Astride news & patch notes

Quests & System-Planning

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

Hi! Maja here. Me and Marius have worked on a quest system for the game loop this past month. Note that this is NOT programming, but pre-production for it. Which means we have to first divide the different categories of quests, which as of now is 1. Breeding, 2. Training (Stats and disciplines) and 3. Behavior training (Spooking, bolting, etc.).  The next step was to define how to change the difficulty within each category, and that may include for example; tiers.  We want these quests to have a formula that lasts forever and never stops giving new quests. Kind of like a randomizer.  The hardest one to work on was breeding, since there are so many factors that can play into this category. Breed, size, gender, coat color, markings and so on. All of the genetics. Some clients are pickier than others. An example can be this for an easy quest: “Hello, I want a Brunblakk (Bay dun) Norwegian Fjord horse, can you breed me one?”. This requires two Norwegian Fjord horses (dam and sire) and that the foal inherits the Brunblakk color gene.

For a more advanced quest it can be: “Hi, I am looking for a Norwegian warmblood, but I want a stallion that is red tobiano with a blaze (face marking). Here you will need Norwegian Warmbloods where the foal inherits a red base coat with tobiano, and also has a facial marking and is a colt/stallion. Much more challenging, right? The challenge is strongly based on the percent chances it takes to get either of these traits and some luck. Maybe you get in the first try, or maybe it requires multiple tries. But hey that’s horse breeding for ya. But this is just two examples out of many. The formula we have planned here needs to be tested and approved before we can confirm that this is what we are going to use. But I think this is a good idea. Small to major change may occur. Stories and other quests On the side of the core game loop, we have also written a lot of more story based quests. Both for the game loop and in-world quests. This has been fun, some quests just arrive by themselves and some others need a little bit more research and planning. Some are interesting, some are funny and some may even be sad. Like it should be. Variation is good. So yeah, lots of writing has been going on. Proof reading, rewriting, and testing is another part that must be done for it to be programmed and implemented into Astride. Many steps, but that’s how it is.

Stabbur & Skigard

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

So, this month has been a little different from the previous months… With challenges from every angle, but I managed to make two new assets that will be added to the game. They are made to make the environment feel closer to what you can see on a lot of older farms around Norway.

This little house is called a “Stabbur” in Norwegian. They used those buildings to store food, and sometimes people were sleeping in them too. Especially in the summer, at large farms where a lot of people were working, since the temperatures inside were a nice escape from the summer heat. The year we put on this Stabbur was a very good year for many farmers in Norway, and brought in good wealth.

Another very typical thing you find a lot here in Norway, till this day, are a type of fences called a “Skigard”. When they are in a row, they make quite a cozy vibe to the environment. 

I’m really looking forward to making more of these assets and putting them into the game world.

LOD's & Animations

By Marius - Animator

May, as every year, is a weird month. And this year hasn’t disappointed in that regard. Other than our constitution day and other usual national holidays that take place in May, I have had very varied work assignments this month. Animation I continued working on the standing jump animation and further segmenting jump animations for easier use in Unity. I hadn’t worked on them for a while and realized that I stopped mid way because of the annoying shoulder calculation problem. But it is more important to get it in game, so any calculation problems will for now be ignored so we can set up the system for the animations and then I’ll have to fix it manually later. Anyway, a funny thing I realized when working on the jumping animations was that I had followed my reference for standing jump a little too well. In that I mean that the jumping height for standing jump ended up being around 1.75 meters, which is insane. Very impressive for the person who was my reference, but not really a “normal” jump. So I lowered the height to be comparable with the running jump. Then just make sure that the different jump segments have the same amount of frames or at least proportionally similar in events along the timelines. This is so they can blend between each other smoothly if needed. Level Of Detail I have planned that the next export of animations should include LOD’s for the character. For those who don't know, LOD’s are variations of 3D meshes with lower and lower polygon count. These meshes replace the mesh when it gets a certain distance away from the camera and don’t need to render in full detail. Usually there are several levels of detail so that when the character or objects gets even further away, there will be even less polygons. The main thing to keep in mind with this is to keep the silhouette as unchanged as possible. So while the fingers might end up with barely any polygons it is okay as long as it won’t be visible at the distance that mesh is meant for.

A good example are the ears. While I did try to keep the roundness of the ear shape as long as I was able to, the lowest level of detail ended up as an elf as the ears will not be visible to that degree at that distance. Round shapes are the most difficult to keep the shape of when reducing edges.

The example above shows the highest and lowest LOD of the head. Do note that curvatures I normally would like and try to keep like the bridge of the nose gets removed at this level. And with that, when another character or player is way far away, you don’t need to render all 14 000 polygons and instead render just the 2 000 needed. (Only body and head mesh taken into account in this poly count example) There might be an even lower resolution mesh made in the future for when the character is extremely far away, but as of now this is the lowest as we might just stop rendering the character at that point. Though I still see some edge loops I should be able to remove on the lowest resolution one, mostly the one around the eyes.

Quest system When taking a break from animating, I joined Maja in making quests, which made me realize we needed to look at how we define different horse traits and training levels. This is so that we can have it ready to be used for making quests in game, as soon as it is ready. Ideally the system will not only make it easier for us to set quests up, but also be used for generating random quests by exchanging the tags in more generic sounding quest text. The system still needs a lot of work though.

Client stories Kind of in tandem with the quest system I worked on how quests could be written as examples, which ended up in a full quest line for a named client. Where the idea is that the client is recurring and will have a loose story that can be inferred if you pay attention. The one I made is a little more overt than I initially meant though.

World Streaming

By Ouroboros - Programmer

I finished with the UI after doing some profiling and got started on implementing stateful triggers. Unity DOTS only has stateless triggers and, while we have managed fine this far, having stateful ones will open up some possibilities. It will make it easy to have an event happen when the player enters or leaves an area, which can be useful for quests, competitions, NPCs, and to make the world feel more alive. As the game world becomes larger, we need a way to keep the game running smoothly. The solution to this is world streaming, where only the immediate area around the player is loaded in and the areas in the distance use lowpoly meshes or billboards. While it sounds pretty straight forward, there is actually a lot that needs to be set up. The fact that Astride is multiplayer also further complicates it. I have spent a lot of time planning and trying to figure out how to handle the more complex parts of the world streaming. At the time of writing this, I am getting ready to do some preliminary testing to see what will and won’t work. Fingers crossed that everything will go smoothly and that I’ll have a version of world streaming up and running before long.

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Please be aware that the content featured in these devlogs represents an ongoing work in progress and may be subject to further changes. We are committed to continuously developing and refining our game. To stay informed about the latest updates and connect with the rest of the Astride community, we invite you to join our dedicated Discord server community here! For additional information about Astride, please visit our official website.

World Design, Music & Art

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

World design: Music and map April was filled with variation for my tasks, involving drawing, writing and research. Marius has been making great progress on the map design, and I‘ve helped him place properties as well as naming locations, some even got renamed to become more fitting to its placement. Alongside the map work, I created a music document matching it up to places on the map. This will help define both the music we need and how it should be. Of course I’ve added some brackets for other parts of the game like training, shows and breeding that will need their own unique tunes.   The white horse painting The painting is coming along, but I was somewhat unsure about the background since the one I drew was just a quick sketch to set a scene. I asked Tirna to sketch a background based on my plans for the setting, and send it back to me to save time while I was writing the music document. She had a good idea, so I continued on that when I was done with the music document. This will be a good painting, and it’s so fun to make. Even though I have to paint so much grass.

UI Since Ourboros is setting up the new UI, she has been asking me for some pointers here and there. The UI is finally coming along, which is so exciting. I have also focused on updating other UI elements to match the new design, like the gait UI and the arrows over jumps. They turned from basic to become more artsy, though I tried to not over design it. I used elements from the Rose paintings and put it on the gait wheel. I even added some more continuing swirls to make it more cohesive. It kind of looks like a fantasy bow! I had to create a matching arrow to it as well. Anyhow, I discovered one issue with this and that was that we would lose the color indicator difference, due to me choosing a brown scale of colors based on the color palette. This means that each gait had its own color on each wheel. So I got the idea to create a “stone” in the middle of the loop to give an additional indicator for the gait, even though we still will have both an icon and text to tell the player what gait they are in. For the stone I had a few tries before finding something fitting. At first I tried to make a more genotype stone. But this looks way too 3-dimensional compared to everything else on the UI. A more simple stone looked way too simplistic and wasn’t fitting at all. Then I thought to myself: Why not make a “stone” out of rose painting? And there we had it. Looks a bit fancy, but it's not competing for attention with everything surrounding it.

Decor Upgrades

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

The stable has been put on a little hold, since I needed to do something other than just UV mapping and cleaning up this very complex 3D model. As you know, we have been doing this for some years, and in the beginning, we had a more stylised style in our game; those assets aren’t going to waste. Currently, I’m tweaking the 3D models. They will be retextured to fit in with the environment and the style we have landed on. The first thing that is going to be upgraded is the fences and gates.

At the same time, some new models are also in the making, like this portroom and bridge, that will match the stable when it’s done. They will give a more cosy, Norse vibe.

Rigging, Maps & Music

By Marius - Animator

Rigging From last month I continued fixing the rigging for the shoulder. While I made some progress on how to better the rotation calculations, I still hit a lot of snags and decided to work on something else for a while, to not be completely preoccupied with one thing. Sometimes you see things better after doing something else, so I went to plan out the map more. Maps and music I went back to continue on the map and plan it out more. One of the first things I realized I needed to do was to size the whole image resolution up… by a lot.

Updating the roads also became a pain and unnecessarily time consuming. So in case I would need to scale the map again for whatever reason the vector graphics would just work without having to do that much if any. Later I went on to make areas where we can have different music as well as placing some potential areas of interest and discussing names. This while thinking of potential music with Maja.

The numbers denote what type of music will be played in those areas. Though this area in particular is likely to change and might not represent how it will eventually look or sound. Otherwise you can see one of the reasons for the size up with the place names that are too small to show in this picture, but fully readable in my document if I zoom in. Also my house measurement examples.

Upgrading & Optimizing UI

By Ouroboros - Programmer

This month has been the month of UI for me. I put in some time looking through Unity’s examples with UI Toolkit and reading up on the documentation. The majority of the work has been to style the UI. Similarly to web development, UI Toolkit uses style sheets where you can create styles that decide properties such as color, border, font, spacings, etc. I have tried to do a more modular approach this time with several smaller styles that can be reused, rather than a few large ones that only work for one element each. It has taken a while to get everything to look right while also making sure it works with different aspect ratios and resolutions. After the visual part of the UI had been updated, I started looking at the code. I had already decided that I wanted to do as few changes as possible and only focus on what I considered absolutely necessary. This included improvement to the graphics options menu when it comes to setting resolution and frame rate, as well as reusing UI elements where possible instead of regularly deleting and re-creating them. I have also completed some minor additions to the UI code. We have a document containing all the text used in the game, with the relevant code fetching the lines it needs. This is to make it easier in the future when it comes to supporting more languages, as we can just hand over this document for translation. Only a few menus used this document, but I have changed it so that all the UI uses it. The last thing I have done is to add a sound when clicking buttons in the UI. This is currently more of an experiment as we only have a few sounds we can use, but it is a good start. The only thing that remains for the UI now is to do some debugging and profiling to make sure everything works as optimal as possible.

