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.

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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.