It has been quite the weekend! The team is back in the office and we’ve had some meetings to address some points brought to our attention during and after the release. And on that note, we would like to give you extensive information about why the release was so premature, what we will do to move on from here, and what will happen with further updates. We have been taking all of your feedback to heart. We appreciate all of your constructive criticism and are working to make improvements where we can. We are also incredibly grateful for the amazing support we have received. We are so thankful for this amazing community.
Regarding the early access release and the massive amount of feedback that has come, we are taking it all in and will do what we can to improve. We want to progress and update as quickly as possible but not to the extent that it affects the quality of the game as a whole. A roadmap for the next phase is in the works and we aim to have it ready and published by this week.
Expanding the team: New Unity programmer and interns
First and foremost, we know that we have a bottleneck in the programming department. We currently have only one Unity programmer, but we are glad to announce that we are expanding the team. We are looking to hire an additional Unity programmer and we are also open to bringing in programming interns. We are working on the applications as we speak, and we aim to have a new member on the team by the end of summer.
Why Astride was released so early in development
We know and recognize that Astride is premature in its early access launch and we understand that there has been a lot of confusion as to why we would release Astride in this early state. Developing Astride has not been an easy journey. There have been a lot of setbacks beyond our control, and we would like to address this.
After Green Horse joined the team in March, we initially decided to start fresh with the programming of the game as what had already been made was simply not viable. We revised our plans and made changes we believed, and still believe, were for the better. You can read more about this in Green Horse’s Patreon post which we have now opened for the public: https://www.patreon.com/posts/73889777
The initial release date of Astride’s early access was initially set for December 2022. However, this was made under different circumstances and with a smaller scope in mind. We have contracts that we are obligated to follow and we, unfortunately, cannot elaborate on this although we wish we could.
As we have received government funding, we have to follow the dates initially set. We were lucky enough to be able to extend the release date by 6 months without risking our funding. Earlier this year, we were granted more funding for the next phase starting in June. But Astride had to be released as an early access title on Steam to receive this funding. We would like to emphasize that if we could, we would have extended the release by another year. But to be able to ensure the future of Astride, we had to release now knowing that there would be heat about the lack of features.
We did our best to put out statements about the current state of Astride and what could be expected from the release, and we realize we should have done more to emphasize that Astride is still in a premature stage. For this, we apologize and we will do our best n to make up for it. We are staying as transparent as we possibly can. More updates about the game’s development, daily (Mon-Fri) work-in-progress posts and information is to be expected. The monthly devlog for May will come very soon but we had to prioritize other tasks for this time.
The Kickstarter trailer: Proof of concept
The Kickstarter trailer that was made last year, was essentially put together as a proof of concept. While everything was recorded in-game, it was not a well-functioning game. We understand how having “early in-game footage” in the video was misleading. When this trailer was made, it was early in-game footage, but as explained, we revised and restarted.
We realize that we should have switched out the Steam trailers consecutively as we developed the game. For example, when the horse creator update came to the testers, we should have made a trailer from that and replaced it immediately. We will follow up on this and produce trailers as the game is updated over time. As an added note, we are revising the Steam page and removing the Planned Key Features section as this turned out to be confusing. We are sorry for this mistake and we are doing all we can to revise and improve.
The following updates and what to expect
We heard your complaints about being limited to the arena, and for the upcoming patch, we have opened up the arena, added terrain collision, and you can now run around in the placeholder environment. Collisions with trees are also in our plans but it may not come with the first update. We are utilizing the Unity DOTS collisions and not the standard Unity collisions for this. Unity DOTS is a new framework made by Unity that enables us to write high performant and best-practice code in Unity. This enables us to push for more players in the game and have more performant servers that can, possibly, support up to a hundred players online at the same time. However, Unity has not yet converted all of its systems to DOTS, so we're waiting for them to deliver their "Open World" package that includes a whole new terrain workflow and using DOTS physics package. In the meantime, we will implement a temporary solution that is not quite as performant as we would like it to be, but it will be a good start for us to get a feel for how riding around in the terrain will feel like so that we can make proper animations for inclines and test out gameplay.
Music in the horse creator is on its way, as well as ambient sounds. A camera lock is also at the top of our priority list and should come with the next patch.
Remember to clock in on the development streams that are announced in #developer-livestreams. You’ll be able to see the game’s development firsthand and talk with Green Horse as he programs.
The human character: On its way
We know you were all disappointed that the character made no appearance in the early access release. While this was our intent, we had to restructure our priorities around the horse controller and striding. There are still a few animations missing for the character but this is something we are working on. We are however putting our main focus on the horse controller and animation system, but we will keep you updated on this.
