Sep 29, 2023

Astride - Raidho Games

September has flown by and we are back with a monthly development log for you. We are putting all of our efforts into this next big update where the new environment and the character will be introduced. After this bigger update that has taken a bit longer, we will push more frequent, but smaller updates for Astride.

Rini, Andrea, and Noah

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

This month's priority for me has been drawing NPC concept art as well as doing application preparations. I started with Rini’s art update. I only shared a little image of her riding boots in the Discord channel until now. I’ve already written a post about creating an NPC from the thought process where I’ve shown more of her current splash art. And guess what, I finished it not too long after that post. So here she is. The new and updated Rini! I really like her design.

Next up was Andrea. I changed her design quite a lot. I wasn’t that pleased with her original design and wanted a more simple and traditional Viking look for her. She is someone who likes to dress up in those types of clothes. Which is very cool. I gave her a green apron dress and a white underdress with fluffy arms. I thought the green color represented her profession well, and it was a very nice color contrast to Oskar’s orange fur. I kept the mountain boots she was wearing in the original since she’s often out in the forest and mountain collecting herbs and berries. Her leather details are now black instead of brown. Which kind of suits her piercing look. And since she is a cat lady, I had to give her a cat liner. Here is her final design.

I’m so happy that I finally am able to update the older NPCs. However, there are many new NPCs that are just waiting to be drawn. One of them is Noah. I will show you a bit more of his design here. Note that it is still a work in progress.

The feature I really like about him is his heterochromia eyes. I think it looks so cool and beautiful. I’ve gone through many color palettes and ideas for him before I landed on yellow, black, and white as his main colors. His role in Astride is probably not what you expect him to be. He will be an equestrian, and in more detail: The dressage rival! I have also prepared his horse’s design. I really can’t wait for you to learn his story. I am so excited to show you more in the future.

So this has been my September. I hope you like their designs. More NPCs will come later. I have a long list. I wish you all a great autumn season.

The Percheron and Icelandic horse

By Mathilde - Community Manager, 3D-artist

As usual, I’ve been spending most of my time working on the horses. We have a list of various breeds that need to be created and ready for implementation when we get further into the gameplay whereas players will be able to choose breeds. I’ve finally been able to get into a workflow that I think works well when creating new horses. I try my best to make the horses feel different and unique while I still have to keep them in the same mesh and use the same textures. My solution to this has been to recreate normal maps/detail textures for each new breed. This means that, essentially, each breed should look a little different when it comes to muscles, tendons, and other small details such as wrinkles and crevices around the mouth/nose and eyes. Having to use the same mesh is very restricting, but I do hope that I can make the best out of it. It will definitely be worth it in the long run if we can visualize our ideas with this.

Without going too deep into the subject, I’ll move on to the breeds I’ve been working on this month. The Percheron has had its final touches and this time we have two body shapes for one breed. The Percheron breed has two standards, so to speak. The original French type Percheron has shorter legs and a bulkier body, while the American type Percheron has longer legs and a more slim body while still keeping a heavy and high-set neck. Creating these differences was a fun challenge, and all of the feedback received during this process was incredibly helpful and constructive. We had a blast going through hundreds of photos of different Percheron horses and discussing their conformation. This is a positive while working on new breeds for Astride, learning about their conformation, history, and distinctiveness.

Here are the differences between the French and American type Percheron. While I would love to make them even more different from each other, I do have a lot of restraints due to rigging. Since all horses use the same skeleton, I can’t make changes that will make the horse move oddly with the rid and skinning. In retrospect, I need to make the hooves of the American type a little bit larger still, as the breed is known for its massive hooves. The French-type Percheron will be smaller than the American-type, so this GIF doesn’t give them the full differentiation here. This is, after all, a breed that can range from around 155cm tall to 195cm tall (if we exclude the record-breaking horses, like Dr. Le Gear, who was 213cm tall according to sources).

When I was happy with both Percherons, I moved on to the next horse on the list. We had a poll running on our Discord server where we asked which breeds the community wanted first. This is where the Percheron won the race. After the poll was closed, I made a smaller poll asking if the community wanted polls for each new breed selection, or if they wanted us to base the order on the original poll. The latter was the most voted on, which made it simple! The Icelandic horse was the runner-up in the original poll, so I moved on and started working on this breed.

