Horses, houses & UI
By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist
NPC concepts for both two- and four- legged
Hi everyone, Maja here. This year sure went by in a flash, it has been a tough year for many, and I am hoping that 2025 will be an amazing year for all of us.
As some of you know, I’ve been working hard on finishing the NPC list. One of the last NPCs, named Tommy, is completed! Tommy will be the coffee shop barista in Eldheim. I’ve written a patreon post about him here, where you can get more information about this NPC.
But I haven’t only been drawing human NPCs. I’ve also been preparing for a few horse NPCs who belong to some of the equestrians of Eldheim, like Rini and Noah. These horses have been created through sketches with quick colors to show their color and/or pattern, since they of course will be of the horse breeds of the game. I’ve not focused on rendering these horses fully yet.
The horse shown below is a stunning Knabstrupper with his own unique pattern. His name is Pippin and is Rini’s horse. This sketch shows just one side of Pippin, as his pattern is different on the other side. His base color is bay, with the Lp/Patn1 genes that gives the Knabstrupper their distinctive spots.
The community’s favorite horse breed
Sticking with the theme of horses, I've also prepared concept art for the winning horse breed, chosen by our wonderful community. Over 800 people of Astride’s community participated in this poll, which is amazing! After an exciting poll with so many breeds competing for the top spot, a clear leader appeared. And as you may have already seen, the winning breed is the beautiful Friesian!
When there were just 1,5 days left until the poll ended, I could safely begin the sketching of the breed. By that point, the Friesian had so many votes ahead of the second most-popular breed that it was safe to assume it would be the winner. If the votes had shifted suddenly, I’d have quickly sketched the other breed, but the Friesian’s lead was so strong no worries with drawing this on the day before the poll ending. I am so happy to have this breed in Astride.
NPC house concepts
Eldheim is taking shape, and thus we need some houses for some of the NPCs. Recently, I’ve been focusing on both Einar’s and Andrea’s homes. Both houses are designed to fit the Norwegian environment, with designs of houses that are and have been common in Norway. Einar’s house is inspired by the “Svenskhus,” or “Traditional Swedish Cottage” in English. These houses are often painted with red, and I just had to give the house a blue door, so it would fit Einar’s color palette. I added some wooden carvings on the entry part of the house, which can be found on many elderly Norwegian homes. I, of course, had to add a weathervane in the shape of a horse on the top of his house. I added some quick white furniture that suits the building. Maybe you’ll find him enjoying a cup of coffee here?
UI here, UI there, UI everywhere
After working hard on the Horse Creator and menu UI, I could finally move on to many other parts of the game. Like dialogue, inventory, quest log, collections, course selection, and so on. And of course with UI, it’s not just to simply create something. I had to put in some time in doing research to see what other games have done, and see if there are things I like or dislike. To see what is user friendly and easy to understand. After gathering references I drew my own designs as a sketch, before creating templates and designs in Unity UI Toolkit. For both the collection and inventory system, I also had to create fitting icons for the various categories.
Here is a work-in-progress screenshot of the collection/inventory and the riding course selection. Not all parts are ready yet, like the scrollbar and dropdown menu. The image of the saddle used here is just a placeholder and will be replaced with the 3D model of the object. These designs also need to be tested to see if there need to be any adjustments later.
Looking back on these past few months, it’s really been a lot for me. So many tasks have been fulfilled, and I am creating all of this with the future of Astride at heart. I hope you’re excited for these as well.
Breeds, textures, & genetics
By Mathilde - Community Manager, 3D-artist
At the start of the month in November, I shared the progress of the Knabustrupper horse breed model with our Patreon supporters. While the Knabstrupper model is still a work in progress and will get some changes to the mesh still, I have been spending most of the time working on the LP/PATN1 gene combination textures and of course research. Since LP and PATN1 affect each other and work together to create the iconic Knabstrupper (and Appaloosa) patterns and that these genes don't like to follow rules, it's been a challenge to put different textures into categories.
The way I have categorized them is the following
Leopard - LP/lp PATN1/PATN1
Near-Leopard - LP/lp PATN1/n
Blanket/Varnish Appaloosa - LP/lp n/n
Snowcap/Varnish - LP/LP n/n
Near-Fewspot - LP/LP PATN1/n
Fewspot - LP/LP PATN1/PATN1
Now, this can still have changes but I do hope that this makes sense due to the phenotypes of the horses that I have researched. It is extra hard since, again, LP and PATN1 don't like to follow the rules but with programming we have to make rules. Hopefully, we'll make it a "best of both worlds" situation. Anyways, enough genetics talk. Let's look at some of the textures I've made for the LP/PATN1 combination so far!