Optimization: FPS cap and other improvements
Measurements will be taken in improving the game’s optimization. There will be more quality settings added along with more control over certain details, such as shadow range. We will be utilizing Amplify Impostors to create billboards of our assets that will help with optimization. We will use Bakery, a high-end GPU light mapper to bake our lights. This will also remove the odd lighting that is happening in the inside riding arena.
As we have moved on to a new phase, our technical artist is back and will look at optimizing the shader and the horse creation. All of the horse texture layers should be baked upon saving the created horse. This will reduce the amount of processing the horse does for every frame.
Controller guide
A controller guide and the option to change keybindings are also among our priorities. This should make it easier for AZERTY users as well as clear up the confusion around the horse controller and how to move around.
To conclude, we are doing all that we can to kick the development of Astride into full gear. We appreciate all of the feedback we have received and are actively working to make fixes and improvements where we can. We will do everything we can to give back to the community with every new update. Astride is a passion project, our dream, and is not something we will give up on. If you have any further questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Thank you again so much for your dedication!
Astride Patch Notes 2023.06.02
Added features
Striding system prototype is available
Striding indicator above jumps
Jump indicators on the ground which trigger the horse to jump if the two front feet land in the circle
VSYNC is added and currently default in settings
Indoor dressage rails have been added and updated
Slow canter has been added to the animation roster
The horse can now gallop
Fixes and adjustments
Tweaks to the animation flow in the horse controller for a smoother experience
Horse now automatically changes to a walk when holding the S-key from a slow canter
Grass and flowers have been added back to the environment
Sand texture has been updated and is no longer as rough
Known issues
The in-between transition between the fast canter and the gallop is bugged due to the animation system struggling to choose which animation to play
Horse starts at a walk in the horse creator
Striding system is currently bug-riddled and will be improved with future updates
The horse shader/textures light up at certain spots in the indoor arena
Game gets stuck when hopping from one online server to another, restart the game as a temporary fix
If the server host exits the server before the other players leave, the other players will have to quit the game as the mouse will not appear
The camera gets locked and the mouse disappears when disconnecting from a server and joining again, fix by restarting the game
Horse will jump even if not landing the stride
Coming up
Resolving the known issues
Tweaks to the striding system and jumping
Updates to horse controller
Toggle for show jumping courses and dressage rails
Camera settings, including camera lock
Refusals
Astride Early Access Release
The moment we've all been eagerly waiting for has finally come! We are happy to announce that Astride has officially launched its early access phase on Steam! We cannot express enough gratitude for the incredible support you have shown us throughout the challenges we faced along the way.
While Astride is being released in its early stages, we consider this a valuable opportunity for our community to actively participate in shaping the future of the game. Your feedback is important to us as we strive to make Astride reach its full potential.
It's important to note that, as an early access title, Astride will contain bugs and issues. We want to assure you that we are working to address these problems. You can find a comprehensive list of known issues and our plans to fix them in the patch notes for the early access build. The patch notes will also highlight the new features and adjustments we have implemented based on the feedback received during the playtest.
FOR ALL KICKSTARTER AND PATREON SUPPORTERS ELIGIBLE FOR EARLY ACCESS KEYS: To get a hold of your Steam keys, please use the following codes and send a direct message to @R2_Key2 in the Astride Discord server.
.patreon_verify YourEmailHere .kickstarter_verify YourEmailHere Make sure you switch out YourEmailHere with the email connected to your Patreon or Kickstarter profile. If you need any help retrieving your keys, please create a ticket in the #help-and-support channel in the Discord server and our moderators will be happy to help you out.
In regards to the Mac build of Astride, we are working on developing a functional build in the near future. We realize that the absence of immediate Mac support at release might be disappointing for many of you. However, we want to assure you that we are committed to delivering a Mac build as soon as possible.
We want to take a moment to express our heartfelt appreciation for the amazing community that has formed around Astride. Your dedication and support have been incredibly important in making this journey possible, and we are truly grateful for each and every one of you.
Regarding Release
It is with great regret that we inform you about the unforeseen complications we have encountered in the release of the early access build of Astride. The Steam review process is taking longer than we initially anticipated, and we are currently awaiting their approval for the early access build. This was not an issue with the playtesting releases. We sincerely apologize for any frustration or disappointment this delay may cause. Please rest assured that we are working tirelessly to resolve the situation and bring the release of Astride to you as soon as possible.
Over the past weeks, we have dedicated ourselves to tidying up and updating the game to the best of our abilities before the early access launch. It saddens us to have invested so much effort into meeting a deadline, only to face an obstacle that lies beyond our control. At this point, we find ourselves with limited power to take action and must rely on Steam to review our launch (within 3-5 business days) or respond to our email, in the hope of expediting the review process.
