Hi, everyone! It's that time of the month again and we are back with more work in progress to share with you. It's been an interesting couple of weeks, but we are keeping a steady pace of development for Astride.
Fast canter
During these two weeks we started on adding speed variation animations of the different gaits, as we move move more to transferring and fixing the game engine animation system. We started with the one you see here which was the most needed; the fast canter. The fast canter is as you can surmise, is a faster variant to the canter we already have and will be the fastest animation before being forced into gallop if speeding up. All this is to avoid speeding and slowing down animations to the point of looking silly before they transition to another gait.
Long jump update
Continuing from last post the long jump got an update with help from the many suggested references our discord community sent us. We felt that the old animation didn't really sell the jump enough, so the animation got basically redone from scratch since last post.
Striding
Striding is an important core feature we need for the show jumping gamemode and jumping in general. It's difficult to show the sheer amount of code that has been written but we promise it's a really cool looking code. We are still in research and development mode, so everything looks broken at the moment in the editor but a work in progress is still just a work in progress. More is to come!
Horse statue
This is one of the statues you can find in Eldheim. The statue is inspired by a few statues we have here in Norway and this fjord is also inspired by an old story from Norway which is called "Vesleblakken" which means tiny, little or small dun horse (Fjord horse). "Blakk" is the Norwegian term for the coat color "dun". The statue's story will be something to discover in the game.
Riding arena
Last week we had a little stream session where we made an arena. This will most likely not be the only arena we will have in our game, and even though there were a lot of details we loved about the one we made on the stream, there were a lot of challenges to make it look nice from every angle as well as being functional. So we have held that design for a little bit, and made a more functional one for the early access. You can read more about the riding arena in this Patreon post.
Tobiano patterns
The last couple of weeks, we've been putting work into creating the tobiano patterns and polishing them. Tobiano patterns will be able to come both with and without "mapping" (the borders around the patterns). Polishing these patterns means cleaning up the edges, adding fur for a soft transition, and most importantly - making sure that they align in a good way when adding multiple patterns on top of each other. Since the tobiano patterns for Astride are separated into three parts - the front, the back and the legs - it is important that all of these patterns can work together to create natural looking shapes that would occur in real life. In addition to work on the tobiano patterns, there has been a lot of time spent on social media and community work (you may have seen a small comeback on TikTok). We are currently trying to boost our Patreon with adding more content and rewards for our loyal supporters.
Character concept update
For a long time we have used two clothing models for some design ideas for Astride, but these drawings are old and were drawn during the idea phase of the game. And of course as time goes by the art style and art skill has changed a lot for our fantastic artist. We are now aiming towards a semi-realistic look and our artist loved to draw the characters with this art style as well. Stay tuned for some new concepts of clothes that we will show you soon.
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!