World Design, Music & Art

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

World design: Music and map
April was filled with variation for my tasks, involving drawing, writing and research. Marius has been making great progress on the map design, and I‘ve helped him place properties as well as naming locations, some even got renamed to become more fitting to its placement. Alongside the map work, I created a music document matching it up to places on the map. This will help define both the music we need and how it should be. Of course I’ve added some brackets for other parts of the game like training, shows and breeding that will need their own unique tunes.  

The white horse painting The painting is coming along, but I was somewhat unsure about the background since the one I drew was just a quick sketch to set a scene. I asked Tirna to sketch a background based on my plans for the setting, and send it back to me to save time while I was writing the music document. She had a good idea, so I continued on that when I was done with the music document. This will be a good painting, and it’s so fun to make. Even though I have to paint so much grass.

UI
Since Ourboros is setting up the new UI, she has been asking me for some pointers here and there. The UI is finally coming along, which is so exciting. I have also focused on updating other UI elements to match the new design, like the gait UI and the arrows over jumps. They turned from basic to become more artsy, though I tried to not over design it. I used elements from the Rose paintings and put it on the gait wheel. I even added some more continuing swirls to make it more cohesive. It kind of looks like a fantasy bow! I had to create a matching arrow to it as well.

Anyhow, I discovered one issue with this and that was that we would lose the color indicator difference, due to me choosing a brown scale of colors based on the color palette. This means that each gait had its own color on each wheel. So I got the idea to create a “stone” in the middle of the loop to give an additional indicator for the gait, even though we still will have both an icon and text to tell the player what gait they are in.

For the stone I had a few tries before finding something fitting. At first I tried to make a more genotype stone. But this looks way too 3-dimensional compared to everything else on the UI. A more simple stone looked way too simplistic and wasn’t fitting at all. Then I thought to myself: Why not make a “stone” out of rose painting? And there we had it. Looks a bit fancy, but it's not competing for attention with everything surrounding it.

Decor Upgrades

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

The stable has been put on a little hold, since I needed to do something other than just UV mapping and cleaning up this very complex 3D model.

As you know, we have been doing this for some years, and in the beginning, we had a more stylised style in our game; those assets aren’t going to waste. Currently, I’m tweaking the 3D models. They will be retextured to fit in with the environment and the style we have landed on.

The first thing that is going to be upgraded is the fences and gates.

At the same time, some new models are also in the making, like this portroom and bridge, that will match the stable when it’s done. They will give a more cosy, Norse vibe.

Rigging, Maps & Music

By Marius - Animator

Rigging
From last month I continued fixing the rigging for the shoulder. While I made some progress on how to better the rotation calculations, I still hit a lot of snags and decided to work on something else for a while, to not be completely preoccupied with one thing. Sometimes you see things better after doing something else, so I went to plan out the map more.

Maps and music
I went back to continue on the map and plan it out more. One of the first things I realized I needed to do was to size the whole image resolution up… by a lot.

Updating the roads also became a pain and unnecessarily time consuming. So in case I would need to scale the map again for whatever reason the vector graphics would just work without having to do that much if any.

Later I went on to make areas where we can have different music as well as placing some potential areas of interest and discussing names. This while thinking of potential music with Maja.

The numbers denote what type of music will be played in those areas. Though this area in particular is likely to change and might not represent how it will eventually look or sound. Otherwise you can see one of the reasons for the size up with the place names that are too small to show in this picture, but fully readable in my document if I zoom in. Also my house measurement examples.

Upgrading & Optimizing UI

By Ouroboros - Programmer

This month has been the month of UI for me. I put in some time looking through Unity’s examples with UI Toolkit and reading up on the documentation. The majority of the work has been to style the UI. Similarly to web development, UI Toolkit uses style sheets where you can create styles that decide properties such as color, border, font, spacings, etc. I have tried to do a more modular approach this time with several smaller styles that can be reused, rather than a few large ones that only work for one element each. It has taken a while to get everything to look right while also making sure it works with different aspect ratios and resolutions.

After the visual part of the UI had been updated, I started looking at the code. I had already decided that I wanted to do as few changes as possible and only focus on what I considered absolutely necessary. This included improvement to the graphics options menu when it comes to setting resolution and frame rate, as well as reusing UI elements where possible instead of regularly deleting and re-creating them.

I have also completed some minor additions to the UI code. We have a document containing all the text used in the game, with the relevant code fetching the lines it needs. This is to make it easier in the future when it comes to supporting more languages, as we can just hand over this document for translation. Only a few menus used this document, but I have changed it so that all the UI uses it. The last thing I have done is to add a sound when clicking buttons in the UI. This is currently more of an experiment as we only have a few sounds we can use, but it is a good start. The only thing that remains for the UI now is to do some debugging and profiling to make sure everything works as optimal as possible.

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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.