We understand that we will be unable to meet the original release date we had set, and for that, we extend our deepest apologies. Rest assured, the game is fully prepared for launch, and we are eagerly awaiting the green check mark from Steam to proceed. We are incredibly grateful for your excitement and unwavering support for Astride, and we want you to know that we are leaving no stone unturned in our efforts to find a resolution to this matter.
Once again, we apologize for any inconvenience caused by this unexpected delay. Your understanding and patience during this time are immensely appreciated. We will continue to provide updates as we make progress in resolving the review process with Steam.
We cannot express our gratitude enough for your ongoing support.
Thank you sincerely, the Astride development team
Astride Release Time
We're absolutely thrilled by the immense excitement surrounding the release of Astride's early access! We've heard some concerns about the Steam timer that has expired, and we want to clear things up. That timer is a standard time set by Steam itself, and we don't have control over it. Apologies for any confusion caused by its expiration, as we never specified a specific release time.
Rest assured, our dedicated team is working tirelessly to ensure the game is polished and ready for your enjoyment. However, we still need a bit more time to address some essential aspects. While the day isn't over yet, we want to assure you that Astride will indeed be released today. We kindly ask for your patience as we finalize the build and prepare it for upload.
We truly appreciate your unwavering support and understanding during this final stretch. Stay tuned for further updates, and once again, thank you for your patience and enthusiasm!
Astride Playtest Patch 2023.05.26
A new build for Astride playtesters is now available. Here are the new features and changes/fixes that have been made. Note that this version of the playtests is only available for our Patreon supporters at Bronze Tier or higher.
You may have to restart your Steam client if the update is not immediately available.
Added features
Horse jumps when pressing the spacebar (placeholder feature)
Change gaits using SHIFT + W/S keys
Smoother animation system
Indoor and outdoor riding arena with placeholder nature environment
Collision with fences, jumps, and riding arena
Standard jump with different pole colors added
Being able to save and join the world with the horse coat created
Horse naming
Toggle name and saddle off/on in the menu
UI overhaul
New idle animations added
Horse creator locations
Fixes and adjustments
The Norwegian Warmblood’s mesh has been adjusted
A new tail mesh to replace the previous one has been added
The rig with skinning has been updated
The back movement in the walking animation has been tweaked
Adjusted the protruding thigh during gallop and piaffe animations
General tweaking and adjustments to animations
The roan and dun overlays have been tweaked and replaced
The greying textures have been updated with a new version
Red/chestnut textures have been desaturated
Many new face markings and tobiano markings have been added
To get access to playtesting Astride, head over to our Patreon page. All patrons subscribed to the Bronze tier and up, will get permanent access to the test. To get more information about Astride, check out our website.
Astride early access release date!
We come sharing news! We are all excited about the early access release of Astride. As we announced before, our deadline with NFI was the 28th of May. This was true at the moment of writing that announcement but when we received the documentation of the postponement, they gave us another date. June the 12th.
But what does this mean for the release? Well, let us assure you that we've been firm about having May as our launch month, and we're sticking to our word. However, we do have more time for writing our reports to the state, and we want to use the few extra days to continue working on the early access and polishing for the release. Considering these circumstances, we can finally give an official release date for Astride.
Mark your calendars because Astride will be available as an early access title starting Wednesday, May 31st!
Regarding the state of Astride upon early access, we are at a pre-alpha or proof-of-concept stage. Astride is still very early in the development process and does not have near the number of features that a full game will. But don’t worry, we are working hard on creating more content, features, and gameplay for you during the early access period.
We sadly did not have enough time to prioritize the human character as we intended to. But we will be working on future updates as soon as we launch and the character is one of the features we want to implement sooner rather than later. The horse creator works as intended and you will be able to spawn in with the horse you create. Your horse won’t be set in stone yet, so you can go back and make changes at any time.
The prototype of show jumping is ready to be tested where you can jump obstacles as a bare minimum. You will be able to toggle between different show jumping courses and the dressage rails which can be utilized both indoors and outdoors. The multiplayer feature works as intended, and you can create servers to invite your friends to.
For our Kickstarter and Patreon supporters who are eligible for early access keys, the keys will be given out just like we have done with the playtester game keys. There will be a bot on Discord where you can send a message and it will give you your key(s). We will give out more information about this as soon as the bot is ready.
We are thrilled to see how many of you are eagerly anticipating the release of Astride. It's been quite a journey, and we know it's only just beginning. We're excited for many more years of development, updates, and being an active part of this incredible community that has formed around Astride. Your support and kind words mean the world to us, and we are truly grateful for each and every one of you.