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Please be aware that the content featured in these devlogs represents an ongoing work in progress and may be subject to further changes. We are committed to continuously developing and refining our game. To stay informed about the latest updates and connect with the rest of the Astride community, we invite you to join our dedicated Discord server community here! For additional information about Astride, please visit our official website.

Wall-art and Stories

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

Art on the wall Finishing one art piece to start on another. During March, I finished one of the illustrations (“paintings”) for the stable, which was exciting. The feel that comes when you complete something you\\ve worked on is unmatched. I already had plans and an old sketch ready for the next piece. The first one feels sunny and warm, while this new one I want to make a little bit colder, to create a warm and cold contrast on each side of the stable.  I was inspired by Theodor Kittelsen illustrations for Nøkken when I was viewing older Norwegian paintings. I wanted to draw a double cream Nordland horse for this piece, which has been the plan ever since the first unfinished drawing. Now, the thing with Nordland horses is that they have a very compact build to them. Their neck is usually quite short compared to an Icelandic horse, which leads to them looking a bit shortened when they are working and running. So I had a challenge to pose one into something I was happy with, that also looks natural for them. I made a large moodboard of Nordland horses and tried out many different poses. After lots of revisions, I was finally happy with the composition. I managed to make the neck look a little bit more curved than shortened. A little bit like a stallion who wants to show themselves.

Quest and story lines The writing continues and this time it is for NPC story lines and quests. I’m refining, defining and structuring what is already planned into something more complete. Noah, River and Erika have been in focus. I’ve written each of their stories, and I had a blast doing it! Their story influences other NPC’s stories too. Their base narrative is complete, and proof reading and adjustments will follow soon. Each character will face their own struggles, some connected to their respected field as well as their personal growth. It’s no fun writing what the stories are about here, so I’ll leave it at that.

Small changes for the bigger picture

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

This month's progress has been heavy on the behind-the-scenes part of development. I have been spending time on a character that… honestly caught us a bit off guard. He started as a pretty minor, slightly annoying character, the kind you don’t think too much about. And then… something changed. And it changed a lot!  We can’t say precisely what happened yet; that is for you to discover when the final release of Astride is ready, but he’s no longer who we thought he was. It’s one of those moments where you just sit there like… “We made you, and yet... You surprised us!”

At the same time, I have been working on the stable environment, preparing textures and swapping out parts to match better the direction we’re aiming for.

It’s not the flashiest work, but it quietly changes everything. The goal is to make the stable feel more lived-in, warm, and believable, less of a static, dead 3D model, and more “I want to exist here for a while.” A lot of development right now is about worldbuilding, both story and environment. Slowly turning into something much stronger.

Refining Animation, Rig Fixes, and Soundscapes

By Marius - Animator

At the start of the month I finally fixed problems with the animation files crashing my pc. Or not exactly fixed the root cause, but I can actually open and work on the files without crashing my computer now. It seems like the reason is something with the HDD drives ability to read files, leading to a crash when “overwhelmed”. So I moved my working files to the C drive (which is an SSD) and removed textures as they are still stored in the HDD drive, and I don’t really need textures when working in blender as it is only needed in Unity… As long as I am not working with textures and UV mapping, of course. Because of this the gifs and images will not be textured. Since I now could work on the character again I continued where I was forced to stop due to the crashes, and finished up the jogging animation redo. But overall I switched work focus a lot this month. Jogging animation While some of the jogging animation I redid was shown back in December I was in the process of making the sideways strafe and diagonal movement when my computer started acting up. Down below you see the current state of the animations as I have finally been able to finish them to a usable point. Though some touch ups here and there will probably be needed in the future.

From the left: Jogging forwards, jogging diagonally left, strafing jog left. The forward jog is captured at an angle as it is more dynamic and shows more movement. As I want the torso to mostly be pointed forwards when moving diagonally and strafing, they end up looking very similar as it is similar movement. Because if the torso isn’t, there really isn’t a reason to have a strafing animation as that would basically be a forwards jog animation at that point, just… sideways. Jumping animation redo and segmenting While I already was working in the animation files again, I revisited the character jump to segment the animation for better implementation in game. As the jump is in game now it is just a full jump animation, and while it is possible to segment it into parts in the game engine, it is better to actually have the movements designed from the get go as segments. And a jump can be segmented into 2, ideally 3 parts. If we discount the landing animation.

• Jump start

  • This is the anticipation for the jump along the actual jumping action. Where you bend down before stretching your legs to accelerate upwards

• Jump air

  • This is after you have lifted off the ground and you try to lift your legs for a higher jump.

  • It is not a complicated animation and is basically just a pose to blend into before blending into the falling animation again.

  • More technically I would say this is a pose for when the character is not grounded, but has neither upwards nor downwards speed… with some leeway for blending.

• Jump fall

  • This is a looping animation meant for when the character is, well… falling

  • We have a similar animation from before, but that is more for when the character has been falling for some time.

  • It needs to be looping as depending on where you are moving when jumping airtime will differ.

  • As soon as the character hits ground it will transition into a landing animation.

Standing jump segmenting Next was to make a stationary jump, so it doesn’t look weird when jumping while not in motion. Up until now we have had one jumping animation, which means it is animated for one speed and doesn’t take into account that you might be moving slower or not at all. The first step to fix this is to make a stationary jump, and if lucky it will blend nicely into a moving jump; if not I will have to make a slow moving jump for blending. Rig arm/shoulder calculations While working on the stationary jump I came across a long hated problem with the shoulder rotation, that I almost forgot existed. That is mostly because there are some issues that are just intrinsic to 3D calculations, there are probably more but the one I know of is rotation; the usual solution to rotation limits is to just avoid the angles it happens in as there should be a lot of possible motion without getting to that point; and that is what I have done up until now. But as one of those limits happens to be in an especially annoying area, I had to take a look at the rig anew. You see this problem in action in the image below to the left. It is a problem that occurs because I am using IK solutions when animating, as it automatically calculates rotations for the upper arm and consequently the corrective bone for deformations. The problem is that in some cases like this one, when a bone rotates above 180° or below -180° it snaps to the opposite to keep it between those angles even though it is entirely possible to continue the rotation; at least if you are using euler angles instead of quaternions. Though usually quaternions are better at rotating, just not in this case.

There were also some blend shape calculations that I had to fix as you see above to the right. So I had to fix some of the math that controls the blend shape, but also look into the bones that are the sources for the numbers the calculations use. While working on fixing the corrective blend shape rotations I also realized how horrible it got when the corrective bone for the shoulder-upper arm was too different from the upper arm main bone. You can see it in action on the image above to the left when the arm makes an hourglass shape. I tried to fix it with only blend shapes, but soon realized I would need to add another bone to the rotation correction, to smooth out the deformation and keep it from collapsing in on itself. But as you see below it needs some polishing.

An extreme shoulder-upper arm rotation. Sound planning Outside of the amazing title pun, I have been looking at potential background sounds that can be around the map. Trying to think of what would fit for the different areas and nature. Though what sounds we will be able to get is an issue for later, it gives us an idea of what we want and where. For the most part it was researching Norwegians bird calls and in what areas they prefer, then assigning them to the map areas that make the most sense. Later I will probably go in further detail and section off areas so that you don’t hear birds that don’t like urban areas in the middle of town or something like that.

Character improvements, Audio, and UI

By Ouroboros - Programmer

I started the month by making some improvements to the code that controls the animations for the character. The animation code has been the same for a long time, and I realized that it isn’t quite right for how the current character controller works. This mostly comes down to how rotations are calculated, but there were also some issues with the jumping. After that, I finally got around to doing some proper profiling and everything looks pretty good so far. The game is currently able to run at 250 fps, with only a few spikes in the performance that I will try to smooth out. The next task on my list was to enable the audio system. I initially thought it would be a quick job, but this turned out to not be the case. It dawned on me that audio can significantly impact the performance if it isn’t handled correctly, especially short frequent sounds like footsteps that are continuously created and destroyed. This led to me doing some research and testing a few different approaches to find out which one gave the best performance. Once I had settled on an approach, it didn’t take long to get the audio up and running again. I will most likely have to make some additions to the code when we get more sounds in the game, but that is to be expected. I have spent the last week on the UI. Maja made some changes to the design a while back that we didn’t have time to get into the breeding update. I’m taking this chance to implement the new design while doing some optimizations. I want to clean up the styling and add some sounds as well. Lastly, I plan on taking some time to become familiar with the new features and improvements that have been added to the UI Toolkit as there seems to be some nice additions.

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Please be aware that the content featured in these devlogs represents an ongoing work in progress and may be subject to further changes. We are committed to continuously developing and refining our game. To stay informed about the latest updates and connect with the rest of the Astride community, we invite you to join our dedicated Discord server community here! For additional information about Astride, please visit our official website.

Lore & Art

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

Lore for Eldheim

I’ve been continuing the story of Eldheim and some of its locations together with Marius. Of course, with all this lore we have done a lot of research so that our fiction has grasps and traits of the story of Norway. But of course, not one to one. I’ve been talking with people who have studied history and taught history, and that gave some great tips and pointers for what we needed. We make sure that the story fits the map and the location too. 

Parts of the lore are the NPCs, and most of them have their stories already written, but it’s never too late to revisit these stories, do adjustments or expand on some parts. Personalities have also been more defined for the NPC’s.

The joy of art

I’ve here and there continued on the “painting” for the stable that I shared at the WIP of the last month. It’s such a joy to draw this and it’s coming along fine! I am at the stage of putting details and definition of the horse. I am having a blast when drawing this. Hopefully it will turn out well. Below is a zoomed in WIP.

Stable Update

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

Adjusting proportions 

The stable has been through a few adjustments lately. We want a massive sturdy stable, but it was a little too much, so everything went through some scaling and other adjustments. Even though everything has been scaled down, the stalls are still larger than what you usually see here in Norway and many other parts of the world. There is still some work to do on the windows and doors, regarding scaling. 

The horse in this picture is 1.70m - so a quite large horse. The paddocks currently look small, so we are figuring out what to do with them. The main goal isn’t that the horses will be in the small paddocks and their stalls. We have planned larger pastures where the horses can roam. 

Hallway

The hallway have gotten a smaller upgrade, with benches and a better ceiling. The stone wall behind them will get a proper texture when all the modelling is done.