From top left to bottom right, we have 3x leopard, 2x near-leopard, 2x blanket appaloosa, near-fewspot, and fewspot. The amount of custom brushes I have had to create in order to make these patterns is also a lot, I am closing in on over 20 different brushes/tools just to make these textures as close to reality as I can.
Moving on from the Knabstrupper and the making of hundreds and hundreds of spots, we did a community poll to decide which of the planned breeds we should drop at the same time as the Norwegian Fjord horse. The votes ended up in favor of the Icelandic horse, and that set me on a side-quest to get the silver gene introduced to the horse creator. Since the Norwegian Fjord comes with their special combination of pangaré and dun, we thought that quickly adding the silver gene alongside the Icelandic would be a fun bonus.
Here, the top row shows different variations of silver black, while the bottom row shows different variations of silver bay. There is also a darker mane/tail variation that is not depicted here.
And of course, on the side of all of this, I have been working on other tasks such as tweaking the Icelandic horse breed mesh, fixing mane/tail textures and meshes ready for implementing into Unity, tack fitting, social media posts, helping with debugging multiple game builds, and much more.
Stable prototype
By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist
Some of you have already seen sneak peeks of the stable in our Discord server. While it’s not finished yet—especially the interior, which needs a lot more work—it’s currently more of a prototype. This allows us to test whether the layout works as intended. Once we’ve finalized the layout, we’ll focus on additional plans and details to bring it closer to our vision.
Most of November was spent remodeling and re-UV mapping all the pieces required to create the stable. It was a tedious process with little exciting progress to show, but it was absolutely necessary.
The remodeling was done in a way that allows us to use a material system, reducing the number of individual textures in the game. This approach will be applied to every building in the future, except for very unique or specific structures.
In the next iteration of the stable, you’ll see some color changes to the interior. There will also be an office and other functional rooms in the central section. For now, we need to test several aspects: Is the roof high enough? Are the stalls big enough? Is it too far to walk from one section to another? Interestingly, the stalls are larger than they typically are in real life, as real-life measurements often feel too small when translated into a game environment. We may also make adjustments to other areas, such as widening the dressage arena, as needed.
Now, back to the stable! The exterior color is inspired by one of the most common paint colors for barns and stables in Norway, with some alterations to make it stand out in the environment and align with our chosen color palette. As for the interior, it will eventually be brighter. The current dark and gloomy look is temporary, and we’ll be adding more light and functionality over time. We hope you’ll take a look at the stable, explore how it feels to move around inside, and share your feedback with us.
Lead changes, IK, animations, & more
By Marius - Animator
Tack blend shape
To implement more horse breeds there are some requirements we have needed to fulfill, and one of the more noticeable ones is that we need the tack to fit the different breeds. Which needs the tack to have a blend shape for the breeds we are implementing.
Those are not the only blend shapes we need though, as I’ll discuss further down we are also implementing horse sizes and size customizability into the mix. To make sure the tack fits the character when the horse is scaled up or down we need to control blend shapes to compensate for the scaling. While the blend shapes themselves existed I needed to make the system that controls it.
Stirrups
There has been a tack set item that has been missing for the longest time: the stirrups. The stirrups have been delayed until now because we knew we needed to have a system for different breeds and sizes, which also means IK systems. Back in the devlog for October I was working on the IK system, but never finished it. Well apparently setting an IK system on a rig that is moved by another rig isn’t that easy, and ended up taking way longer than expected with a lot of help from Ouroboros.
Horse height
Different breeds have different standards for their size, so while we could just have set a size for each breed and scaled accordingly, that would still amount to most of the same problems as just making the size customizable. I can’t say if that holds true on the UI side of implementing it though as I don’t work with it directly.
IK and stirrups
IKs’ work by setting different reference targets that selected bones should try and follow in different ways. What I use for the most part is two bone IK, which lets me have a target for the knee direction, but only works with two bones. “note that the two bone limit is in the Unity Animation Rigging package and not a hard rule for every IK system.”
In this case the target is set to the stirrup position on the horse, which is represented by a stirrup bone; there is also a knee bone for IK targeting, but not as important to go into more detail about. The stirrup bone is part of the horse rig which is both a boon and a detriment for the IK; The boon is that the stirrup bone is what I originally used to make the character leg animations when riding, so it already has the animations. The problem is that it is set in its position relative to the horse, which means that when you scale the horse up or down; the stirrup length stays relative to the horse size, meaning that you have really short stirrups with a short horse and really long stirrups with a big horse.