Devlog #29: April 2023
The month of April has flown by too quickly! But that also means that our monthly devlog is here. We've been making quite a few upgrades and we are getting closer and closer to the early access release in May. It's definitely a bit scary, but we are excited to get past the release and work on pushing updates without thinking about worrying about deadlines. Enough about that, let's look at April's development.
Character clothes, greying, and markings
By Mathilde - 3D-artist
We are getting closer and closer to the early access release, and I’ve finished tweaking the character’s clothes so that they are ready for implementation into the game. We first only had the feminine body type, but we recently got the masculine body type done. Since both of our current body types need clothes, I fitted the feminine-shaped clothes to the masculine body. This way, all clothes fit all current body types and we can blend between them.
Blending between body types in the game is something we are striving for, and this is a small step in the right direction. We want to let anyone wear whatever clothes they’d like, no matter which body type or size they choose. Further down in Marius' part of the devlog, you can see the blend between the characters and clothes.
The greying gene has also had more work this month. I focused on adding greying to all of the manes we currently have. It will most likely not be available right at the release of the early access but will be added with a later update. That’s when I’ll be working on hyperpigmentation as well. Right now, the horses do not have any hyperpigmentation when greying, so it is not very accurate, especially on red horses. But the manes and tails are ready for greying and I can’t wait until we get it into the engine and shader.
Currently, we have the two greying processes that are already in the current playtest. As you might have seen in the last devlog, I updated these textures. The updated texture won’t be in the early access release from day one as I still have some tweaking to do. I want to make sure it’s up to standard and the transition between the different stages is smooth. So the texture will most likely be updated when we add greying to the hair.
Moving on to what I’ve spent the most time working on this month, horse markings. I’ve been mainly working on adding more tobiano patterns and face markings. As some of our community members noticed on one of the tobiano patterns, we use real horses as references for our markings. It’s incredibly important for me that the markings and other gene textures look and feel realistic. Therefore, I use references for all of the markings I make. I do of course tweak them a little bit so that they are not exact replicas. If I made these markings from my own head, we would definitely have some weird-looking markings.
In the current Astride playtest, we have 14 full-face markings, 14 upper-face markings, and 11 lower-face markings. As I am writing this, we have 40 full-face markings, 21 upper-face markings, and 20 lower-face markings. That’s a big step up and just from upper and lower face markings, you can make over 400 different combinations. With time, there will of course come more variations, but I absolutely feel like everyone should be able to find at least one combination of markings they like.
Some of the new face markings that are added are also designs sent in by our Kickstarter supporters! I’ve shared these markings with the supporters who sent them in, and so far, I’ve received a lot of positive feedback on them. I’m so happy to have our community be a part of the game in this way, and some of the designs are really beautiful and unique!
Kickstarter print and new splash art
By Maja - Concept Artist
April has been quite a busy month. Not only have I been working hard on the Kickstarter reward art, but I’ve also been occupied with paperwork for both Østnorsk Filmsenter and Norsk Filminstitutt since both of them have been so kind and granted us funding for further development of Astride. I am so thankful to them for believing in us and Astride.
Almost all my latest WIP have been snippets of the progress of the Kickstarter art. It’s been a big project to draw this one. This art piece will be a limited print signed by the developers for those who supported the Kickstarter campaign with €150.
I worked so hard on it, and it took a lot of time. I actually finished the drawing right before writing this devlog. I’ve already written about it in the last devlog, but it has gone through many iterations and I am now finally happy with it. I hope the supporters that will receive this piece in the mail will enjoy it. I cannot wait to show you the whole drawing and I really believe it will look great when printed. I will contact a printing firm soon and have it printed. I've been printing a few drawings privately before so I have a few ideas of what paper type we should use and such.
Even though I just finished a huge art task, the next season is coming soon which in my opinion is the best season of the year: Summer! I’ve chosen the beautiful Alter real to be the breed on this splash art. I can’t wait to see how it will turn out. I also need to figure out what the rider should look like.
Striding system and UI updates
By Green Horse - Programmer
Astride is going to have a striding system so it’s a bit challenging to design. We have a way to predict where a stride will land in the future, so we can give the player feedback on whether or not they should speed up or slow down in order to make a perfect jump. The problem is all about accuracy. A slight speed change for the current stride might cause a larger change for a future stride so it gets difficult to adjust your speed, especially on a keyboard. I’ve added a way to automatically adjust the striding so that you will be able to make a jump. However, this is slower than doing it manually by speeding up or slowing down, so people who train themselves to not use this automatic adjustment mechanic will have an advantage.
It still looks rough and unpolished, but it is a work in progress after all.
