Call Your Horse

A gameplay mod for Skyrim that allows the player to whistle for their horse.

Call Your Horse is a simple and lightweight mod that I made for personal use, and decided to share it with everyone! It lets you call your last-used, player-owned horse to your location – as long as you’re in Skyrim, and not in an interior.

Mod synopsis

Call Your Horse was the result of me re-playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim after many years. Many games I had played since that included horse riding had a feature that allowed the player to whistle to call their horse to the player’s location, and I found I was missing that feature in Skyrim.

As I tended to create larger quest and location based mods, I thought it would be a good opportunity to change gears and create a small, single-feature focused gameplay improvement mod instead.

Whilst there were other mods that fulfilled similar functions, there were none that matched the requirements I had set out:

  • Lightweight and modular, allowing it to work with horses added by other mods as well as official DLC without compatibility concerns
  • Immersive horse traversal – if the horse is within the player’s vision cone, having it path straight to the player. If the horse is out of sight or otherwise unloaded, perform a trigonometric function, placing it far behind the player and have it gallop towards it
  • Keeping it ‘real’ – rather than a spell that conjures the horse, have it be a traditional whistle

Overview of Work

  • Identified feature gap in the “market” for a horse calling feature
  • Planned out and implemented a modular and extensible framework for the horse whistle feature
  • Iterated on the mathematical function that found a clear area behind the player to teleport the horse to, as well as a failsafe in case the teleportation function failed
  • Worked with an audio designer to get 5 variants of a whistle audio asset to cut down on repetition

Platform: PC & Xbox, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Role: Designer and scripter
Duration: 2 Weeks
Tools Used: Creation Kit SDK, Sublime Text 3, Adobe Audition