And there is small differences as well in the main hall (entrance).

The first floor of the main hall has been made smaller to make the outside look like a "Stabbur".

In order to make that work, some walls had to move some walls, where it’s the most visible is the little opening where you can look into the stalls, from the main hall. So right now, it looks like this.

Exterior of the stable

So there have been some huge changes to the outside of the stable as well. Some of you might recognize the details from another model, a few years back, called the horse market. We decided to reuse some parts of it to create a more epic Nordic look to the stable. We have also decided that the stable won't be red after all, but the old barn at the property will stay red.

On the back side of the stable, there will be a little bridge where you can enter the hayloft

The stable is looking more and more like a Norwegian fairytale stable. We hope you will like it as much as we do. And we can’t wait until it’s done and placed on the property.

The Friesian

By Mathilde - Community Manager, 3D-artist

This month, I've been continuing my work on the Friesian horse model. The high poly sculpting Was mainly to get in the shapes of the muscles, bigger details, and some smaller details such as the eye and mouth area.

Once the sculpt was completed, I lowered the resolution and uploaded it to Blender to make sure it would still fit the low poly mesh that we use for all of the breeds. Since I had already changed the shape of the low poly mesh to fit the Friesian before I started the sculpt, I mainly just had to reshape the low poly mesh a tiny bit to account for some of the changes I had done while sculpting on the high poly mesh. This was to make sure the low poly and the high poly meshes would match as closely as possible in order to get a good bake. This is where we mirror the details on the high poly mesh onto the low poly mesh, making the low poly mesh appear to have the same (or close) amount of details as the high poly mesh. Below, you can see the low poly mesh with the high poly mesh successfully rendered on top of it. I also added more details to account for some that got lost when baking, but added parts such as veins and skin textures as well.

Finally, I could import the exported texture maps into Blender and have a look at what the result of the Friesian horse will be. I also started a small test of feathers on the fetlock/leg. This is still in trial and needs more testing, but it is definitely going somewhere!

Map, Planning, and Zoning

By Marius - Animator

After last month's computer problems I have slowly but surely continued to set up my pc again after formatting it, as my backups from the formatting still bog down my other drives somewhat. But in the meanwhile I have been working on other stuff that isn’t as heavy for the computer, I have for once worked in 2D! Which has been a really fun change of pace for me. When not working on other things, I have been working on a more definite and planned map for how Eldheim could be laid out and worked on. And while it hasn’t been fully set in stone it has helped a lot in brainstorming world ideas.

The geography

For the geography we have already researched and talked about real places to take inspiration from, as that would help a lot in making the topography look natural. We had all agreed earlier of a place that looked great and could be a source of inspiration, so I found it on the map and screenshot the topology of the area. Afterwards I removed any signage and roads from the map by hand so that we could be more free to design the layout; as while we want to draw inspiration from the area's nature, we don’t want to make the place one to one.

In the phase after that I looked at the topology to try and chart out what would be the most natural playable areas. While it got updated the more I worked on it, the main idea was that I want there to be natural borders to the map and avoid invisible walls if possible. While invisible walls might be needed depending on how things go, I do want to avoid them unless necessarily. Because of this Eldheim will most likely be steeper than the area we used as reference, both to give a natural world limit, but also to section off areas.

Above is the first iteration of possible playable areas.

Areas

To not overwhelm ourselves with designing the whole potential world at the same time I started sectioning off pieces of potential playable areas where it looked to be most natural. Mostly to have areas we will develop one at a time so that we can focus on the areas that are most important, but also in the worst case scenario that it actually is too much world to develop, that we have not used time to do detailed work on areas that get scrapped. Lastly the areas work as a good first pass on what goes where.

As an example we would most likely start with the home stables and then Eldheim. Then afterwards maybe start with Zone 2 when we are satisfied with Home and Eldheim, then maybe Zone 4 and so on.

Above: sneak peak on zoning

I will probably make a Patreon post of the full process when I am finished so as to not make the devlog too long and to have more details to write about in depth. But I will spoil that I have worked with for example nature and road placements.

Testing & improving

By Ouroboros - Programmer

I have continued working on the character controller and the camera, with several builds being made for testing. We first tested a build ourselves to iron out some bugs and make sure everything worked. After releasing an updated build in test on itch, we followed up by hosting test events where Marius and I tested the build along with our testers. We had a great time chatting with everyone, and we were able to find both bugs and things to improve. I spent the time between the test events on fixing what I could and making new builds. The main takeaway from the testing is that the camera still needs some work. On the bright side, the memory usage was very stable, and the new multiplayer code worked great.

With the testing done for this time, I have worked on implementing the last few components of the character controller and improving the camera. I have also spent time doing research and learning what I need for the next step of the optimizations. I’m going to start enabling more and more systems. It will be important to keep a close eye on the performance as this is done, making sure there aren’t any unexpected bottlenecks. After the character controller and camera, the main focus will be audio, UI, and inverse kinematics. We need the UI fully up and running before we can enable systems like the inventory and interactions. This is also as good a time as any to look over and re-enable the code for the audio. The inverse kinematics are more to further build on the character controller, as well as being a test for having more IK for the horses.

Overall, the testing went pretty well, and it feels like we are going in the right direction by taking the time to optimize and polish what we have. We are constantly exploring different options to make Astride the best it can be and, while it unfortunately is taking a while, we believe the result will be worth it.

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Please be aware that the content featured in these devlogs represents an ongoing work in progress and may be subject to further changes. We are committed to continuously developing and refining our game. To stay informed about the latest updates and connect with the rest of the Astride community, we invite you to join our dedicated Discord server community here! For additional information about Astride, please visit our official website.

A new hotfix for Astride is now available. Here are the changes/fixes that have been made. You may have to restart your Steam client if the hotfix is not immediately available.

Fixes & adjustments

• Fixed a bug that left some players stuck on a black screen at startup. This fix is only for a specific issue related to missing save data and there might be other bugs resulting in getting stuck on the black screen. Please file a bug report if this happens.

Hair, paintings & lore

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

Mane and tail: revisit There has been a while since I last did anything with the horse’s hair cards. But now I got the chance to take a look at them again. I had to do some adjustments to the short mane, long mane and redid the forelock for many horses. Since last time, I’ve gotten a better grasp of blender. The most fun part this time was to fix the forelocks. Since the ones we have are mostly suited for the warmblood, breeds with thicker manes often looked a bit strange. I made sure to look at forelock images of each breed, even though I believe I have a good grasp of how each breed’s forelock tends to look. This resulted in me redoing the Alter Real/Lusitano forelock entirely, as well as the more draft horses like Jutland and Percheron. Mostly all breeds at adjustments. Examples for edited short forelock: Jutland, Alter Real/Lusitano, Nordland and Fjord

Examples for edited medium/long forelock: Percheron, Icelandic and Alter Real/Lusitano

All the manes, forelocks and tails are sent to Mathilde, so then she will be able to do some more adjustments where needed with both textures and colors visible. WIP: Painting for the stable With the exciting stable design coming up we have some free space that’s ideal to put an “illustration/painting”. So I have looked at classical painting to draw some inspiration from. The “painting” will of course be horse themed, featuring a Fjord. I am aiming for the “national romantic vibe”, which was quite popular in Norway during the 1800s.

Now, this is still early progress, but the shapes are coming along fine. The background is slightly inspired by a part of Mjøsa as well. It's been a while since I’ve done an art piece like this. It’s so fun, especially after all the writing I’ve done and am still doing. Lore After writing so much game design last year, it’s just naturally that I write some lore too, even though we have had this planned for a long time. However, we still need some more definition and adjustment to this aspect. This means the property’s story and Eldheim.

Stable development

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

The stable is coming along bit by bit, and these are the newest updates. Some textures are broken or have small errors, but they will be fixed before we launch the new stable. For now, the textures are mostly to help see the vision.

Since last time, the floor has been done. The old stone floor with a fan-shaped pattern gave the perfect old stable look that we were aiming for. However, in the stalls, they have upgraded over time, with a more stable material: concrete. With some wood shavings on top (There will be more wood shavings later). At some places in the stable you can also find a beautiful carved pattern.

The doors out to the paddock have also got textures. And we can’t wait to see cute horses peaking through the open windows.

The ceiling has gotten some more support and structure to it. For some reason, the structure stole the texture from another place, so it can borrow that until it has its own texture.

Here is a before-and-after picture. We thought it helped reflect the light better, so it wasn’t a boring void of a ceiling.

Speaking of voids…The main entrance has been through a lot of changes recently!

I struggled a lot with making sense of this main entrance… It gave a sneaky, dark backdoor vibe, where you could expect to be jumped by a ghost rather than being the actual main entrance. So the walls were knocked down and I tried to make it more cozy. But it still didn’t scream “main entrance”. So I tried again… But we all felt that it was unnatural to have a space to sit here. And other equipment already has an assigned space.

But this sitting space is still kind of cute. But just not for the entrance. So it got moved upstairs. The plan is to have a grand painting behind the bench, so when you look up from the first floor, you won't see the bench, but a large painting. Then… What now, what screams a good first impression for the stable? It was time to think outside the box, or outside the stall (that joke works a lot better in Norwegian). What makes sense to the player, and not necessarily for a stable? A showroom of your achievements and highlights! Like a little progress museum!

Not my proudest artwork… But the vision was more important than the execution.  By doing this, I came across a few problems. So the decision ended up with Expand the space, rather than force it. I had to fix the wall texture anyway. So now you will be met with a grand hall of fame!

Where two of your beloved horses will greet you from each side of the entrance. For reference, the horses will get large stalls with paddocks.

Lastly! Since this is an old stable, we need some old functions, and at the same time, we changed something in the game design document. There will be a hole in the ceiling and the hay will be pushed down from this room. From here, you fill a wagon with hay and then give it to the horses. 

There will be some changes here as well. - The window will be moved up, and when it is filled with hay, it will look something like this.

Starting the Friesian

By Mathilde - Community Manager, 3D-artist

You may have noticed that I have sort of disappeared from the devlogs as of late. I've been busy working another part-time job, but this month and February I have more time to spend on Astride before I start working another job in March. While my wish is to be able to work full-time on Astride, I am limited by my personal budget, and the best solution for me at this time is to focus mostly on a different full-time job while doing what I can on Astride in my spare time. This way, the other developers have more finances on their end while I can still be a part of the game and contribute, just at a slower pace. Thankfully, the other amazing developers of Astride are still going strong even with me stepping aside to stand on the sidelines from time to time. I still have so much faith in this project and do not intent to leave anyone or anything behind. Moving on from that to what I've been working on lately - the Friesian horse is finally in the works! This breed was chosen by you, the community, and I was honestly so happy that this breed was chosen. I haven't yet worked out a good way to deal with feathers on the legs yet, so please use your imagination for them in the meantime! As for now, I've only done the basics of fitting the base model into a more Friesian-like body type that is ready to get the high-poly sculpt. This is where more/different details are added to make the Friesian stand out even more from the other breeds. I also have some tack fitting to do, but that will have to wait until I am done with the high-poly sculpture and have somewhat finalized the model. Of course, feedback is more than welcome, I am no Friesian horse expert!

