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!
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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.