A new update is right around the corner, and our focus for March has been around this. Additionally, progress has been made on the inventory, dialogue, and quest systems, laying the groundwork for future updates.
Visual Updates & Creating UI
By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist
Hi, Maja here. Wow, March just flew by in an instance!
As some of you may have already noticed, I have given both the Astride Logo and Raidho Games logo a makeover. It was made back when Astride was just an idea, and some years have passed since then. I always kind of liked the Astride logo, but the main issue with it was that it was not very symmetric and hard to place in documents and such. And the lines were quite thin. The logo upgrade happened as I was preparing a style guide for Astride’s Social Media and documentation.
Of course the goal was to make it more symmetric and more compact with thicker lines as seen below. I also got some great pointers from a fellow 2D artist. The base idea for the logo is a Viking ship and a rune horse.
The Raidho logo just got some simple tweaks to make it more square and fuller.
Tirna asked me to create a painting or for one of the walls in the stable that we are preparing. So I’ve also been focused on that task this month. It’s currently featuring a Nordland horse and I can’t wait to continue on it further.
I've also had to step into new waters. I’m setting up the UI in Unity! And this is not just making the visual assets for it. Ourboros has been guiding me to learn the Unity UI toolkit. It’s been a bit confusing since I’m used to working more visually and not by text and in-engine, but it’s getting easier every day that I’m working on it. I’ve had a plan to change up the horse creator for a while. First, the player will choose a breed, then choose the coat color and genetics that are available for the chosen breed. They will then choose between available markings for the face and legs. Then choose mane and tail style. I’ve also prepared a page for stats and personality, though it won’t be available until the system for that is ready. At the end, there will be a “passport” page where the name, gender and age for the horse is chosen, and a summary of the choices that are made for the horse.
I also planned for a randomize button on each tab. I’ve made many icons for this too.
I am so excited to get my UI into the game. It will probably change here and there when it’s tested by the community, but it’s fun to make it either way.
Show Jumping Course & More
By Mathilde - Community Manager, 3D-artist
In March, I have been kind of all over the place trying to tie up loose ends, helping the rest of the team, and doing fixes here and there in preparation for the next update. Again, I've been spending some time on the Game Design Document so that features that are coming up in the development schedule are properly planned and explained for the programmers. This is very important to make sure that the development flows smoothly, avoiding as many hiccups as possible.
What I found the most exciting, however, was that I learned how to create new show jumping courses. Ouroboros has done some amazing programming which made creating show jumping courses a dream in addition to the fact that other developers can now create show jumping courses, ultimately relieving more time for the programmers to work on other features. It's still a work in progress, but it's definitely a start. I tried creating a course that used all of the jumps inside the riding arena and that the pathing between the jumps made sense. Some parts of the course can be a bit tricky, but I have really enjoyed both creating it and riding through it to test it out. For later, we (or mainly Ouroboros) will test out toggling between different show jumping courses and switching them out.
Above is an excerpt from the work-in-progress post I published on our Discord server. See the full video with better quality and framerate there.
I've also been helping out Maja with some of the genetic aspects of the new UI for the horse creator. Since I am the one sitting on the genetic "system" (at least the planned system for the game that is currently residing inside my head and in the Game Design Document), I help out where I can so that the UI matches how the genetics will work out.
As I mentioned earlier, I've been all over the place this month. I've done some tweaks here and there, changed up the splash art in the game menu, wrote a Patreon-post detailing the Dole horse, began preparation for making the Alter Real (finally), created some icons of markings, helped our technical artist with some horse color parameters, I've been writing the patch notes for the next update coming very soon, and I fitted all of the new tack to all of the current breeds that have been made. Fitting the tack is in preparation for the inventory system coming in Q2 of this year where players can change and remove the tack. I'm looking forward to how it will turn out!
Testing An Upgraded Environment
By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist
First and foremost, we want to thank NatureManufacture for crafting such an array of amazing asset packs! We've had our eyes on them for months, although initially, we felt they were too hyper-realistic for our vision at first. However, as our horses and human characters evolved, the nature assets we relied on started to feel overly stylized for our game. I can't wait to create exciting but also relaxing landscapes for you to explore, and we hope that you will enjoy taking photos with your horses here! We need to mention that this environment will only be accessible in our Itch test scene as we need to figure out a few details before we put this, or something similar to the Steam version.
This environment will also contain fields filled with a good variety of flowers. I'm also excited to share a neat little trick with you.
The bottom photos are in the same spot of the map. In the left picture, it's a but flat and isn't as lush as we imagined. However, in the right picture, we swapped out the ground texture for one brimming with heather and flowers. This means we can make the meadows look lush without having a huge impact on the performance.
We need to revisit numerous textures later to ensure everything matches seamlessly. Fortunately, I've worked on a strategy for that, and I believe it won't consume as much time. Some of you may already know that I've been working on the new stable modules, and they're designed with this level of quality in mind. I also want to mention that the water in the Itch test scene is currently glitchy and very much temporary—we're working on fixing it.
At this stage, there isn't much more I can tell you about our environment since it's just in the test scene. But trust me, I've got a lot of ideas and inspirations bubbling up, ready to be put together to create Eldheim!