Tech troubles

By Marius - Animator

For my part I have been bogged down by computer problems that froze my computer anytime I tried to work in 3D. One day it worked, the next it didn’t. While trying to find out what was wrong, I found that the upgrade from windows 10 to 11 had majorly broken key parts of all Microsoft applications, forcing me to do a reset.  After that it became clear that a reset wasn’t enough to fix things and I had to do a complete formatting of the C drive. The problem still persists, but at least the computer lives long enough to let me diagnose the problem.

Cleaning up code

By Ouroboros - Programmer

I started the new year by picking up where I left off before Christmas: spawning the player character into the game world. Following this, I started enabling a few of the core systems such as the character controller, the camera, some UI, and animations. It might sound pretty straight forward when written like that, but I spent time on each system to clean up, optimize and simplify the code. The camera in particular has taken a lot of work to get right for both first-person and third-person. I was able to simplify the code a significant amount, while also fixing some of the existing issues (no more ending up inside the character’s head). I have finally reached the point where I’m ready to start making some builds for testing. The main focus will be to test the new multiplayer system, the character controller, and the camera. I want all of these to be as good as possible before moving on. Now that I can make functional builds, I can also start doing some profiling. I have made a temporary test scene that I will tweak to be able to profile different parts such as vegetation rendering, lighting, and physics. It will be interesting to see how much impact the different systems have on the game performance, and how big a difference the optimizations will make.

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Please be aware that the content featured in these devlogs represents an ongoing work in progress and may be subject to further changes. We are committed to continuously developing and refining our game. To stay informed about the latest updates and connect with the rest of the Astride community, we invite you to join our dedicated Discord server community here! For additional information about Astride, please visit our official website.

Hello, everyone and Happy New Year!

Here are some words about Astride’s progress in 2025 and what our focus will be in 2026.

One year ago, we shared our development goals for 2025. These included horse breeds, foals and breeding, tutorials, horse AI, more tack, client quests, environments updates, and improvements to the horse controller and player character. Now that we have entered a new year, we would like to look back on what we achieved in 2025, before sharing our plans going forward. While all the updates included bug fixes and general improvements, we will focus on the new additions each update introduced.

We started the year strong by releasing an update with horse breeds, updated UI, improved horse creator, a stable, lead change, stirrups, and more color variations for saddle pads. This was a big update where we really nailed down the horse genetics, both for breeds and coat color.

The second update of the year came in May. We had earlier upgraded to Unity 6, which resulted in some shader issues that had caused some delays. While we don’t have any absolute deadlines, we try to set goals for when we want an update to be ready. In addition to the shader issues, this update also ended up needing a lot of testing. The update included a new horse controller with halt and rein-back, option to swap between first-person and third-person, refusals, more leg markings, new show jumping and dressage courses, Arabian as a new breed, Rabicano as a new gene, new gait UI, and improvements to lead change and animation transitions.

The third and last update of 2025 was the breeding update in October. This was another big update that added breeding, stable management, foals, Percheron as a new breed, tutorials, cross country courses, day and night system, time progression, new interaction system, save slots, buying and selling of horses, and being able to own multiple horses.

Looking back at the goals we had set, we were able to complete the following:

• Foal: base mesh and textures, hair, blendshapes and animations

• Breeds: Arabian, Percheron

• Tutorials: tutorials to introduce the players to the game’s controls and gameplay

• Controller upgrade: improve gait transitions, leading, multiple horses

• Player character: first-person and third-person perspective off and on horse, object interactions

We also added a few more color variations for tack, and work on the environment has been ongoing. In addition to this, we added several features that weren’t specified in the development goals, such as cross country and stable management.

We were not able to release Alter Real and Dole, and we did not complete client quests, horse AI, bitless bridle, halter, and clothing options for the character. So what happened? Is horse AI cursed? Will Astride ever get a proper gameplay loop? The truth is that we were going to implement client quests and a wardrobe system before the end of 2025 and then start on horse AI first thing in 2026, but we had to put those plans on ice due to some issues with Unity.

A few weeks before the release of the October update, Unity notified its users that they had discovered a security vulnerability (Ouroboros wrote about this in the October devlog). This was pretty major and affected all the editor versions. Unity gave clear recommendations that everyone should update to the newest editor version where the vulnerability had been fixed. We of course did this, but soon started seeing problems. When initializing the game world, it would suddenly stop spawning objects and loading data. This happened for several of our testers, and debugging gave few answers as to the cause. It appeared to be connected to the save files, but there weren’t actually any issues with the save files and they worked fine on earlier versions of Unity.

After extensive debugging, Ouroboros noticed that everything initialized fine on the server side, but not on the client side. Since Astride supports multiplayer, all the code is set up for client and server. This is also used during single-player, but both the client and server is run locally and doesn’t connect to the internet. Astride uses a server authoritative model, so the client receives much of its data from the server. For some reason, this was not working and the client didn’t receive the data it needed.

Since Unity has several supported major versions of the editor, we tried to upgrade from 6.0 to a newer major version 6.2. The result was that the game wouldn’t run at all due to several errors. The conclusion is that the code we have for creating and initializing the client and server is outdated and won’t work properly on newer versions of Unity. This makes sense considering that Unity has made changes to its multiplayer packages this past year, and this is even more true for DOTS multiplayer (Netcode for entities).

The only way we were able to release the breeding update was by creating a build in an old version of unity and using a patcher (made by Unity) on the build to patch the security vulnerability. This works, but it isn’t ideal as we do want to upgrade Unity to get access to new features and improvements.

The plans for 2026

This brings us to our plans for the immediate future. We have decided to take time doing a more manual update so that we can move to Unity 6.3. Work on this started in October 2025, and we expect to keep working on it at least until summer 2026. Updating to Unity 6.3 is only one part of it, as we intend to take this opportunity to do some heavy optimization, improvements, and polishing. At the moment, we have a project containing all of Astride’s code and assets running in Unity 6.3.0f1 with a new and improved multiplayer system. Almost all the other features and systems are disabled in this project, and the plan is to enable them one at a time so that we can give each the attention it needs. During this time, we will release bite-sized builds to our testers so that we can properly test every part.

This decision is made to keep our players safe from major security holes and to up the game further. This will benefit both Astride and you guys in the future, even though it may take longer to finish the production.  

That’s all we can share for now. This has been a difficult decision to make since it means it will be a while before we can give you any new features. We will continue to post devlogs every month, and we will write an update in regards to our progress and future plans once summer arrives.

Read, Update, and Rewrite

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

For the last months of the year I’ve been focusing on going through the entire game design document for Astride. The GDD is a living document that is constantly changing and being added to throughout the development. 

This is an important task where I’ve gone into the depth of different systems, evaluating whether they needed more detail, rewriting due to new/change of ideas, clarification or if they are already in a good place. And I’ve restructured the entire document on where all systems and subjects are written and what comes after the other. Some time has also gone to writing about some parts that have not been completely designed yet due to it not being worked on yet.

In some parts the content itself didn’t need to change, just the structure. Reshaping how information is presented makes it easier to read and understand for everyone involved in the project. 

Some of the parts I’ve read through, gone more into depth with and updated/rewritten, if needed:

• Interaction system

• Progression

• Competition

• Quest system

• Horse AI

• Horse breeds

• Breeding

• Wardrobe system

• NPCs

• NPC AI and schedule

I have written over 80 pages. Some of the parts require a lot of thorough research as well, so this is not just me writing on the top of my head. And honestly, I have to say I have never enjoyed writing this much before (that isn’t story writing). It hasn't felt like a burden at all to me. Even though this is a huge task. It has truly been fun and refreshing. 

The next step will be for the rest of the team to read through the updated document that they haven’t seen yet and give some thoughts and feedback. This whole process gives an easier workflow when revisiting plans and ideas. There are first some more writing that are needed, but most of it is done.

I have been working on other tasks as well, but since the majority of my time has gone into text writing and updating the GDD, I don’t have any fun images to share right now. So I’ll share my favorite screenshot from the breeding and foal update! 

I wish you all a wonderful winter season and I wish you a happy new year. I cannot wait for the sun to “turn” and the daylight to become longer again.

Stable Work

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

Over the last couple of months, I have been working on this stable, which will be the crown of the property. The previous stables that have been made are not going to waste; they will be relocated to other places on the map.

The textures are coming along one by one. This is by far the most complex 3D-model I have ever made. Not only by the mesh but also the textures. Here, it looks more gloomy than what the end result will be in the game engine; these are just screenshots from Blender. However, there is still a lot of work to do. Like the floor, sealing and walls aren’t done yet.

We wanted to give you a stable that makes you feel like you are entering a stable that generations have enjoyed, with a lot of history within its walls. Also, we wanted to give you a bit of our Nordic mystery and magic, with a touch of coziness.

The stable will have 20 large stalls.

Some of the stalls will have an individual door to a paddock (the doors do not have textures yet).

A place to tack up your horses. Missing textures here as well, but you get the idea!

In here you will find the saddles, bridles, and everything you need for riding.

In here you will find the horses feed and snacks. Across on the other side is a room where you will find the hay and other necessities.

Animations

By Marius - Animator

Nursing

Now that we have foals, we will need some more animations than moving and idling. And mostly for it to interact with its mother; I teased it in the last Patreon post, but I have worked on some nursing animations. Weirdly enough this will be the first time I make animations for interacting between two different rigs… outside of horseback riding. It will also be good practice for when I eventually need to make more interaction animations.

Nursing animation turns out to be deceptively hard to make, the foal needs to bend its neck quite a lot and lean down at the same time. There was a lot of discussion on what size the foal should be, but in the end we decided that it should be consistent, relative to the size of the mother. This also made it easier to animate as I don’t need to account for a slew of possible height differences. Otherwise it was the age old quest for good references, and in this case the biggest problem was angle of footage and the foal. For I needed to be able to see how the legs move as they can’t be completely stationary (realistically it can, but it looks stiff animated); but I also needed to be conscious of the foals angle relative to the mother, because this is an interacting animation and needs to have positions in mind. There will probably be more angles for the foal to nurse from, but this was one of the angles I knew we will have a position reference point for in the future.

The dam is just referenced in and cannot be edited, so there is a frame with different head-scaling

New jog animation

For the longest time I have had a major gripe with an animation of mine. In the start it was comical in a sense, but the more time has gone the more it has gone over to me actually cringing on how bad it is. And as you probably realized from the title, it is the jogging animations. To be fair, it is one of, if not the first animation for the character rig I made. And finally I have had time to start updating it.