We have a very simple motion-matching system in place that blends between animations based on movement. At the moment the horse will slide around when it doesn’t find an animation to blend into so it looks a bit funky and broken. The reason for this is that we haven’t put in all the animations yet. We wanted to explore sideways/lateral movement before the early access release but we decided that we were just going to have forward and turning animations instead. The rest will come later. You’re not going to do much lateral movement in show jumping anyways. Dressage, however, will have a lot of it.
I've also been working together with Maja to update the visuals of the menu. This is currently what it looks like.
Stepping up the quality
By Tirna - 3D-artist
Over the past few weeks, I have been working on upgrading the riding arena. The previous model had a few flaws that were a result of our style not being fully established at the time they were made, particularly when it came to buildings. It was a more tedious task than I had anticipated, but now that all the necessary models have been created and textured, I am very glad that we had the opportunity to do this before the Early Access release. I am happy to report that all the necessary modules have been imported into Unity, so you will see the upgraded version in our streams in the near future!
After completing this project, I was looking for a more relaxing task and decided to sketch some ideas for the environment. Although I cannot guarantee that these designs will be used, I find it helpful to have a starting point before working with the environment in Unity. I really hope that I can bring some color and create a relaxing space around the arena for you. This will also help us to get a step closer to making decisions regarding the style of the environment in Astride.
While we wait for progress on the environment, we have decided to upgrade our saddles as well. The current models are quite old and no longer fit with the style we have established. Now, they look much closer to a real saddle, and I am very excited to begin texturing them, as well as the tack that some of you have sent to us through Patreon!
Eager to saddle up
By Marius - Animator
This month started with me finishing up the eager animation as a variant to the stationary walk that shows a little more... Life and agency. If you have followed Green Horse’s streams you might have seen it. After I finished that, my main task these last few weeks has been to prepare the human character to be added on the horseback. With early access getting closer and closer we were originally not thinking we would be able to implement it before the early access, and were planning to add the character later. But after I started making the rig and setup to the character back in February, I decided that I want to try and implement a least viable product version of it before the early access.
In theory, it would be done fast, theory is nice that way. Practically though, you always meet setbacks and obstacles you don’t foresee.
Implementing the character is a lot harder than one would think. Adding a free-moving character is one thing, but having two characters moving in tandem and in constant contact is another. Though I don’t have personal experience with interacting animations between two characters in-game animation from before, I have heard that it is some of the harder stuff you can do depending on the interaction. I believe them. But before I get ahead of myself, I wanted to see if I could implement blending between feminine and masculine body shapes now that we have the meshes to do it.
Above is the end result after adding blendshapes to the clothes. Now, I have had the character riding on the horse before while testing possible solutions to future problems, like “How do we deal with different sitting positions between different saddle types?” My solution was to have a bone on the horse rig that the character could be retargeted to depending on the saddle. In the last few weeks, this evolved into its own saddle rig that has taken most of my time, as we want the saddle to be its own entity and not deform perfectly with the horse’s skin. Though I have to add that this is a special case and we probably won’t give other skin-tight tack the same treatment, as the time investment to reward ratio is too low to be feasible on other equipment.
Most of the time has gone to tweaking parameters to a script that moves the saddle according to the horse's movement as animating it by hand would swallow a huge amount of time from other work. The rig includes retargeting points that control the player character as that character is in another project file and helps a lot in getting the basic movement down without having to jump in between and cross-reference back and forth.
Placing the character has been the easier of what has been done this month as I already had in place the setup to have the character's hips be placed at the saddle position. Now to avoid having the character be a mannequin placed on top of a horse with no additional movement, I needed to animate the sits, hand, and foot position for each horse animation. While there are a lot of animation clips to go through, as long as I get the base position right it gets done quite fast.
All saddled up! Now I just have to bake the animations and test them in the game engine.
Please note that everything shown in these devlogs is mostly showcasing work that is in progress and is not finished. To see work in progress daily, join our Discord server community here! To get more information about Astride, check out our website.
Early Access Information
With early access right around the corner, the team is working hard to get the initial early access version of the game ready for the players. Game development is not a straight line from A to B, and some changes in priorities have been made since we last gave you information about early access in October of 2022. We would like to provide you with more detailed information about what to expect from the state of the game, the release date, the Steam page, the Discord server, and Patreon rewards when early access finally releases.
First off, what you are most excited about: Astride and its release. While we initially aimed for an April/March release, May is where we have landed. Our due date for filing papers about this development phase is the 28th of May, and we will need at least a week to get these in order. Based on this, we are expecting the game to release in mid-May. We cannot give you an exact date yet, as we are still working hard to develop the game, we will give you a date as soon as we have one.
