The year 2024 is slowly coming to an end, and with that, we would like to update you on the roadmap that we planned for this year. A new roadmap for 2025 will come in January.
We started the journey by releasing an update containing sound effects, music, and ambiance at the start of April. Included in this update were also emotes for petting the horse while mounted, grey and tobiano patterns affecting the horse’s mane and tail, and hyper-pigmentation for the grey gene.
The next features in the roadmap weren’t released until September, but in the time before this, we released some quality-of-life patches that added a scoreboard, camera fixes and adjustments, memory usage reduction of up to 10GB, tweaked the striding visuals and guides, and fixed crashing issues and stuttering.
The September release included the overdue inventory along with quests. This made it possible to earn tack through quests and change tack through the inventory. While we weren’t able to implement the stable building as planned, we are aiming to release it before the end of the year and it is currently being worked on behind the scenes. We hope to include breeds at the same time, but we might need a little more time for those.
As you may have noticed, we have not mentioned the Horse AI that we had listed on the roadmap for this year. While this is a feature we have been working on, it still needs more time to be ready for release. The development has taken longer than we anticipated, but Astride has as of today not had any additional funding in the last year. Because of this, we have had to take on different side projects along the way so that our developers could still earn a living while working on Astride. We have also spent a lot of time writing these funding applications and going to pitches to present the game to potential investors. This has resulted in the development of Astride being slightly slowed down and led us to reprioritize certain features and updates.
But the year is not finished yet! We still have some goals for the remainder of the year. Before the end of the year, we hope to have an update that includes not only one but two new horse breeds. The first new breed will be the Norwegian Fjord horse, and the second breed, you may ask? That’s up to you! We will be having a poll on Patreon where you will be able to vote for the breed that you want to see implemented together with the Fjord. In addition to the new breeds, we will be adding more tack color variations and, if we have time, a few new tack items such as new bridle and leg protector variations. Lastly, we have been reworking the entire horse creator to fit better with the genetic aspect of Astride which also includes breed selection, height, face shape, and more!
We have also added a few features and things that were not on the roadmap but that we had personally wanted to have in the game sooner rather than later. Among these were the show jumping course system, multiple new courses, improvement to dressage, a save system, reins, and a new environment.
We are still all-in on the development of Astride and we are doing our best to stay afloat and keep giving you more content and updates to the game. Astride is still our passion project, and we will do anything in our power to see it through to the finish line. Finally, we want to thank you all for the incredible support you have given us through the development of Astride. We are grateful for every one of you.