Forwards and sideways jog

First and foremost we have the forwards jog, which is the one you will see most of the time as you for the most part move that way. It is also the jogging direction it is easiest to find references from. And while I will need to make other directions too, they will be based on this one. While I am not sure I am 100% happy with it, it is leagues above the old one.

I am currently working on the sideways jog or strafe movement, which is maybe the most frustrating jogging movement to animate; since it is an unnatural movement to do over a length of time at speed. It is absolutely possible of course, but finding references is next to impossible and at least last time I made my own reference… it wasn't good, haha.

Standstill jog

In cases where we might want to be jogging slower, we will need a non moving jogging animation to blend between. For the most part this animation will not be visible, but it should keep the movement beats in proportion to the frame count. In this case I kept the frame count the same to make the steps shorter in length as it blends between the animations instead of step speed.

While it feels a little awkward between the arms and legs, it should function as a blending animation. Mostly because it will not actually play when standing still, but will help calculate movements in slower movements. I still have to test it to be sure it works as intended, though.

Rig and skinning fixes

While working on the jogging animations I noticed that some of the blend shapes for the hands and fingers had become broken over time, or I missed it at the time. Not the most noticeable thing from a distance, but close up there was some jarring movement due to the corrective blend shapes.

While it doesn’t show the biggest fixes, it shows well enough the improvement. I also had to fix some calculations for how the blend shapes are controlled.

Multiplayer & Inheritance

By Ouroboros - Programmer

After October, I began reading up on profiling and optimizations. I took a deep dive into how Unity’s different profiling tools work and how to read the data they provide. I learned a lot, and I have a pretty good idea on where to focus my effort when it comes to optimizing Astride. Although I always try my best to write performant code, I actually have very little experience with profiling and optimizing. The job naturally fell to me after GreenHorse left the team, but it has been difficult to find the time to learn everything. The recent issues with the Unity editor and having to upgrade to the newest version is proving to be the perfect chance to go through all the different parts of the game and profile them.

Before getting to that part, however, I had to update the multiplayer code. After moving to the newest version of Unity, there was some code that no longer worked. Even though I refer to it as multiplayer code, it is actually used for singleplayer as well. Both game modes use the same setup with client and server worlds, with the difference being that singleplayer keeps everything local instead of connecting to the internet. Before I can start with profiling and optimizing, the code responsible for setting this up needs to be updated so that the game actually runs.

This brings us to the fact that I am not a multiplayer programmer. My job at Raidho Games originally consisted of gameplay- and UI programming. I did have to write code that worked for multiplayer, and through that I learned how it works in general. Writing code to set up the multiplayer is something different again, though. I have spent time reading documentation, forum threads, and gone through several code examples. I also dug through our own code to properly understand the current implementation. There have been some improvements to the multiplayer for Unity DOTS, which made it possible to simplify the code quite a bit.

In the middle of all of this, a bug related to inheritance of face markings was discovered. It took some time before I was able to find the cause, but I was eventually able to fix it. After talking with our testers, I also decided to go ahead and make some improvements to how markings are inherited. The new logic for it is less random and should give more consistent results. There are still improvements that can be made, but those aren’t as fast to do so I will have to come back to it at a later time.

Suffice to say that I have been pretty busy lately. There’s a lot to do and a lot to learn. I have spent the last few days on updating and simplifying the code for loading and unloading scenes, which is also part of the game setup. The only thing that remains before we have Astride up and running in the newest Unity editor, is to connect the updated code to the system that spawns the player character and horses.

Since I haven’t really had any pictures to share for this or the previous devlog, I’m going to end with a picture of my cats (aka my coworkers).

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Please be aware that the content featured in these devlogs represents an ongoing work in progress and may be subject to further changes. We are committed to continuously developing and refining our game. To stay informed about the latest updates and connect with the rest of the Astride community, we invite you to join our dedicated Discord server community here! For additional information about Astride, please visit our official website.

A new hotfix for Astride is now available. Here are the changes/fixes that have been made. You may have to restart your Steam client if the hotfix is not immediately available.

Fixes & adjustments

• Fixed a bug where foals didn't inherit full face markings

• Improved the logic behind inheritance of face- and leg markings to make it less random

The horses are getting a hair cut and I’m the hairstylist

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

Spooky season is here and I’ve been continuing my work on the horse’s mane and tail. Note that I’m still learning Blender and how to work with hair cards, but I felt I got a better grasp around it this month. Last devlog I focused mainly on the long mane and the roots. This time I worked on the short mane, which proved to be a bit more challenging to work with than the long mane. I also worked on the forelocks, so that they were fitted to each horse and adjusted. 

A few hours was spent on the tail, testing out ways to make it more interesting and dynamic. Some adjustments were maybe too much. However, I keep having to do adjustments, because after testing it we found some issues causing some hair cards to be invisible. And I learned quickly that the texture doesn’t follow the hair card exactly, so even though it looks nice in Blender doesn't mean it looks good in Unity. Yeah, this is a huge task, and I think I need to add more cards to make it look fuller. Still, I enjoy working with this more than I anticipated. I’m looking forward to improving my skills even more in this area. 

One of my favorite parts has been to edit the shortest forelock in the game to fit other breeds like the Fjord and Icelandic. Because it just didn't suit them at all, they need extra volume! I’m excited to continue this work, though it needs to be tested a lot before completing it fully.  

Testing and preparing for the Breeding update

Breeding will be an important part of Astride and to have it in the update is fantastic. We had to take a lot of screenshots of record content for the trailer and Social media. I had just a good time breeding horses and buying horses in the game to create cute foals for the video. You can get so many different results from the same horses. 

For update trailers we need to decide on what are the most important features to showcase. This of course being breeding and the foals, as well as day and night cycle and of course the mighty Percheron. The part that was the most time consuming was to lead the foals to different spots. They aren’t the fastest at the moment. But at least they are movable. Also recording content throughout the day and night cycle was lovely. So many different looks for everything.

Designing and further planning

There is no month without some paperwork here and there. Now, I’m preparing some documents for shaders goals for the game. To give ourselves a clear view of what we want. I am especially excited for a hair-shader in the future. I have much more to design and plan, so I’ll head into the new month with that in mind.

A Touch of Tradition: Rosemaling in the Stable Design

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

Last month, we began working on the traditional stable, which also led us into the world of traditional Nordic art and patterns. This month has been filled with planning, meetings, and — as autumn tends to bring - a fair bit of seasonal sickness. So while development on my side hasn’t been the biggest leap forward, some nice progress has still been made!

Here is just a sketch that I made, inspired by different traditional Nordic buildings, reimagined as a stable.

A big focus has been on UV mapping, the prep work that needs to be done before texturing. Alongside that, I’ve been creating a whole set of new pattern stamps inspired by Rosemaling: a traditional Norwegian decorative art that directly translates to “rose painting.”

By designing these in Photoshop with transparent backgrounds, we can easily apply them to different assets in the stable, from furniture and walls to smaller details, like a brush or a bucket. giving everything that warm, handcrafted look. There are now around 35 unique stamps ready to use!

Painting these intricate patterns directly onto 3D models would’ve taken much longer, so this method lets us stay flexible while keeping the handcrafted feel we want.

This furniture was created last month, but they got finalized after we created the patterns. We are looking forward to putting together the Nordic Cosy stable.

Our vision for the stable is something unique and full of history, not a modern, freshly built one, but an old, character-rich place that has seen generations of horses, which we do hope you will create too.

Foal Animations

By Marius - Animator

While looking though the few animations that are made for the foal, I realized that I would need a movement animation to be an alternative for the bucking animation. The initial bucking animation was made at the approximate speed my reference moved so it is quite a bit faster than the walk animation; which at that point was the only other movement animation made. I decided to make a normal movement alternative for bucking, as we will need it so that when we implement bucking it doesn’t just start sprinting along from a walking speed. It should ideally keep the movement speed it has or maybe have a slight shift in speed, but not a complete change as it would with only walking and bucking animation as it is now.

After looking at the movement speed the initial bucking animation was made in, I found that it is around the same speed as canter would be for the foal. I took some time looking at different clips of foals moving and running around to see if I found one that showed a stable enough canter to loop, filmed from a good angle. While I didn’t want to change too much, other than making sure the legs didn’t clip through each other, I did try to incorporate some of the differing movement the foal had.

Starting the process of adjusting the horse canter to the foal seemed easy at first, but I quickly remembered why adjusting or adding to the canter animation usually takes so much time; I needed to animate the turning animations for left and right individually as they do not mirror in movement.

Foals & Major Bugs

By Ouroboros - Programmer

I was able to finish implementing the foal during the first week of October. I got the last few textures set up, which included foal camouflage, and made it possible to lead the foals. The rest of the month was spent on bug fixing and polishing. The build with the foal model was released in test during the second week of October, and it was in this build that we started to see some concerning issues.

For the build with the foal, we had also updated the Unity editor. At the start of October, Unity released a message stating that a security vulnerability had been discovered in all versions of the Unity editor that had been released since version 2017.1. It was advised that everyone update to the newest Unity editors, and so that is what we did. After this, there were instances where save files made in earlier builds of Astride no longer worked and left the player stuck under the world. We are not quite sure what exactly caused the issues, but the assumption is that there are some changes in newer versions of the Unity editor that don't interact well with our code for setting up the client and server worlds. Everything would load properly on the server world, but it would stop on the client.

We were initially hoping the issue only happened for save files from older builds, but it was eventually confirmed that it could happen with save files for new builds as well. We had no idea about how common the issue would be, how many would be affected, or what triggered it. At that point, we had to seriously consider if we should delay the update. While we were looking into the different options we had, Marius got the idea that we could stick with the old Unity editor and instead use a patcher tool Unity had released to patch the security vulnerability in builds. We gave it a try and, luckily, it worked. The security vulnerability was patched and there were no more issues with the save files or the client and server worlds. Thanks to that, we were able to go ahead with the release of the breeding update.

Even though we managed to find a solution to get the update out, it is still recommended by Unity to use the newer editor version. This is also something we wish to do so that we can get access to the newest features and improvements. While the plan was initially to start work on implementing client quests, we have decided to instead focus on updating the client/server code in Astride so that we can upgrade our Unity version. I will also take this chance to look into optimizations so that the game will run smoother. I expect it will take some time, but it will be worth it at the end.

- Please be aware that the content featured in these devlogs represents an ongoing work in progress and may be subject to further changes. We are committed to continuously developing and refining our game. To stay informed about the latest updates and connect with the rest of the Astride community, we invite you to join our dedicated Discord server community here! For additional information about Astride, please visit our official website.

A new patch for Astride is now available. Here are the new features and changes/fixes that have been made. More patches and updates will come soon. You may have to restart your Steam client if the update is not immediately available.

