With early access right around the corner, the team is working hard to get the initial early access version of the game ready for the players. Game development is not a straight line from A to B, and some changes in priorities have been made since we last gave you information about early access in October of 2022. We would like to provide you with more detailed information about what to expect from the state of the game, the release date, the Steam page, the Discord server, and Patreon rewards when early access finally releases.
First off, what you are most excited about: Astride and its release. While we initially aimed for an April/March release, May is where we have landed. Our due date for filing papers about this development phase is the 28th of May, and we will need at least a week to get these in order. Based on this, we are expecting the game to release in mid-May. We cannot give you an exact date yet, as we are still working hard to develop the game, we will give you a date as soon as we have one.
From the start of the early access release of Astride, it will initially have limited features, which may cause the game to feel incomplete and empty, with less gameplay than what one would expect from a complete game. This brings us back to the point of early access. The point of early access is to release the game before it is finished to be able to (hopefully) help further fund the game. Not only this, but it gives us the chance to get feedback, opinions, and impressions of the game to give us the chance to improve it even further. Up until now, we have shared our game development with you, the wonderful community, and we have received such great feedback and help to improve the game fundamentally. Your opinions as players matter to us. This is why we opted for early access.
Moving on to features, we initially informed you that the game will be very barebones from the start. We mentioned a horse controller, a jumping mechanism with striding, and possibly a few dressage moves. This is still in our plan today. We said there will be no horse customization, grooming, feeding, and tacking up. Limited environment and world to ride in outside, as well as a few cross-country jumps. No player character and you would choose between a few horses from a menu. This is where we have made some changes.
The horse creator is very much a working feature at this point and will be available from the release of early access. The horse created by the player will be the horse they spawn in with when playing. The player character is still not confirmed - but we are currently working on the animations and hope to have a first prototype of the character in the game by launch. By prioritizing the human characters, the new horse animations and tweaking existing horse animations are currently on hold. But we believe this is the right choice, to hopefully be able to have the character in the game from the start.
While we would love to add more horse breeds to early access, we have prioritized programming around multiplayer, the character, and the show jumping system. But don’t worry, the new horse breeds will come with an update when it’s time. While we can’t give you a list of the order the planned horse breeds will be released, we can tell you that the first new breed will be the Norwegian Fjord horse. As the Norwegian Fjord horse’s staple look is a roached mane, this will give us the opportunity to test if changing the mane style will work as intended.
As for the environment, we are currently working on a solution where the players will be able to ride both inside a riding arena as well as outside in a larger outside arena. We hope to create more trees and an environment outside, but only time will show if we can manage to get it done in time for release. Since we won’t be using any store assets for our environment, creating these assets take time, and our 3D artist is currently working on refining and polishing the buildings.
The Steam page will get an overhaul as we get closer to the finished build. We will switch out all of the screenshots and provide a new gameplay trailer that matches the current state of the game. The description will also be updated to list the current features and what will be worked on during early access. We want the Steam page to be truthful to the current state of the game to avoid any confusion or upset. It is important for our team to stay transparent with you and the rest of the community about Astride. There will be created a few threads on the Steam discussion section of the store page. The threads planned so far are mega threads for bug reporting and mega threads for suggestions and ideas. This way it will be easier for the developers to get feedback about bugs, but it will also give the community an opportunity to share ideas with the team in one place.
The Discord server will mostly stay the same, but there will be new channels made for reporting bugs, troubleshooting, and possibly other community-related channels. The daily work-in-progress posts and general updates will not change on the Discord server. We recently started using the #updates channel for announcing Steam updates. This will also continue as we move into early access. Generally, the Discord server will stay the same.
The Patreon page will undergo a few changes. Mainly, the early access reward will be taken away and replaced. The bridle pendants will stay, and we will be working on adding your tier subscriptions to the game in form of a profile splash, text colors, and so on. This will not be a focus for the start of early access, but will most likely come with a later update when it is in our priorities. There will still be Patreon posts with behind-the-scenes for you all to dive into as before. Hopefully, we will be able to give you more Patreon posts soon, as we have been beating ourselves for the lack of posts recently. The playtesting reward that we currently have will stay and give players a chance to test out early access updates before they release. This way, we can sort out possible bugs and issues before the update is released to the public.
We are incredibly excited about the early access release, and we can’t wait to let you all play. We are definitely worried about complaints about the lack of features in the game at the start, but we hope to solve this by being open and transparent with you concerning the game’s development and our plan forward. Astride is not a project that will ever get abandoned. It is our passion project and we will stand by it. We are glad to have the Norwegian game industry on our side and we are incredibly grateful for the absolutely amazing community that has been built around Astride. We can’t wait to share Astride’s progress with you.