The month of April has flown by too quickly! But that also means that our monthly devlog is here. We've been making quite a few upgrades and we are getting closer and closer to the early access release in May. It's definitely a bit scary, but we are excited to get past the release and work on pushing updates without thinking about worrying about deadlines. Enough about that, let's look at April's development.
Character clothes, greying, and markings
By Mathilde - 3D-artist
We are getting closer and closer to the early access release, and I’ve finished tweaking the character’s clothes so that they are ready for implementation into the game. We first only had the feminine body type, but we recently got the masculine body type done. Since both of our current body types need clothes, I fitted the feminine-shaped clothes to the masculine body. This way, all clothes fit all current body types and we can blend between them.
Blending between body types in the game is something we are striving for, and this is a small step in the right direction. We want to let anyone wear whatever clothes they’d like, no matter which body type or size they choose. Further down in Marius' part of the devlog, you can see the blend between the characters and clothes.
The greying gene has also had more work this month. I focused on adding greying to all of the manes we currently have. It will most likely not be available right at the release of the early access but will be added with a later update. That’s when I’ll be working on hyperpigmentation as well. Right now, the horses do not have any hyperpigmentation when greying, so it is not very accurate, especially on red horses. But the manes and tails are ready for greying and I can’t wait until we get it into the engine and shader.
Currently, we have the two greying processes that are already in the current playtest. As you might have seen in the last devlog, I updated these textures. The updated texture won’t be in the early access release from day one as I still have some tweaking to do. I want to make sure it’s up to standard and the transition between the different stages is smooth. So the texture will most likely be updated when we add greying to the hair.
Moving on to what I’ve spent the most time working on this month, horse markings. I’ve been mainly working on adding more tobiano patterns and face markings. As some of our community members noticed on one of the tobiano patterns, we use real horses as references for our markings. It’s incredibly important for me that the markings and other gene textures look and feel realistic. Therefore, I use references for all of the markings I make. I do of course tweak them a little bit so that they are not exact replicas. If I made these markings from my own head, we would definitely have some weird-looking markings.
In the current Astride playtest, we have 14 full-face markings, 14 upper-face markings, and 11 lower-face markings. As I am writing this, we have 40 full-face markings, 21 upper-face markings, and 20 lower-face markings. That’s a big step up and just from upper and lower face markings, you can make over 400 different combinations. With time, there will of course come more variations, but I absolutely feel like everyone should be able to find at least one combination of markings they like.
Some of the new face markings that are added are also designs sent in by our Kickstarter supporters! I’ve shared these markings with the supporters who sent them in, and so far, I’ve received a lot of positive feedback on them. I’m so happy to have our community be a part of the game in this way, and some of the designs are really beautiful and unique!
Kickstarter print and new splash art
By Maja - Concept Artist
April has been quite a busy month. Not only have I been working hard on the Kickstarter reward art, but I’ve also been occupied with paperwork for both Østnorsk Filmsenter and Norsk Filminstitutt since both of them have been so kind and granted us funding for further development of Astride. I am so thankful to them for believing in us and Astride.
Almost all my latest WIP have been snippets of the progress of the Kickstarter art. It’s been a big project to draw this one. This art piece will be a limited print signed by the developers for those who supported the Kickstarter campaign with €150.
I worked so hard on it, and it took a lot of time. I actually finished the drawing right before writing this devlog. I’ve already written about it in the last devlog, but it has gone through many iterations and I am now finally happy with it. I hope the supporters that will receive this piece in the mail will enjoy it. I cannot wait to show you the whole drawing and I really believe it will look great when printed. I will contact a printing firm soon and have it printed. I've been printing a few drawings privately before so I have a few ideas of what paper type we should use and such.
Even though I just finished a huge art task, the next season is coming soon which in my opinion is the best season of the year: Summer! I’ve chosen the beautiful Alter real to be the breed on this splash art. I can’t wait to see how it will turn out. I also need to figure out what the rider should look like.
Striding system and UI updates
By Green Horse - Programmer
Astride is going to have a striding system so it’s a bit challenging to design. We have a way to predict where a stride will land in the future, so we can give the player feedback on whether or not they should speed up or slow down in order to make a perfect jump. The problem is all about accuracy. A slight speed change for the current stride might cause a larger change for a future stride so it gets difficult to adjust your speed, especially on a keyboard. I’ve added a way to automatically adjust the striding so that you will be able to make a jump. However, this is slower than doing it manually by speeding up or slowing down, so people who train themselves to not use this automatic adjustment mechanic will have an advantage.