WARNING: Existing save files will not work with this or any newer build. The current save files will not be deleted and it will still be possible to use them for previous builds of the game. For this build, new save files will have to be created.

Patch highlights

Added content & features

• A breeding board and a stable management board have been added to the stable

• A breeding feature using realistic genetics has been implemented in its first stages

• Foal models for the offspring that turns into the horse model after one in-game year

• Foal grows gradually over time

• The Percheron horse breed has been added

• Tutorials have been added

• Added cross country courses

• Stable assigning and horse placement feature was added to the main stable

• Day/night system with the sun/moon moving as time progresses

• Players can now lead horses

• Players can now open and close doors/gates

• Owning multiple horses is now possible

• Selling/deleting horses has been added

• Option to geld stallions has been added

• Added save slots

• A new interaction system is in place

• Renaming or changing horses’ names now possible

• It is now possible to buy horses

Fixes & adjustments

• The player can no longer sprint while crouching

• Fixed a bug that made it impossible to go from passage to trot

• The horse’s jumping animation height is based off the current jump

• Jumps in competition will no longer be allowed to be jumped from the wrong direction

• Jump refusal animation is now correctly animated

• Jump refusal animation is now played from gallop as well

• Jump refusal animation from trot is now not as extreme

• Fixed weird hip movement on the character while riding into a halt

• Adjusted jump animation to not overstretch as much

• Fixed horse coat name not being saved in horse definition for horse creator horse

• Fixed mane not getting the correct blendshape for Norwegian Warmblood

• Made changes to the code that spawns, initializes, and deletes horses

• Updated save and load system

• Fixed the horse head size between breeds

• Fixed the missing transition from riding idle to non-riding idle

• Fixed bugs in multiplayer

• All horses aged two years or older will automatically get the default saddle and bridle

Known issues

• When skipping to the next day, it will sometimes get stuck on a black screen

• The option to sell horses will sometimes stop working

• Day and night cycle only works for the host in multiplayer

• The breeding tutorial and the Stable boxes tutorial are missing images

• Cross country uses the show jumping tutorial

UI, Tutorials & Mane

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

New design profile

I’ve been adding shadows and other details to the updated UI for a while, and I’ve more or less finished that part. However, the UI did not work right away when testing it. The designs themselves were fine, but the programming and functionality part of it wasn’t successful. Mostly because I had set it up incorrectly. We decided that it would be better for Ourboros to set it up properly, using my designs. Unfortunately, this means you’ll have to wait a bit longer for the UI update.

I’m very happy with the designs and I’m excited to finally see it in the game, instead of the old black and boring UI.

Image over: Breeding UI panels design. I have prepared space and ideas for stats for when the stat system will be implemented in the future.

Preparing for tutorial

On the other hand, I’ve made some tutorial UI images for different parts of the game. This way, it won’t just be a list with controls in the menu anymore. I will continue to make more as we go. Here are some simple examples that will be put into another UI together with text that explains the tutorial.

The images above: Astride has a few ways to change gait and speed, so I had to show all the methods.

Hair upgrade

I want the mane and tail to feel more alive, since they’re very flat in our game right now. I’ve been learning a little bit of blender to try to improve the manes, and Marius has been a great teacher! Basically, what I’m doing is to change the shapes of each hair card to look messier, and fitting them to each horse model. I’m paying extra attention to the manes for the Fjord and Icelandic, so that they’ll have more volume from the root and up, compared to the Norwegian Warmblood. I still need to test them in Unity to see if they actually look good, and then make adjustments if needed. But I believe this will improve the horses visually.

The roots

My edits (I haven’t touched the forelock yet)

The mane of Icelandic in the current build on the itch.io build. See how small and flat it is?

Updating the entire Stable

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

After testing the current stable for a good while, the stable will get a complete do-over. It has been a task that has been worked on back and forth on for a good while. But we finally have landed so much more style-wise with everything. Especially the UI. The stable and UI are reflecting each other, with rich details and a Nordic coziness that we are looking forward to showing you all. Many of you are probably familiar with the Viking style; however, we want to show you another Nordic style that is very beloved here, it’s mainly from the time period 1700 to mid 1800th style and can still be found in old churches, houses, and a lot of cabins across Norway, and other Nordic countries. 

The stable itself will no longer have the U-shape, which we think is way too impractical and take up a lot of space. So there will be a rectangular shape, with four entrances, two in the middle, and two on each end. There will be tack rooms and feed rooms, which are easily accessible. 

But enough rambling, and more pictures!

This is the tack room and feed room from an early stage; there are a few differences as to the current state. But that’s for another time.

The stalls have also gotten an update!

This is just to get an idea for placement and how large the stable will be. Textures and fine tuning are the next step.

However, some texturing work has been started. And here are some of the textures.

Early stage of textures for the furniture across the stable.

This is a close-up of the finished work for the sink in the feed room and some detail work, this is a column/ archway inside the stable with the Nordic-inspired rose paint-pattern.

More Foals!

By Marius - Animator

After rigging and testing that the foal mesh deformed acceptably it was time to add movement animation. I chose to have the walk animation animated first as we don’t need any other movement animation this early in testing and implementing. While I could lean quite heavily on the walk animation from the horse, I had to tweak it to adhere to the foal's proportions. In addition to the proportion difference I also had to keep in mind that a foal walks more clumsily and awkwardly than a full grown horse, as well as not having the same posture a trained horse would have. So the foal’s neck and head is in a more relaxed pose while the front legs keep their bend for longer after hitting the ground. There were some more small changes here and there I had to change after looking at videos of foals walking.

I originally did not think the walking animation would take as long as it ended up doing, but I forgot how much the turning animations are a pain.

The first import

After finishing the walking animation it was time to test importing the foal into Unity. You usually end up finding problems you did not think of at this stage, and problems I found.

Most of the work when importing is just making sure your import settings are correct. By this point I knew what these were from working on the horse rig and got it done quite fast, especially since I deleted most of the animations set for export in the foal’s blender file that were remaining from the horse.

Making sure the animations that did come with the foal rig worked well, the next step was to start the setup of the foal’s prefab. The prefab is where you attach a lot of the scripts and functionality, but what I’ll focus on this time is the animator. To save time I copied the animator file the full grown horse uses as they will use a lot of the same parameters and setup. Even with that I deleted most of the animations that the foal should not be able to do yet, as I want to only see what the foal actually is able to use. Though when testing the bucking animation and how it transitions into the idle animation it did let me realize I never made a new idle for the foal. I did make it and reimported the foal to have it work properly, but the faulty result is hilarious and serves to show why I can’t use the horse animations on the foal:

While I can easily copy animations from the horse to the foal in blender, Unity sadly can’t retarget animations for different proportioned rigs. Well, it can in certain circumstances, but not on the horse. It is a functionality only available for humanoid rigs, which has strict setup rules that exclude the horse.

Testing the foal

After setting up the foal’s prefab I got to finally test the foal in-game for the first time, and while I did not get the mane and tail to work. The foal itself works, with animations and I got it to use the horse shader making it be able to use every coat the horse is able to. So here is the first test on the foal in-game:

Sadly, I forgot to scale it correctly so it is as tall as a grown up in this shot. And excuse the low resolution and quality, Steam only allows us to upload GIFs with up to 5MB file size.

Night/Day System & Tutorials

By Ouroboros - Programmer

I continued working on the day and night system for the first few days of September before releasing it to test. The current implementation starts the day at 06:00 and ends it at midnight. When midnight is reached, time stops progressing until the player chooses to continue to the next day. One day in-game lasts 45 real life minutes, with it being possible to skip to the next day at any point. We will likely make adjustments to the day length and progression to the next day as we continue development, but this is as good a starting point as any.

Something Astride has been lacking so far is tutorials. I have implemented a simple system for tutorials, and Maja has helped with making the actual tutorials. Two have been added to the test build so far, and more will be added over the coming weeks.

The last part of September has been all about getting the foal model into the game. I have made it so that all horses that are younger than one year use the foal model. Once they turn one year old, the foal model is swapped out for the adult horse model. The work on the foal has included making sure the correct textures are set, that the foal is scaled properly, that it grows as it becomes older, and that it stays with its mother for the first part of its life.

I will continue working on the foal and fix bugs as we head into October. Our goal is to have the release out around mid-October, and there are still things that need to be done for that to happen. Once I am done with the last parts for the foal, it will only be polishing and bug fixing left.

- Please be aware that the content featured in these devlogs represents an ongoing work in progress and may be subject to further changes. We are committed to continuously developing and refining our game. To stay informed about the latest updates and connect with the rest of the Astride community, we invite you to join our dedicated Discord server community here! For additional information about Astride, please visit our official website.

UI changes

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

UI with personality

I have been working on a few concepts of UI parts that are currently missing for future features. One of these is the competition UI. I wanted it to look a bit more fancy and royal in terms of design. So I started looking at old Norwegian royal colors combined with Norwegian rose painting. The result? We all loved it way too much. Our current design has always been clean and simple, but it’s truly lacking personality and uniqueness. I’ve felt that for a while. The UI could be in any game. So when I created that concept art everyone agreed that I should change the entire UI profile into the new one. It wouldn’t take too much time, but the changes are enough for Astride to get its true flavor.

I used some colors here and there from the old UI, like the white, however the profile got a whole new color palette. The brown background had been in the plans for a while, however pink and gold details is a new approach. I spent some time on the rose painting itself, testing out a few color-combinations before choosing the one with dusty rose, calm teal/green with gold details. I kept the white for the text. 

This is my first sketch and color sketch. You can see that I tried to keep some of the older elements at first, but then decided to remove them entirely. Which turned out more cohesive.

Final result!

I kept the rose painting in the corners, added a golden frame where some parts have a little swirl on it. I tested having no frame at all, but that looked a bit boring. What I like about this design is that it is a good mix of calm, royal and traditional Norwegian art. The bigger challenge in this process was to put it into Unity I builder, place everything, and make the drop-shadow match each part as much as possible; Though the shadow asset has its limitations. Either way, I am happy with the result. Now I need to spend some time adding shadows to the remaining UI, even though everything has already been updated with colors and visuals.

Note: Some parts may look pixelated in the screenshot since it’s quite zoomed out within the UI builder.

The Old Barn

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

There has been a lot of work on the environment lately. One of our greatest tasks is to make it look more Nordic. And with that decision made. We knew we had to make an old barn for the property. 

We don’t have any pictures of the models from the start. The goal was to make it look old and as if it had been smaller at some point. Here in Norway, it is not uncommon to see a mix of different building methods on these old barns. And we wanted to take this with us in Astride. Therefore, there are logs on one half of the barn, and planks for the other half.

This is how it looked before texturing.

And then!

It has been a lot of fun working with this old barn. And I’m looking forward to the next building. A huge update to the stable is on the horizon.

Foals!

