Game development is weird. Sometimes you’re writing a script or fixing some bugs in the code, other times you’re trying to work out how to motion capture a horse. As the devs of Equinox: Homecoming learned, you do it the same way you would for a human being, just in a large barn.

Equinox: Homecoming is an MMO mystery game being developed by Blue Scarab Entertainment. You travel to a “dark island” to investigate the disappearance of your mother, and you ride horses while you do it. It’s a bizarre crossover of interests, and a strange game from former World of Warcraft and Helldivers devs. So, how do you actually motion capture a horse?

“It’s the same way you do with a human,” studio director Craig Morrison tells us. “We put them in a suit, and the white balls go on the suit, and the suit that we had, I think it was tailor-made in Ireland.” Hilarious to imagine a horse in one of those mocap suits.

“Eventually, the actresses and actors were in suits with those helmets and the cameras, and the horse actor was also in the suit with the dots, and dots on the ears,” adds CEO Colin Cragg. “Everything had to be built so that it functioned exactly the same for the horse as it did for the people. And we went through a couple different horses to get to the point where we had a reliable actor to work with. So our actor is Bella the horse. This is a quality dressage horse, so it’s got good movements.”

How does one let a horse know it just wasn’t up to the task and is being replaced? Hopefully no one made a ‘why the long face’ joke.

Getting a custom suit and the right horse seem like the least troubling parts of the production, though.

“We had to set up a facility in Canada, in a barn which was large enough to have a horse to be able to trot, and cantor, and gallop, and us be able to do the capture,” Morrison explains.

But with a large building like a barn, which was presumably in a field or on a farm, other issues present themselves that those used to working in a studio might not be prepared for.

“If you have 60 cameras mounted to the outside of the building, and, amazingly enough, if the wind gets a little too high outside, the building shakes and vibrates a little bit, which de-syncs all of the cameras,” Cragg remembers. “So we had to build a secondary superstructure inside the building to prevent the vibration from the weather.”

And because this was done in Canada, when the temperature dropped, industrial heaters were needed so “the performance capture artists wouldn’t look like they’re freezing to death in the scenes,” Cragg says.

Equinox: Homecoming doesn’t have a release date yet, but if you’re a fan of fillies you should check out our list of the best video game animal companions.