Einar & courses
By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist
August for me has been busy, since I’ve done mostly administrative work throughout the entire month. But I had some time to finish Einar’s updated art and do some UI design. Einar was one of the very first NPCs announced to Astride. The elderly man who will assist the player with horse property. His very first art piece was drawn in early 2022 + his portrait for the Kickstarter campaign. That art was drawn in a short amount of time and my skill level has significantly increased since then. I did some changes, but stayed mostly true to the original design. He is kind of a very stereotypical Norwegian grandpa.
I’ve designed more courses for show jumping and dressage. I have also planned a few cross country courses that will appear later. Some of the courses will be available in the next update. And they are very fun to ride.
Training courses
By Mathilde - Community Manager, 3D-artist
This month, I worked on making show jumping more exciting. And by exciting, I mean more courses to ride through and variation in the obstacles. After Ouroboros made the feature to switch out courses in the arena, I started working on multiple show jumping courses for the players to test themselves with. With help from Maja's templates, we now have many new courses to test skills and beat time records, but I also reintroduced the training course that has been available in the game for a while already.
In addition to the new courses, I was tired of all of the jumps being so similar with only pole colors to differentiate them. This is when I started implementing some new jump standards and poles. In the image above, you can see an example of the new standards and poles. Hopefully, this new addition will help bring more life to the show jumping courses. I've also added some black tripods to the courses. These are supposed to imitate the lasers that mark the start and end of a round, counting the exact time for each equipage to ride through the course.
Another task I gave myself this month was to replace all of our cross country jumps. The log jumps from the current build on Steam were too stylized to fit into the environment, so I made some new jumps using assets that belong to the new environment. While they might not be the prettiest jumps, they will serve as a placeholder until we make new ones that fit better and look like actual cross country jumps.
Finally, I wanted to work on something that has been a wish from the community for some time. A lot of our players enjoy training and working with their horses in the arena, and I noticed that players were missing a crucial element; cones. With some help from Ouroboros to add a script to make them interactable, we now have cones that the players can grab and place freely around the world. I am very excited to see how they will be used. Hopefully, you will be able to place them a bit better than I did!
Tack, animations & more
By Marius - Animator
Dividing tack for equipability
I already had made a script earlier that makes tack equipable, but I had made the error to group together some tack objects that made it impossible to match tack to your liking. While it is a minor task in the grand scheme of things I feel it is an important one.
The tack objects in question were the saddle and saddle pads. When I originally added them to the game they were added as a single object, so if you wanted a different saddle pad color or type you couldn’t without changing the saddle. So I had to go in and change it to be different objects, especially since we needed it to work correctly for the inventory system that was going to be made this month.
Breed selection
It will not be available in the game yet, but I have worked quite a bit on a breed selection script. So far it only works for purebreds, but the end goal is that it can evolve into the foundation for breeding mechanics. But it still has a few problems that need to be addressed before it is usable.
Character deformation
While testing the mane movement we noticed that there were some weird deformation on the human character. Apparently it was because of my setup when exporting, that made it apply corrective deformation from specific animations to all animations under export. I only had time to do the simplest fix as the optimal way to fix it would take too much time as of now.
Smoothing out mane animation
While I did mane animation simulation in June some of the animations were quite jittery as simulations tend to be. This made it so that I had to take some time to smooth out the animation bakes.
Forelock animation
While working on smoothing the mane animations I noticed something I forgot to do in June: the forelock. I apparently managed to completely ignore the forelock when I initially worked on the mane. So I had to simulate the forelock in the same fashion as I made the mane animation. Luckily the forelock is only one chain of rigging bones, which makes the cleanup 6 times easier and way faster.
Sound of hooves
While we have had hoof sounds in the game for a while now, I had to go in and change it for the next update. This is because we have a new environment, and a new environment means new texture setup. Because when I originally made the hoof code, I mapped the sounds to the environment's texture ID; the problem with doing that is that it breaks as soon as there is a new order of textures.
When texturing the environment, each texture behaves as layers in standard image editing software. Texture ID is the order these layers are set up in, so when there is a new environment (canvas) that order will be something different. Good chance that it will be different textures too. Because of this the hooves did not make any sound in the new environment.
So I had to convert the code to read texture names instead of ID’s. Which sounds easy, until you realize Unity reads the texture names differently from how it displays them; at least from what I could gather. So there was a little trial and error testing.
Polish & bug squashing
By Ouroboros - Programmer
There is always a lot to do before an update. Features have to be polished, adjustments need to be made, and bugs have to be hunted down and squashed. While I try to test as much as I can while implementing a new feature, it is difficult to do so in multiplayer. As such, it was no surprise that was where most of the bugs showed themselves. It doesn’t help that I still struggle a bit with multiplayer programming, but I’m getting better all the time. I have worked for Raidho Games for a year now and while I feel like I’ve got a handle on most things, there is still a lot to be learned. But that is also part of the fun.
During August, I have fixed colliders and adjusted LOD in the new environment, cleaned up a bit in the assets we have, swapped out the old dressage system for the new one, made some minor changes to show jumping, fixed some bugs with the UI, fixed some bugs with the inventory, fixed some bugs with show jumping, fixed some bugs with changing tack, did some polishing of the course selection UI, polished the inventory, and set up inventory items and quests. That’s more or less it. By now, it’s probably pretty obvious what is going to be in the update.
I’ll end my part of the devlog by leaving you with a short preview of the course selection.
Welcome, Darline
By Darline - Internship
Hi dear Astride community, I'm really excited to introduce myself! My name is Darline, I'm 21 years old, I come from Germany, and I'm currently training to become a game designer. In addition to my apprenticeship, I work on many creative projects. I'm an illustrator for various book covers and for children's books, a VFX artist, and cutter for the German YouTuber "Julien Bam", an illustrator for the TCG "Bluthelden", and much more. When I'm not busy with my apprenticeship, internship or my projects, I like to spend time with my friends, look after my cat or play handball.
I've always loved playing horse games since I was a child and when I discovered Astride, I immediately fell in love with the game. I have to do a 3-month internship for my apprenticeship and I asked the team of Raidho Games if it would be possible to do my internship there. Since the beginning of August, I've had the opportunity to start my internship. I was given a very warm welcome! I've had so much fun so far and I'm looking forward to the rest of the internship! The team is really great and is always there to help and advise me!
A little about my tasks: I am mainly responsible for 3D props, which means that I create small objects that fill the environment a little. They are not necessarily important for the storyline or quests, they are just nice to look at and contribute to the environmental storytelling. I have studied Norwegian culture a bit, for example to create the pattern of a Norwegian coffee cup or delicious waffles with cheese, jam and sour cream (I have never seen such a combination of waffles before XD). I have also looked into the old runic script. Maybe you can find some objects with the old runes in the game when the objects have been implemented. I have also drawn concepts for clothing or tack sets and also made some Eldhest designs. That's it from me so far. I wish you a wonderful day and have fun playing Astride. <3
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