By Marius - Animator

August has gone to prepare the foal to eventually be implemented. The model itself has been ready for a while, but rigging and skinning it has not been prioritized before now as we knew we needed the breeding mechanic to be in place first.

My first hurdle was “How do I rig and skin the foal model without it taking as long a time as the horse did?”. Luckily the answer was easy this time. We already have a horse rig with the correct named bones and setup, so I should in theory be able to change the rig to fit the foal model.

It took some time but I did get to transfer the skinning from the horse to the foal with some trouble, but it holds up after some tweaking.

And with using a copy of the horses rig we kept the animations from the horse which makes for easy testing!

As you might see, the legs clip through each other though. Which in this stage is fully acceptable. No changes have been made and the animation was not made for the foals' proportions, but the shoulders deform nicely and the tail and neck seem to be functioning correctly.

While I do have to tweak most animations to work with the foal, I decided that the first animation should be a new one. So I started animation bucking. I most likely have to animate a slew of variations to this animation so we can switch between them to break up the movement, But as a first baseline it was fun to make. And I got to study foal videos!

Game saves and breeding

By Ouroboros - Programmer

First month back to work after a much needed vacation. We wanted to get a build out in test as soon as possible, so my priority was to finish any work necessary for this to happen. When I had implemented breeding, I had also made it so that the horses would spawn in the stable boxes. New horses would be randomly assigned a box and given a default name. Having to run around the stable to find the box the horse spawned in was inconvenient, and ending up with multiple horses that all had the same default name wasn’t great either.

My solution to these problems was to implement a new UI that allows the player to manage the stable boxes and the horses in them. This UI makes it possible to rename horses and, as a temporary solution to a horse marketplace, buy and sell horses. The save system had to be upgraded to support the features of the new UI, so I took the chance to clean it up a bit and add some general improvements. After that, I spent time debugging and fixing any bugs we found when testing the build ourselves.

Once the build was finally out in test, it was time to start working on the next part of it. The upcoming breeding update for Astride will have several new features, so we have made the decision to take each feature out in test as soon as it is ready. The part that is currently out in test is the breeding feature. The next part that will be released to test is a day and night system that adds time progression to the game. The last part will be to get the foal model into the game, set up all the textures for it, and connect it to the time progression so that the foal can grow into an adult horse. I have spent the last couple of weeks fixing any bugs the testers have found with the breeding, as well as working on the day and night system.

It has been a busy month, but it is incredibly fun to see the game taking shape as we’re working on it.

- Please be aware that the content featured in these devlogs represents an ongoing work in progress and may be subject to further changes. We are committed to continuously developing and refining our game. To stay informed about the latest updates and connect with the rest of the Astride community, we invite you to join our dedicated Discord server community here! For additional information about Astride, please visit our official website.

Tweaking, workshops and events

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

Tweaks This month has been filled with tons of work and events. I’ve made a few adjustments to the post-processing to make the visuals pop even more than before. We still need to tweak some of the white colors on objects like fences and jumps, as they currently appear overly bright in direct sunlight.

Workshops and events

June has been packed with local game and film industry workshops and the hosted by Østnorsk Filmsenter. I have spent a few days attending these workshops. I learned a lot and met some great people during these days.

Every year we travel to Spillkonventet, where game developers from across Norway gather to network, showcase their games, test each other's games, attend presentations and join workshops. This year’s program had many useful and inspiring topics. I took many notes!

Nearly everyone I spoke with this year already knew of Astride and was excited to try it out. That’s always lovely to hear! And let me tell you, it’s not often we have Astride out for testing for people outside of our community and target audience. It was quite interesting to see if they figured out the controls, even though you can see all of them in the menu. 

Most testers instinctively went full speed the entire time. I guess that happens when you play games with mounts for speed mostly. So I had to remind a lot of them that they actually can’t jump at max speed, and most of them didn’t even look at the speed UI either. I showed them that the point is to control different speeds within each gait, and then they understood. Still, they had a great time. A few even enjoyed running to the edge of the world to see what happens. 

It’s always nice and refreshing to get input from people who work with games professionally now and then. This feedback had so much enthusiasm and positive opinions about the game. Of course the feedback from our testers and community is very important. You all help shape Astride every step of the way, and we are incredibly grateful for your continued support.

I am so ready for a summer vacation. I think the entire team needs and deserves a good break for all the hard work we’ve done. 

See you all after summer!

The halt

By Marius - Animator

The halt as it is in-game right now is very abrupt. This month I have worked on how to soften this abrupt change when halting. The reason it feels so abrupt right now is that when you press “halt” the code for movements stops you immediately, while normally any momentum needs to decelerate to stop; As an immediate stop is normally called a crash. But on a more serious note basically nothing in nature stops without some form of deceleration or consequence. All the energy needs to go somewhere.

When movement changes like this animation comes in and adds movement and weight distribution changes to “sell” the momentum change. But normally that is prepared for before the stop, which is not possible in this case as the momentum change is immediate. So I had to add the deceleration after the stop and move it back to its actual position.

While it still looks a little unnatural, that is more because of the walking back… And the change in hoof placement, but that part can’t be changed. The walk back is meant to be faced out as we adjust how the halt decides to stop. Because ideally the horse will stop when the animation has reached its stopping position, but this is a temporary solution.

After testing and animating for each gait, here is the result:

Game saves and breeding

By Ouroboros - Programmer

Having gotten the update and the new interaction system out of the way last month, I started working on the next update. It is with the coming update that it will finally be possible to own more than one horse, and I had to tweak the code a bit to make that possible. Another new addition will be multiple save slots, which required some changes to how data is saved and loaded. Both of these features were planned well in advance and I had written most of my code with that in mind, but there were still a few things that had to be changed to actually make it work.

With it being possible to own multiple horses, I got started on code for breeding. Data from two horses are used to generate a new horse that inherits the parents’ traits with some variations. It took some time to code all the different parts, and I also had to update some of the existing code as there were a couple of places I hadn’t taken mixed breeds into consideration. We have yet to import the foal model into the game, so the “foals” are currently adult horses, but I am glad to say that the tests of the breeding code have been going well. Everything works as intended and the testing revealed some minor bugs that were quickly dealt with.

The above picture shows the result of the first test. Milly is the mare and Bolt is the stallion. All of them are Norwegian Warmblood. Both Milly and Bolt are currently permanent residents in the stable for testing, but their appearance is randomly generated for each save file. I have made improvements to the code and several more tests since this first one. I’ll end this month’s post with the results of the most recent test. In all of the below pictures, the mare is to the left and the stallion is to the right.

Knocking poles

By Jasmine - Intern

Hello, I’m new here!

My name is Jasmine and I’m the latest intern at Raidho Games. I’ve been fortunate enough to join the team working on Astride for a few weeks to learn more about Unity DOTS and multiplayer.

I’ve taken on the challenge of implementing knocking down poles which has been very exciting to work on since it’s a core mechanic for show jumping. It may sound like an easy task, but the horse and the obstacle don't exist in the same world: the horse exists in the GameObject world, while the obstacle exists in the DOTS world. Meaning that there’s no easy way to detect collisions between a hoof and a pole. After spending some time testing out different ideas I finally settled on instantiating colliders for the poles in the same world as the horse is in, and then passing on collisions to the server.

Making a game with Unity DOTS and multiplayer functionality is very different from making a game without them, and the learning curve has definitely been steep. Luckily, I’ve had Camilla to help me along the way!

- Please be aware that the content featured in these devlogs represents an ongoing work in progress and may be subject to further changes. We are committed to continuously developing and refining our game. To stay informed about the latest updates and connect with the rest of the Astride community, we invite you to join our dedicated Discord server community here! For additional information about Astride, please visit our official website.

Planning to upgrade the UI

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

Looking to lift the UI

I am working on doing a few visual changes to the UI, like changing the background shape to be smoother and softer, as well as its color. The background color has been black with transparency. This has caused one issue that I’m aiming to fix, and that is the black coat color icons are disappearing and are hard to see.

At first I wanted to keep the transparent background, but make it blurred. We got an asset that made this possible, so I tested it. It did not work at all, until we discovered that it only worked on a light/white background, which is not suitable for our UI (it was my original idea, but it looked not that good). So then I went over to look for a solid background color instead. This color needs to complement the text color and icons. The text is as many of you know a shade of white, + we have this teal-color as well.

I tested with many darker shades of both blue, green and purple/red. And right now I’m trying to use a brown color, which makes the icons and text pop. I feel like it matched the calm and clean look we’re going for. Maybe not the most exciting color, but it’s a bit neutral, which is much needed. Though, I have not decided on color yet. I need to do more testing first.

Shadow looking nice and being troublesome

One thing that has been missing from the UI is shadow, drop shadow. Until now I’ve pre-made all the icons with drop shadow as a placeholder, and it is not the ideal way to have shadows on the UI. 

With the same asset pack as the blur function, I got to try out a shadow function. It looked so smooth and nice!!! That unfortunate part is that I manually have to fit the shadow to each object, and there are limited options to reshape it. I originally wanted another one that would shape itself to the text, but it was not compatible with our project. Anyways, I managed for it to look very nice either way. I also had to switch out every single icon to not have a pre-made drop shadow on them.

However, we found one other issue with it. We haven’t found a way for the shadow in layout to resize itself to the object it’s attached to. We use the Unity UI toolkit, and there you create layouts and styles that are used throughout the UI. Because of that we need to see if we still are going to use this shadow asset, or if we need to find another solution.

Sketching UI that we currently do not have

I need to create ideas and goals for future UI. So I’ve been sketching a lot for different parts of the game. For example character customizer, competition and so on. The layout is planned, just need to create some object for it.

Update, Itch, & Courses

By Mathilde - Community Manager, 3D-artist

The month of May has really flown by, and I'd like to share some of what I've worked on this month. Firstly, we released a new update this month and with that comes writing and publishing the patch notes to make sure we list all of the changes, updates, and fixes that have been done to the game since the last update. In addition to this, I did some in-game recordings of the new build right as it was ready for release to use for the promotional videos such as the trailer for Steam which we also published across our other platforms.

We are also working on moving the playtesting of Astride's testing and experimental builds over to Itch.io to have the test version of the game more separated from the Steam game library. The Itch page for Astride is closed for testers only, so I cannot show any screenshots from the actual page, but I was pretty happy with the results. Hopefully, you will be too!

Lastly, I've been working more on the dressage courses which were also included in the latest update. I will hopefully be able to create more variations of fun dressage courses for you all to try out. I hope you enjoy the new courses this far!

Blocking out the property has begun

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

Right now, it doesn’t look very impressive, but this is just the foundation to figure out where everything will be placed on the property.

The stable is also getting an update. The current stable in Astride feels a bit claustrophobic for a game environment, and can sometimes be a little challenging in order to make the cameras work better.  There fore we’re changing out a few parts here and there. One of the bigger changes is to the stalls—they will be more open and include more decorative elements.