It still looks rough and unpolished, but it is a work in progress after all.
We have a very simple motion-matching system in place that blends between animations based on movement. At the moment the horse will slide around when it doesn’t find an animation to blend into so it looks a bit funky and broken. The reason for this is that we haven’t put in all the animations yet. We wanted to explore sideways/lateral movement before the early access release but we decided that we were just going to have forward and turning animations instead. The rest will come later. You’re not going to do much lateral movement in show jumping anyways. Dressage, however, will have a lot of it.
I've also been working together with Maja to update the visuals of the menu. This is currently what it looks like.
Stepping up the quality
By Tirna - 3D-artist
Over the past few weeks, I have been working on upgrading the riding arena. The previous model had a few flaws that were a result of our style not being fully established at the time they were made, particularly when it came to buildings. It was a more tedious task than I had anticipated, but now that all the necessary models have been created and textured, I am very glad that we had the opportunity to do this before the Early Access release. I am happy to report that all the necessary modules have been imported into Unity, so you will see the upgraded version in our streams in the near future!
After completing this project, I was looking for a more relaxing task and decided to sketch some ideas for the environment. Although I cannot guarantee that these designs will be used, I find it helpful to have a starting point before working with the environment in Unity. I really hope that I can bring some color and create a relaxing space around the arena for you. This will also help us to get a step closer to making decisions regarding the style of the environment in Astride.
While we wait for progress on the environment, we have decided to upgrade our saddles as well. The current models are quite old and no longer fit with the style we have established. Now, they look much closer to a real saddle, and I am very excited to begin texturing them, as well as the tack that some of you have sent to us through Patreon!
Eager to saddle up
By Marius - Animator
This month started with me finishing up the eager animation as a variant to the stationary walk that shows a little more... Life and agency. If you have followed Green Horse’s streams you might have seen it. After I finished that, my main task these last few weeks has been to prepare the human character to be added on the horseback. With early access getting closer and closer we were originally not thinking we would be able to implement it before the early access, and were planning to add the character later. But after I started making the rig and setup to the character back in February, I decided that I want to try and implement a least viable product version of it before the early access.
In theory, it would be done fast, theory is nice that way. Practically though, you always meet setbacks and obstacles you don’t foresee.
Implementing the character is a lot harder than one would think. Adding a free-moving character is one thing, but having two characters moving in tandem and in constant contact is another. Though I don’t have personal experience with interacting animations between two characters in-game animation from before, I have heard that it is some of the harder stuff you can do depending on the interaction. I believe them. But before I get ahead of myself, I wanted to see if I could implement blending between feminine and masculine body shapes now that we have the meshes to do it.
Above is the end result after adding blendshapes to the clothes. Now, I have had the character riding on the horse before while testing possible solutions to future problems, like “How do we deal with different sitting positions between different saddle types?” My solution was to have a bone on the horse rig that the character could be retargeted to depending on the saddle. In the last few weeks, this evolved into its own saddle rig that has taken most of my time, as we want the saddle to be its own entity and not deform perfectly with the horse’s skin. Though I have to add that this is a special case and we probably won’t give other skin-tight tack the same treatment, as the time investment to reward ratio is too low to be feasible on other equipment.
Most of the time has gone to tweaking parameters to a script that moves the saddle according to the horse's movement as animating it by hand would swallow a huge amount of time from other work. The rig includes retargeting points that control the player character as that character is in another project file and helps a lot in getting the basic movement down without having to jump in between and cross-reference back and forth.
Placing the character has been the easier of what has been done this month as I already had in place the setup to have the character's hips be placed at the saddle position. Now to avoid having the character be a mannequin placed on top of a horse with no additional movement, I needed to animate the sits, hand, and foot position for each horse animation. While there are a lot of animation clips to go through, as long as I get the base position right it gets done quite fast.
All saddled up! Now I just have to bake the animations and test them in the game engine.
Please note that everything shown in these devlogs is mostly showcasing work that is in progress and is not finished. To see work in progress daily, join our Discord server community here! To get more information about Astride, check out our website.