From the start of the early access release of Astride, it will initially have limited features, which may cause the game to feel incomplete and empty, with less gameplay than what one would expect from a complete game. This brings us back to the point of early access. The point of early access is to release the game before it is finished to be able to (hopefully) help further fund the game. Not only this, but it gives us the chance to get feedback, opinions, and impressions of the game to give us the chance to improve it even further. Up until now, we have shared our game development with you, the wonderful community, and we have received such great feedback and help to improve the game fundamentally. Your opinions as players matter to us. This is why we opted for early access.
Moving on to features, we initially informed you that the game will be very barebones from the start. We mentioned a horse controller, a jumping mechanism with striding, and possibly a few dressage moves. This is still in our plan today. We said there will be no horse customization, grooming, feeding, and tacking up. Limited environment and world to ride in outside, as well as a few cross-country jumps. No player character and you would choose between a few horses from a menu. This is where we have made some changes.
The horse creator is very much a working feature at this point and will be available from the release of early access. The horse created by the player will be the horse they spawn in with when playing. The player character is still not confirmed - but we are currently working on the animations and hope to have a first prototype of the character in the game by launch. By prioritizing the human characters, the new horse animations and tweaking existing horse animations are currently on hold. But we believe this is the right choice, to hopefully be able to have the character in the game from the start.
While we would love to add more horse breeds to early access, we have prioritized programming around multiplayer, the character, and the show jumping system. But don’t worry, the new horse breeds will come with an update when it’s time. While we can’t give you a list of the order the planned horse breeds will be released, we can tell you that the first new breed will be the Norwegian Fjord horse. As the Norwegian Fjord horse’s staple look is a roached mane, this will give us the opportunity to test if changing the mane style will work as intended.
As for the environment, we are currently working on a solution where the players will be able to ride both inside a riding arena as well as outside in a larger outside arena. We hope to create more trees and an environment outside, but only time will show if we can manage to get it done in time for release. Since we won’t be using any store assets for our environment, creating these assets take time, and our 3D artist is currently working on refining and polishing the buildings.
The Steam page will get an overhaul as we get closer to the finished build. We will switch out all of the screenshots and provide a new gameplay trailer that matches the current state of the game. The description will also be updated to list the current features and what will be worked on during early access. We want the Steam page to be truthful to the current state of the game to avoid any confusion or upset. It is important for our team to stay transparent with you and the rest of the community about Astride. There will be created a few threads on the Steam discussion section of the store page. The threads planned so far are mega threads for bug reporting and mega threads for suggestions and ideas. This way it will be easier for the developers to get feedback about bugs, but it will also give the community an opportunity to share ideas with the team in one place.
The Discord server will mostly stay the same, but there will be new channels made for reporting bugs, troubleshooting, and possibly other community-related channels. The daily work-in-progress posts and general updates will not change on the Discord server. We recently started using the #updates channel for announcing Steam updates. This will also continue as we move into early access. Generally, the Discord server will stay the same.
The Patreon page will undergo a few changes. Mainly, the early access reward will be taken away and replaced. The bridle pendants will stay, and we will be working on adding your tier subscriptions to the game in form of a profile splash, text colors, and so on. This will not be a focus for the start of early access, but will most likely come with a later update when it is in our priorities. There will still be Patreon posts with behind-the-scenes for you all to dive into as before. Hopefully, we will be able to give you more Patreon posts soon, as we have been beating ourselves for the lack of posts recently. The playtesting reward that we currently have will stay and give players a chance to test out early access updates before they release. This way, we can sort out possible bugs and issues before the update is released to the public.
We are incredibly excited about the early access release, and we can’t wait to let you all play. We are definitely worried about complaints about the lack of features in the game at the start, but we hope to solve this by being open and transparent with you concerning the game’s development and our plan forward. Astride is not a project that will ever get abandoned. It is our passion project and we will stand by it. We are glad to have the Norwegian game industry on our side and we are incredibly grateful for the absolutely amazing community that has been built around Astride. We can’t wait to share Astride’s progress with you.
Devlog #28: March 2023
We welcome a new monthly devlog about the development of Astride. The March month is over and we would love to give you some more insight into each developer's work during this time.
Hair, coats, and clothes
By Mathilde - 3D-artist
March has gone by too fast! I’ve had some different tasks this month and would like to elaborate more on them. Within the first weeks, I created a riding helmet to continue the work on the human character’s clothes (riding pants and boots) from the last month. The current “V” logo design is temporary until we build brands that will be in the game.
While the riding boots and pants were created by the character artist and textured by me, the riding helmet is something I made from scratch. When the helmet was done, I added them with the rest of the clothes to see if they fit the rest, and I was glad to discover they did! Since the daily work in progress only show snippets of what we are working on, I thought I would show you the full outfit in its entirety. Since we also created a sweater/baselayer and a riding vest.
