Hi everyone! It's time for our bi-weekly updates regarding the last weeks work in progress and updates on Astride. There has been a big focus around horse colors, environment and more animations of course.
Low jump
We redid the low jump using the old as a reference and fixed problems that never got addressed in the old version. But while doing that it never ended up feeling right. Our animator realized he worked himself blind on this animation, so he asked our community to see if they could put words to what was wrong with the movement while adding his suspicions.
Low jump update
Our community was to great help as we got a lot of feedback on what could be the problem, from confirming the animators suspicions to other things that could need a touch up. One of the suggestions added a reference that turned out was in a better angle than the one already used. In the end almost all parts of the animation got scrapped and redone.
While some problems still persist and will be worked on more, the overall flow of the animation jumped leaps and bounds (badum tss).
Turning on the forehand
It has been a long time since we added a new animation and not redone an old one. Turning on the forehand is a variant of the old turning of the haunches when the players turn the horse while standing still.
The movement seems easy, but it turned out to be deceptively difficult movement to animate. But after a lot of tweaking back and forth and adjusting tiny joint placements it turned out great (badum tss x2).
Points of interest concept
For the past few weeks, Maja's tasks has been to draw alot of concepts for many different objects that may appear in the game. This includes different kind of fences, gates, lamps and "points of interest", which means interesting objects the players can discover through out the world of Astride. It can be a special looking tree stump, wood carvings, runes or cairns ("varde" in Norwegian).
Duns, duns and more duns
The quest to make more horse color variations is still ongoing, and these last couple of weeks has been mainly focused on that. As the dun gene can affect all horse colors in different ways, there had to be made different shades of dun. For example, the black dun overlay is more grey, while the red dun overlay is brighter and more red in tones to match the underlying color. Dun in single and double diluted creams also needed their own shades. Cremello, perlino and smoky cream dun will be very bright, but still show sign of primal markings if you look close enough. Palomino and buckskin also needed their own shades to match and look natural.
Horse coat greying
Since all horse coat colors can grey out, we had to scrap the previous greying cycle. The old one was based just on a black horse turning grey, but we needed the greying to work on any color horse. The greying was posted and received feedback of too little pronounced dapples, so this greying will be revised and remade once again to really give the greying process the love it deserves.
The new beginning of horse face markings
While keeping on the subject of horse colors, markings play a big role in making the horses look more alive and giving them personality. There are a lot of markings that will be added to Astride, but here are 6 of the markings that were worked on during an afternoon. Three of these are Kickstarter markings and three of them are inspired by Patreon supporter horses. We are excited to expand on the horse markings library to make every single horse in Astride unique in their own way.
Maps of Eldheim
Some of you might have seen our first draft of Eldheim. We think this version had too much city and too little space to roam with your horse in the nature. Therefore, we have been testing out other maps that will open up more space to explore from horseback.
We have tested out a faster way to make different types of landscapes. The 3D picture is just a test to see if our pipeline worked out, which it did! We don’t know for sure what Eldheim will look like in the end, but we are positive that with this pipeline and testing, the end result will suit the Astride and have exciting locations to explore.
Player character riding boots
Since the player character is also a big part of the player experience, we decided to outsource an artist to help with creating it. While we have two wonderful 3D artists at Raidho, they both agreed that getting a more experienced 3D character artist to work on the player character would benefit Astride both quality and time-wise, since our two remaining artists can focus on creating more environments and polish the horses during that time instead. The quality of the rider is important, and as you can see from this high poly version of the riding boots, we want to achieve a high level of detail.
Please note that everything shown in these devlogs is mostly just work in progress and is not finished. Changes may happen and the things showcased here will have further work put into them! To see work in progress daily, join our Discord server community here!