over a hundred horses per season, that quickly became impossible. This tool grew out of exactly this pain point.

Technical development

The calculator reads the pasted profile via JavaScript and converts the text values into scores. Good values are marked green, bad ones red, so you can immediately see whether a foal is worth breeding or better sold.

The second part compares a mare against up to three stallions. Instead of a single fixed grade, a progress bar of up to 100% shows how well each stallion matches the mare, broken down by interior, exterior, and average breeding value. Anyone specifically trying to improve interior can watch that particular bar. Anyone breeding for average simply picks the stallion with the highest overall score.

Individual settings let you additionally define the threshold below which interior or exterior get excluded from a horse's evaluation, which target grade you're aiming for, and whether perfect values should be highlighted. Special abilities that aren't directly visible in the profile are additionally marked with icons, for example when a horse is completely unsuited for an area or exceptionally strong in it.

The calculator runs entirely on JavaScript; the program settings are saved via functional cookies.