Moving on from the riding clothes, the setup of the hair for the horses has been revamped. With the previous method, painting on the hair cards one by one was not possible, but now the amounts of hair cards have been drastically reduced in trade for being able to paint on every single card separately. This will also make it easier to implement the feature where the tobiano patterns in the coat will affect the patterns in the hair. I can now make different tobiano coat patterns and match them with hair patterns almost seamlessly.
During this month I started reworking the Fjord horse. Or - I made it from scratch again using the already existing mesh of the Norwegian warmblood. This way I could make a shape like the Fjord horse quickly and work with the same textures and hairstyles. While I haven’t started the high-detailed mesh for the Fjord horse, this is a task I will be working on soon.
With the Fjord horse comes both the dun gene as well as dun mixed with pangaré. Since pangaré affects how dun looks, I made overlays for pangaré dun which differ from the regular dun. Dun horses as well as Fjord horses with pangaré dun have diluted color and dorsals. This not only affects the coat but also the hair. Therefore, we also needed overlays for the hair just as with the tobiano patterning. The mane has gotten lightened layers of hair over the original color, and the tail has also been lightened with a dorsal going through from the base to the end. Since the thickness of dorsal stripes varies from horse to horse, we have made a system that matches the thickness of the dorsal in the coat with the thickness of the dorsal in the hair. For now, we have four different thicknesses.
And finally, back to the greying we go! Since the hair was updated, I decided to update the hair greying as well. While being on top of this idea, I also decided I finally wanted to do a new iteration of the greying process. For some reason, I can never seem to get satisfied. While greying horses in real life isn’t as complex, creating it digitally while also looking realistic is not an easy task.
The hardest being the dapples themselves. This time I hand-painted every single dapple. While it may sound extreme, stamping on a pattern like this never looks right. Repeating patterns in such an intricate pattern becomes obvious very fast, so finding a way to produce dapples fast and still keep quality was a challenge. I played around with the brushes and made one that gave me a great starting point. It felt like splotches of color on the fur but still felt a bit uniform. There were all too round and perfect. So back to the thinking box I go.
The solution was to use this same fur-like brush, scale it down and get to work. I would shake my hand while making every dapple to create randomness at the edges to make them feel more like real dapples. I don’t think I can get them 100% looking like real dapples, but at least we won’t be using photos of horses as a texture, which is what I wanted to avoid. As of right now, I am pleased with the result, but I am sure that I will probably revisit the greying another time when I realize I’m not happy with it after all. I guess that’s part of being an artist!
Posters and hairstyles
By Maja - Concept Artist
The early access launch gets closer day by day so I wanted to prepare a poster for it. Since the theme of the early access is showjumping I chose a jumping horse that jumps so high it flies in the sky. Fly high was the motto for it. I wanted this horse to have a buckskin color, which I haven't drawn before for any splash art. I love markings so the horse got some markings for its legs as well as its face. So very cute! The hardest part of this poster was the text. But I believe I've found a solution to it. I added a jumping pole with red and white colors which is a very nice contrast next to the horse and the blue sky. I cannot wait to show you the final poster at the launch.
I've also done some concept art sketching for the game. This time I drew many ideas for different hairstyles for the player character. There are a lot more sketches than what shows in the screenshot, but I’ll show you some more here. And remember: even though I have drawn some hairstyles on a female model and some on a male model, the chosen hairstyles for the game will be available for any gender. So no worries there! Also even though I have made a concept of a hairstyle does not mean it will appear in the game. But hopefully, most of them will be added. I've made many sketches for curly and wavy hairstyles too, which we want in the game, but I know it's very hard to make it look good in 3D. But we will do our best!
And the biggest art project at the moment is the Kickstarter art print which I kept secret for a while. It's coming along fine and I've been doing lots of background work for it like drawing mountains, forests, and a nice little farm. I wanted it to have two horses in the frame. The first horse is of course our dear Norwegian warmblood. It has a bay coat with some markings on its legs and face. The other one is the lovely fjord horse with a brown dun coat color. It gives me summer vibes for some reason. A fjord on grass. There is still lots of work left before it’s completed. Right now I'm focusing on the foreground and rendering the horses’ bodies and legs. Soon I'll have to make the water look cool as well. Wish me luck!
Menus and collisions
By Green Horse - Programmer
A problem with being an early adopter of new, experimental technology is that sometimes you have to figure out your problems all by yourself. For example, if you google an error caused by the old Unity workflow, you will have no trouble finding forum posts by users experiencing the same issues. However, since what we are working with is relatively new, you might be one of the first to discover a new bug, so you get to name it. Lately, I have been naming a lot of new bugs, and this has made me realize that I have feelings.