Since the last update, I’ve been working on adjusting and expanding our existing building modules to create the new stable. Our goal is to give it a cozier feel, inspired by traditional woodwork from our region.

Below, you can get a little sneak peek of what the new stable interior looks like, for now! The new stalls The new tack room  And lastly, a little peek from the feeding room and kitchen - And there will be more to come 

Gallop & Rig Fixes

By Marius - Animator

Easing into a slow full gallop Up to this point canter and gallop have been treated as the "same" animation in the unity animator, as it is easy to blend between since they are so similar in movement; But gallop and canter do not have the same timing. It has been functional up until now, but they needed to be separated. So I had to make a slower version of the gallop.

Above is the new slow full gallop.

Fixing an old enemy of mine While working on the gallop I also found that I could and should fix an animation problem that has been prevalent for a long time, that I have tried to hide as long and best as I could. When the shoulder is moved far enough back, there is a bend that happens between the shoulders and ribs. Usually it is not that visible as it is most noticeable in certain angles and mostly on extreme poses, but some animation has it more apparent than others and the gallop is one of them.

I am normally very reluctant to edit the rig for either character or horse, I found that the best way to fix that shoulder problem would be to add a new bone that corrects the bend. While it is not perfect, it is leagues above what it was!

Above: Before and after shoulder fix. Do note that the shots are from an extreme position for the legs, so the deformation is pushed to its limits. But you can see a clear improvement in the shoulder area.

Broke the arms again While testing in Unity it became clear that the character's elbows got way overstretched in both full gallop and slow full gallop. So something in my last fix must have broken.

The overstretching arms stumped me for a long time. I tried to go into the old fix to see if there was something wrong there, but couldn't find anything obvious. After a lot of back and forth it finally turned out that I also needed to change the animation system for the character after separating gallop from canter.

Sadly the version where the arm stretching was at its worst got deleted, so I cant show you the full extent of how bad it was. But I could still replicate some of it on the closest repository I found.

Leading & Doors

By Ouroboros - Programmer

The work on the update continued this month, and I spent the first week of May fixing some tricky bugs. The striding prediction for jumping was a bit wonky with the new animation system. It took some trial and error to get it working properly again. There was also a bug where the horse didn’t jump when there were multiple jumps close after each other. It took a lot of debugging to figure out what the issue was. Turns out the jump system was faster than the code that triggers the jump animation, which made the jump triggering not work when there wasn’t enough time between them. I was able to fix it by adding an additional check for the trigger.

The next week was all about getting the finishing touches in place before the release. I cleaned up the code for the new horse controller, made some final adjustments to the first-person camera and the look-at IK, made sure the new dressage and show jumping courses were set up properly, and updated the gait UI. We were able to get the new update out on 15th May, and everything seems to have gone smoothly.

I have spent most of my time since then on the new interaction system. As we have added more objects that have various kinds of interaction, the old interaction system started to become a bit cumbersome. The new interaction system is made so that it is easy to add new interactions, and it also supports multiple types of interactions on one object. With the new system up and running, I have updated all the existing interactions and added some new ones. Horses have gotten a new interaction that allows the player to lead a horse by the reins. Interactions have also been added to all the doors in the stable, making it possible to open and close them.

- Please be aware that the content featured in these devlogs represents an ongoing work in progress and may be subject to further changes. We are committed to continuously developing and refining our game. To stay informed about the latest updates and connect with the rest of the Astride community, we invite you to join our dedicated Discord server community here! For additional information about Astride, please visit our official website.

Patch highlights

Added content & features

• The Arabian horse has been added to the horse breed roster
• The Rabicano gene is now available for the Arabian horse
• Third-person and first-person view while riding or grounded have been added and can be toggled with Tab
• Added saving and loading of the camera mode
• Horse refusals have been implemented
• Updated and added more leg markings variations
• Added lead changes while turning
• Added four more show jumping courses and updated show jumping course 3 with a new course
• Added a new dressage course and a new dressage training course
• Added lead change for slow canter
• Added idle and halt animation with transitions from different gaits
• Added rein-back (reverse, backing up) on horseback
• Added Silver Buckskin and Silver Smoky Black gene combination
• Added a hard stop animation for the horse, activate by pressing X
• Added walk-to-canter transition
• Added look-at IK for third person character view, the character will now look towards where the camera is pointed
• New UI that includes gait and speed indicators while mounted on the horse

Fixes & adjustments

• Terrain texture has been updated
• Water shader has been adjusted
• World lighting and shader has been updated and adjusted
• Increased the scroll sensitivity range in the controls options
• Fixed a multiplayer bug for force animations
• Fixed various LODs
• The world fog has been adjusted
• Reflection probes have been swapped and replaced
• Fixed issue with horse jumping delayed because of changing strides before the jump
• Splashed white face markings have been updated for better eye textures
• Fixed animation looping issues
• The horse shader has had some updates and tweaking
• Minor fixes of the shadows
• Adjusted the horse’s textures to be less shiny
• Changed the render order of some materials
• Added object shadows
• Updated colors and textures for the house and stable buildings
• Adjusted arena fence to hide the fence foundation mesh
• Reduced sizes of numbers of textures to help with optimization
• Pangare textures have been replaced with new ones that do not have visible seams
• Some white patterns, such as Tobiano, have increased texture size and quality
• The main menu camera angles for the horse have been adjusted
• Tweaked the existing dressage training course to have less gait transitions
• Updated the transition from idle to turning standstill
• Updated the textures inside the stable building
• Fixed stirrup placement based on breed
• Fixed neck position and deformation on scaled horse heads
• Updated control scheme in the escape menu
• Added scaling to the scroll sensitivity when playing with a save from an older build
• Adjusted the turning of the horse
• Made post-processing and shadows change with the quality set in the graphics options
• Updated transitions from and to halt and transition between reverse and walk
• Updated show jumping training course 2 with a new training layout and exercises
• Fixed the transition between piaffe and passage
• Fixed issue with transition from piaffe to walk, trot, and canter
• General updates and tweaking of the UI, including changing the backdrop with blur and shadows for text

Known issues

• The reins sometimes clip through the neck and both reins end up at the same side of the neck
• Mane clipping issue with some breeds, especially the Arabian
• There are some clipping/skinning issues with tack

Colorful month for art and UI

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

Dressage Courses

By Mathilde - Community Manager, 3D-artist

Property Changes

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

Breed Scaling, Rider IK, and Halt Animations

By Marius - Animator

Preparing for the update

By Ouroboros - Programmer

Final Animation & Prop Update

By Mathie - Intern

Becoming friends with post-processing

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

Everything all at once

By Mathilde - Community Manager, 3D-artist

Environment

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

Lead changes & gait transitions

By Marius - Animator

Horse controller

By Ouroboros - Programmer

Face animations

By Mathie - Intern

Fighting the light

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

A much needed texture update

By Mathilde - Community Manager, 3D-artist

Technical improvements in the environment

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

Lead changes, jump transitions, and more

By Marius - Animator

Camera, horse controller & refusals

By Ouroboros - Programmer

Assets and face rigs

By Mathie - Intern

Breeding UI, Bitless Bridles & Tack Concept

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

Trailers, Genetics & Baby Horses

By Mathilde - Community Manager, 3D-artist

New Year, New Tack

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

Character Animation & IKs

By Marius - Animator

Updates & Camera

By Ouroboros - Programmer

Welcome Mathie!

By Mathie - Intern

Fixes & adjustments

• Fixed a bug with a dropdown menu not initializing to a valid option
• Fixed an issue where the game's default resolution was set to the lowest option

Patch highlights

Added content & features

• The main menu and the Horse Creator UI has been overhauled
• “Delete save data” and “Delete horse data” are added to the main menu
• Added options to change mane and forelock in the Horse Creator
• The Norwegian Fjord horse and Icelandic horse have been implemented
• Players can now switch between different horse breeds and change their height and face shape in the Horse Creator
• Pangare, splashed white, and silver have been implemented
• Added in the “Hair and coat color” tab in the Horse Creator, “Show gene options” that will let the player further customize the different gene outputs
• When hovering the ⍰ next to any text in the Horse Creator, helpful information will be displayed
• Added age and gender options in the Horse Creator
• A randomizer button in the Horse Creator has been implemented in the shape of dice
• Option to reset the horse in the Horse Creator by pressing “Reset”
• Added different camera views as an option in the Horse Creator
• Option to hide UI and change background in Horse Creator
• The horse’s selected age will now affect how some genes display on the horse, such as grey
• Lead changes has been implemented and can be triggered by pressing Q while the horse is moving straight forward in canter
• Stirrups have been added
• Added more colors to saddle pads
• A stable has been added to the map
• A limited version of multiplayer save has been added, details of what is loaded and saved can be found in the multiplayer menu
• A respawn button has been added to the in-game pause menu

Fixes & adjustments

• The horse no longer stutters when the jump animation is played
• The cream gene has been placed together with the other genes, check both checkboxes next to the gene name to get a double dilute
• Swapped the light green saddle pad for a white one
• The reins are now shorter and less jiggly
• Reins now have the same color as the bridle
• The jump indicator arrows above the jumps are now back to white and has a bigger difference in size and transparency from the first jump to the next jump in the order
• Hotkey to hide UI has been moved to F5
• The horse no longer collides/walks on top of the dressage rails

Known issues

• Animation issue when jumping while the horse is on the left lead
• The reins sometimes clip through the neck and both reins end up at the same side of the neck
• There are some clipping/skinning issues with tack
• The pangare texture has seams going through the chest, belly, and legs

Horses, houses & UI

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

Breeds, textures, & genetics

By Mathilde - Community Manager, 3D-artist

Stable prototype

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

Lead changes, IK, animations, & more

By Marius - Animator

Genetics & restrictions

By Ouroboros - Programmer

Marimba

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

Nordland & Tack Fitting

By Mathilde - Community Manager, 3D-artist

Knock On Wood

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

Lead Changes, Refusals & IK Systems

By Marius - Animator

Horse Creator

By Ouroboros - Programmer

Fountain & Rune Stones

By Darline - Internship

Trym & jumps

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

The update & Nordland

By Mathilde - Community Manager, 3D-artist

Waterfall & stable

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

Clothes & sitting

By Marius - Animator

Big Fixing & Polishing

By Green Horse - Programmer

Update, saving, & bugs

By Ouroboros - Programmer

Building atmosphere

By Darline - Internship

Fixes & adjustments

• The arrow over the current jump in show jumping courses is now blue for better visibility
• A save system has been added that loads and saves progress in single player, no data is currently loaded or saved in multiplayer
• A button to delete save data has been added to the bottom right corner of the main menu
• Fixed a bug where the in-game UI wouldn't reset properly when disconnecting and then connecting again

Fixes & adjustments

• Fixed an issue where players would experience a black screen when entering the game