It has been quite the weekend! The team is back in the office and we’ve had some meetings to address some points brought to our attention during and after the release. And on that note, we would like to give you extensive information about why the release was so premature, what we will do to move on from here, and what will happen with further updates. We have been taking all of your feedback to heart. We appreciate all of your constructive criticism and are working to make improvements where we can. We are also incredibly grateful for the amazing support we have received. We are so thankful for this amazing community.
Regarding the early access release and the massive amount of feedback that has come, we are taking it all in and will do what we can to improve. We want to progress and update as quickly as possible but not to the extent that it affects the quality of the game as a whole. A roadmap for the next phase is in the works and we aim to have it ready and published by this week.
Expanding the team: New Unity programmer and interns
First and foremost, we know that we have a bottleneck in the programming department. We currently have only one Unity programmer, but we are glad to announce that we are expanding the team. We are looking to hire an additional Unity programmer and we are also open to bringing in programming interns. We are working on the applications as we speak, and we aim to have a new member on the team by the end of summer.
Why Astride was released so early in development
We know and recognize that Astride is premature in its early access launch and we understand that there has been a lot of confusion as to why we would release Astride in this early state. Developing Astride has not been an easy journey. There have been a lot of setbacks beyond our control, and we would like to address this.
After Green Horse joined the team in March, we initially decided to start fresh with the programming of the game as what had already been made was simply not viable. We revised our plans and made changes we believed, and still believe, were for the better. You can read more about this in Green Horse’s Patreon post which we have now opened for the public: https://www.patreon.com/posts/73889777
The initial release date of Astride’s early access was initially set for December 2022. However, this was made under different circumstances and with a smaller scope in mind. We have contracts that we are obligated to follow and we, unfortunately, cannot elaborate on this although we wish we could.
As we have received government funding, we have to follow the dates initially set. We were lucky enough to be able to extend the release date by 6 months without risking our funding. Earlier this year, we were granted more funding for the next phase starting in June. But Astride had to be released as an early access title on Steam to receive this funding. We would like to emphasize that if we could, we would have extended the release by another year. But to be able to ensure the future of Astride, we had to release now knowing that there would be heat about the lack of features.
We did our best to put out statements about the current state of Astride and what could be expected from the release, and we realize we should have done more to emphasize that Astride is still in a premature stage. For this, we apologize and we will do our best n to make up for it. We are staying as transparent as we possibly can. More updates about the game’s development, daily (Mon-Fri) work-in-progress posts and information is to be expected. The monthly devlog for May will come very soon but we had to prioritize other tasks for this time.
The Kickstarter trailer: Proof of concept
The Kickstarter trailer that was made last year, was essentially put together as a proof of concept. While everything was recorded in-game, it was not a well-functioning game. We understand how having “early in-game footage” in the video was misleading. When this trailer was made, it was early in-game footage, but as explained, we revised and restarted.
We realize that we should have switched out the Steam trailers consecutively as we developed the game. For example, when the horse creator update came to the testers, we should have made a trailer from that and replaced it immediately. We will follow up on this and produce trailers as the game is updated over time. As an added note, we are revising the Steam page and removing the Planned Key Features section as this turned out to be confusing. We are sorry for this mistake and we are doing all we can to revise and improve.
The following updates and what to expect
We heard your complaints about being limited to the arena, and for the upcoming patch, we have opened up the arena, added terrain collision, and you can now run around in the placeholder environment. Collisions with trees are also in our plans but it may not come with the first update. We are utilizing the Unity DOTS collisions and not the standard Unity collisions for this. Unity DOTS is a new framework made by Unity that enables us to write high performant and best-practice code in Unity. This enables us to push for more players in the game and have more performant servers that can, possibly, support up to a hundred players online at the same time. However, Unity has not yet converted all of its systems to DOTS, so we're waiting for them to deliver their "Open World" package that includes a whole new terrain workflow and using DOTS physics package. In the meantime, we will implement a temporary solution that is not quite as performant as we would like it to be, but it will be a good start for us to get a feel for how riding around in the terrain will feel like so that we can make proper animations for inclines and test out gameplay.
Music in the horse creator is on its way, as well as ambient sounds. A camera lock is also at the top of our priority list and should come with the next patch.
Remember to clock in on the development streams that are announced in #developer-livestreams. You’ll be able to see the game’s development firsthand and talk with Green Horse as he programs.
The human character: On its way
We know you were all disappointed that the character made no appearance in the early access release. While this was our intent, we had to restructure our priorities around the horse controller and striding. There are still a few animations missing for the character but this is something we are working on. We are however putting our main focus on the horse controller and animation system, but we will keep you updated on this.
Optimization: FPS cap and other improvements
Measurements will be taken in improving the game’s optimization. There will be more quality settings added along with more control over certain details, such as shadow range. We will be utilizing Amplify Impostors to create billboards of our assets that will help with optimization. We will use Bakery, a high-end GPU light mapper to bake our lights. This will also remove the odd lighting that is happening in the inside riding arena.
As we have moved on to a new phase, our technical artist is back and will look at optimizing the shader and the horse creation. All of the horse texture layers should be baked upon saving the created horse. This will reduce the amount of processing the horse does for every frame.
Controller guide
A controller guide and the option to change keybindings are also among our priorities. This should make it easier for AZERTY users as well as clear up the confusion around the horse controller and how to move around.
To conclude, we are doing all that we can to kick the development of Astride into full gear. We appreciate all of the feedback we have received and are actively working to make fixes and improvements where we can. We will do everything we can to give back to the community with every new update. Astride is a passion project, our dream, and is not something we will give up on. If you have any further questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Thank you again so much for your dedication!