The old main menu was certainly a placeholder, and the current one is also a placeholder, but to a lesser extent. What is important right now is to ensure that the menus are wired up and working properly so that we can get our Patreon playtesters to experience the flow of the menus and provide feedback on their functionality. We are internally exploring different UI styles and will update the menu before Early Access, so we can gather feedback on the visuals too.
Here are some new main menu features:
Join window where you can see active servers in a server list
Host window where you can set the server name, max players, and other settings
Basic options menu
There are now walls with collision and we finally have the power to keep the horses contained. No more phasing through walls and going on infinite journeys into the void. Instead of the void, we now have a simple indoor riding arena with the ability to go outside into a fenced-off area for show jumping. We want to add some simple terrain geometry to the area outside the walkable space so that it does not look empty. This is purely for visuals, though, as collision with the terrain will be added once Unity releases the "Open World Streaming" package, and we start working on cross country riding.
Buildings and textures part 2
By Tirna - 3D-artist
Let's delve into the topic of buildings once again! Recently, we tested our riding arena in Unity and were in for a surprise - the measurements had been toggled on for inches instead of centimeters. As a result, our riding arena turned out to be much larger than anticipated. While it's great to have a spacious arena, it doesn't need to be excessively big.
As a solution, we're now working on adjusting the proportions and dimensions of our arena. While scaling everything down would be the easier route, we have to manually adjust the measurements because our doors and some windows are in centimeters. However, I see this as an opportunity to make some changes that I wasn't satisfied with before. It's great to have identified the issue and make adjustments accordingly. This gives us the chance to focus on optimizing the buildings to ensure smoother performance.
Side note: It seems like the entrance room will not require much tweaking when it comes to strange dimensions!
Even though we need to rework many parts of the riding arena, it will mainly look the same as before but with some changes in detail. For instance, the windows will have thinner bars, and the arches and doors will follow suit. We've made the planks slimmer to resemble normal pinewood planks, rather than something that looks like wide sycamore-tree planks. In this picture, it might be challenging to spot all the differences, but we hope you'll get a good idea of how much we're altering the dimensions of the riding arena. Below is the house before and after.
And below is the house with its first iteration of textures.
Adding missing pieces
By Marius - Animator
Most of this month has gone to generally improving already made stuff; and while going through our controls and movement, we realized we were missing something: two movement animations. Originally I had planned to work on a variety of animations for when you are not moving, but not quite idle yet. The movement animations took precedence though, so even though I had one variety animation almost ready, I had to put it on hold.
While we were talking about the technicalities of jumps in the game, we realized that we had been thinking too much about how to control the horse and not necessarily when you don’t have control. Specifically “what happens when the player is way off with the jump?” because usually, the horse would take matters into their own hooves and just refuse if they feel they won’t make the jump. This led me to drop what I was working on at the moment to make the jump refusal.
After the jump refusal was made I got to work on fixing a long-standing problem with the rig and deformations: the neck. After working on the human character rig last month I learned a few tricks that could help with the deformations that were far from optimal. While usually, the standard is to make corrective blend shapes, I used corrective bones to fix the neck.
Corrective blend shapes are when you add animation information on the mesh itself to fix deformation by moving vertices to counteract whatever the problem is. While it is the standard way of doing it, you have to make one for every deformation problem you have. Because of this you usually don’t make them before you are at the point where you can’t fix the deformation with the rig itself. Corrective bones on the other hand are not something I learned about before, but I can also see why. The general rule you hear with rigs is that you should have as few bones as you can get away with for optimization reasons. But that is a rule that stems from when computers were not as powerful as they are now and it would save a lot of time (though you shouldn’t go bananas with the amount of bones). What corrective bones are is bones you add with the same purpose as the corrective blend shapes: to counteract faulty deformation. The reason I say it will save a lot of time is that corrective bones should be automatic if made correctly, though it needs some programming know-how.
Only testing will tell if I have to rein back on the corrective bones or not, but speaking of reining back; that is the second movement animation I made!
After realizing we were missing the jump refusal animation, I later took some time to go through more thoroughly what movements we would need in the early access build of the game. And while looking at Green Horse work and test stuff I had an epiphany, we were missing a backing-up animation, or rein back, as I learned it was called. Generally, we could not move backward. So I got to working on a rein back animation, which turned out to not take as much time as I feared it would take. I even added a second loop of the leg movement with some variation before looping the animation to break the uniformity.
Please note that everything shown in these devlogs is mostly showcasing work that is in progress and is not finished. To see work in progress daily, join our Discord server community here! To get more information about Astride, check out our website.