Since there isn’t much more I can share, other than pictures, Let’s have a look!
This is from a forest trail and a test of a rockier mountain.
This is a little blooper that happened when the sun broke. But it is kind of a mood, don’t you think?
And just for fun, keep in mind that this is just a photo edit, with the horse and rider form another shader and light setting than the environment behind it, but it is just to have somewhat of an idea where we are going with our visual style.
Horse Petting & Hair
By Marius - Animator
After I made the interacting animations last month, I had to set up a system to play the animations while also not disturbing the riding animation. Luckily I have already dabbled in this before so it wasn’t too hard to get into again. What I needed was to set up a layer mask; a layer mask is for masking out parts you don’t want to be affected and is used in other programs as well like photoshop. The difference in Unity is that what you decide is what bones on the rigg should be affected by the animation on this layer. This opens up having animations that only affect the fingers or in this case the upper body.
After making the mask and testing if it worked as it should, I had to program a system to activate that animation layer and play the animation with a button press. While making this system I also found some settings that would be essential to make the interaction work with more flexibility, this makes the animation layer blend with the base layer instead of overriding it completely; opening up the possibility to have it work on other animations than the idle animation. Though it will clip with only that in some animations it does make it more flexible. Doing it while turning is a surefire way to break the animation as of now though, haha.
Going more into system work, I wanted to start making it possible to change between genders. While it is not possible in the game yet and still have some quality checks to go through before programming it into the game fully. I made a script that made it possible to change it in the game engine, though there were some problems along the way that got me to look at the way I exported the models and animation anew. After a lot of troubleshooting and searching the web, it turns out that while exporting I also exported the dependencies I had in Blender. Dependencies that I use to test the blend shapes in Blender and in animations, but also do not work in Unity. I falsely believed that since they don’t work in Unity they would not be in the export… I was wrong; the dependency information just locked up all the blend shapes to be reset at every frame, so the blend shapes could never be changed and stay during gameplay.
If anyone is in need to know what I am talking about it is the “relative” check box in the shape keys tab in object data properties. It should be unchecked if you have drivers in your blend shapes.
Within the team we were pretty unanimous in thinking that the baldness of our character had gone on for too long. I tried to find the original file from our character modeler, but could not find it among all the backups I have (you can never have enough backups), so I asked him and got it anew and started working on it. He also had made some improvements since last time, as it was now made with the helmet in mind.
After I added it to the model something weird happened though. All character animations played at half the speed. We could not fathom what the problem could be. So I looked through the last few versions and updates we made within our project and found out that for some reason it was the hair model that did it; not code, not animation information, but the hair. I tried exporting it into the character file again, but it had the same problem. A note here is that usually I export in .FBX format as it keeps more information during transfer. So I had a thought, what if I export it as an .obj into Blender instead as .obj is a little more rudimentary. To my surprise and relief it worked, even though I still don’t know exactly why it happened.
Next up and what I am still currently working on is a system to change the horses’ breed. A lot of the basic system is similar to how the system I made for gender adjustments, but a lot more complicated as I need it to be forwards compatible. Though, sadly, it is not functional as of yet, so there is not much to show at the moment.
Big Fixing & Polishing
By Green Horse - Programmer
March was a month of fixing bugs, polishing, and getting a build ready for release. Thanks to a group of Patreon playtesting heroes, who keep joining my livestreams, I’ve had my hands full fixing bugs that they kept on discovering. I’ve been settling into my routine of streaming three times per week and I might try to do more Patreon-related development because of how quickly I got feedback on changes and how much that helped with the development. We’re incredibly lucky to have such a dedicated community to help us out.
Between fixing bugs and everything I’ve been researching other games like Half Life 2 on how to handle interaction of physical objects. They seem to have a pretty solid design on picking up and carrying physical objects so I want to implement that design in Astride.
Dialogue & Quest System
By Ouroboros - Programmer
March has ended up being a bit of everything. I have worked on the inventory, code for UI, dialogue system, bug fixes and tweaks, show jumping courses, and I have started some preliminary work on the quest system. The inventory is coming along nicely, but there is still work to be done before we are ready to release the first version. The base for the dialogue system is done, but it won’t see much use until we get further with the quests.
Test of loading and displaying dialogue.
When it comes to the quest system, I am trying to stay a few steps ahead. It won’t be released until autumn, but it is a complex system that will require a lot of work to get right. It needs information from other systems (inventory, dialogue, dressage, show jumping, etc) to keep track of the progression of quests. It should also be relatively simple to make and add quests without having to change any code. This is easier said than done since a quest could be anything from “win the show jumping championship” to “pick up an eldhest”. Adding to that, one quest can have multiple steps to it, and even prerequisites that have to be done for the quest to become available at all.
The preliminary work for quests includes planning how to implement everything so that it works the way we want. This mostly comes down to how the different parts should be split into components and systems, what entities are needed, what data the different parts will need access to, and making sure it will be possible to add to it later without everything breaking. It is also important to have a good idea of how the quest system will be implemented when doing more work on the inventory and dialogue, since they have to be able to communicate with the quest system when relevant events happen. There’s a lot to take into consideration at every step, but I always enjoy a challenge.
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