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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