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.