To compensate for that I first thought of how I could overwrite it with code, but quickly realized that in this case at least I could use animation layers instead. While I probably could have done it in code also, coding isn’t really my field of expertise; so if I know an alternative that uses animation tools I’ll rather use that than stumbling around with code. So long as it is defensible to use instead of coding.
What I did was use an animation layer with no more than 3 poses, these poses involved one for moving the stirrups down and scaling them up, one for moving the stirrups up and scaling them down, and the base pose. This layer included a layer mask making sure it only affected the horses’ stirrup and player-knee bones. Finally i needed to set the animation layer to additive instead of overwrite. Additive is a setting that blends the animation layer with underlying animations instead of overwriting them completely. I had never done it with poses instead of full animations before so I did have to do some research, but ultimately got it to work.
Deactivating global normalized time
A thing we realized with the IK system is that we could shelve using the global normalized time as the IK’s would make it redundant. Global normalized time is what we use to ensure that the character and horse are in sync when riding. Without it I can guarantee that the animations would get out of sync and clip through each other as they would use their internal normalized time instead and generally make nonsensical movements in relation to each other. The problem is that global normalized time meddles with the animation transition, it is one of the main reasons the transitions have been janky; most noticeable on jumps.
Ideally we might want to have it functioning alongside the IK system at a later date, but as long as it affects the transitions the way it currently does and makes movement janky; it will be put on ice.
Jump with transitions (sadly the arms got a little broken in the jumping animation after the IK implementation)
Lead changes
It has been a long time since I showed the lead change animation I originally made, but finally it will see some use. I got to start setting up the animation trees and conditions, while Ouroboros added the functionality when she had the time. It wasn’t a fast ordeal though as there was one thing I was missing for lead changes to actually work… The other lead. By that I mean I had the animation to change the leads, but not the mirroring motion of the different gaits. If the horse had been a human or humanoid rig, the process would have been pretty pain free; but since it isn’t I had to copy and mirror every animation by hand. While it isn’t a difficult job per se, it is a very time consuming one.
Mane blend shapes and skinning
Now to the bane of my existence the last few weeks: We needed to update the blend shapes for the different manes. The problem when working with the mane is mainly two things: It follows the neck, which is the most difficult area to work with on the horse, and it has several layers that need to be edited and skinned to the rig.
While working back and forth between Blender and Unity I became aware of another problem in addition to the first two. Some skinning and blend shapes behave slightly differently between the two programs. So what seems to be a smooth mane root in blender becomes very uneven in Unity. At first I suspected it had something to do with the source shape as that affects all blend shapes put on top of it, but it turned out to be both blend shape and skinning working in tandem to make me crazy.
After many tries I have made it much better than it was, as the mane used to have a gap between the neck and the roots. What I am currently trying though is a hard reset on the skinning to try and definitely fix the blend shapes before mixing in the skinning weights again.
Genetics & restrictions
By Ouroboros - Programmer
I had started updating the horse creator in October, and I spent a great portion of November on this as well. I finished implementing color genetics and made it possible to activate and deactivate the different genes through the UI. The coding was quite fiddly at times, as some genes affect each other and I had to make sure all the variables would be updated correctly at all times. Expanding on this, I created a way to add restrictions to genes and markings based on breeds. We want to keep the genetics as close to reality as possible, and the restrictions are a necessary part of this. The last part of my work on the UI (for now) was to go back and do some finishing touches to both the main menu and the horse creator.
The plan was for me to spend the time before Christmas on implementing tutorials for the start of the game. I did spend some time on this and was able to finish a working prototype for tutorials, but I have had to reprioritize as the horse creator ended up taking longer than I had anticipated. I actually started planning for tutorials at the start of 2024, but quickly realized it would be best to implement a quest- and dialogue system first. Tutorials are implemented as an extension to these systems, meaning they have gotten an upgrade as a result. There are still several improvements I want to make for quests and dialogue, but this was the first step.
In between the work on the horse creator and the tutorial, I have spent time fixing bugs and making some small improvements. A couple of bugs were found in the multiplayer save that is in test, so they had to be taken care of. I have also implemented a respawn button in the pause menu, and assisted Marius with the code for the IK we’ve added. It’s been pretty busy these past two months, so I’m looking forward to some time off for the holidays.
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