I’ve previously created the Icelandic horse if some of you can remember back in early 2022 when we had a few breeds in the works. The reason we’ve decided to rework the new breeds is simply because the previous ones all had different meshes, UV maps, and rigs. This created a lot of unnecessary work for me and our rigger/animator, so we decided to use only one mesh that fits with our rig. To reduce the workload and in return have a more effective workflow.

Back to the Icelandic horse, I knew this was going to be a challenge. Not only because the Icelandic horses have such vastly different builds within the breed, but also because I have an Icelandic myself. And he is definitely not a standard Icelandic when it comes to conformation. Thankfully, it’s a popular breed and I knew where to get photos of the right angles of breeding horses. I, of course, had to use some references from my own horse for this one, so the wrinkles on the muzzle and around the eyes are created from his references. That way I could have a small piece of him in the game.

Oh, and don’t worry about the small head size this model is displaying. The head sizes will be done through the rig and animations. So smaller horses, like the Icelandic horse, will eventually get a tad bigger heads when implemented into the game. This also showcases something I’ve been working on on the side; the splash gene. Icelandics are known for all of their wonderful colors and when the Icelandic is introduced, so will their unique genes. SW1, which is responsible for creating the splash pattern, will be introduced alongside the breed when it is ready. I have a few patterns made that I cannot wait for you to see. Ranging from minimal (solid coat with a half-blue eye) to maximum (almost completely covered in the white pattern).

All in all, I feel satisfied with the variety of the current finished horse breeds and I’m excited to start working on the other upcoming breeds. The next breed on the list is the Arabian which I have been looking forward to creating. The Arabian horses definitely have their distinct features which I hope I am able to bring forward in the model. Stay tuned!

Tack updates

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

During this recent period, my focus hasn't been on the most thrilling aspects of my work. Instead, I've been occupied with various behind-the-scenes tasks. However, amidst all this, I managed to find some time for important updates.

One of the notable improvements has been in our bridle designs. The 3D model has received a significant upgrade, but the most substantial improvement lies in the ease of adjusting these bridles to suit different breeds. Additionally, we've revamped the leather used in our products. Although the colors may seem familiar, the leather now exudes a more high-end quality, distinguishing it from cheaper alternatives. All our bridles come with metal details available in both brass and steel finishes.

Not too long ago, we introduced a major update to our dressage saddles. Following this, I've also developed new saddle pads to complement these saddles perfectly. Furthermore, our horse boots and wrappers have undergone updates to ensure that our products continue to meet the highest standards of quality and performance.

Movement, textures, and deforms

By Marius - Animator

The last months have had a lot of differing types of work on my part, as I usually try to not switch between work types too often. From my typical animation work to my rare texture work (not really my area).

One thing I am normally adamant about is to not do animation (or other life-imitating arts) without reference, as no matter how good you get you will always do better with reference. But there are times you just have to do what you can with what you have. Luckily when working on human characters you always have yourself as a reference, though with movement, there is some trouble with observing without overthinking. Anyway, we have been a little too busy the last few weeks for me to be comfortable dragging someone along and away from their own work to film animation references. Normally I would just find a good reference on YouTube or something, but there are some movements that you generally don’t see, and strafing while crouched is one of those movements I couldn’t really find outside of other games.

In the end, I ended up using the basic crouching forward animation as a base for the strafing. By that, I mean that I duplicated the basic crouch and added sideways movement, and tried to place the feet according to my own foot placement when I started sneaking around the office. Yes, I felt like an idiot.
There was a lot of back and forth between testing the movement and animating. Trying to mimic my movement by deconstructing weight placement, hip placement, rotation and a lot more by feel is not easy. And underlines what I told earlier about how it isn’t easy to do without overthinking. After a lot of back and forth I got to a movement I felt happy enough with to continue on other animations.

For a long while, the masculine texture has been as stand-in as it could be. There were missing texture maps that made most of the body unusable. We use different texture maps for different parts of the body, so when some of them were missing we used other maps we had as a placeholder.

Normally I don’t touch the textures outside from updating the ones I have with new ones I get sent, but back when I first made the blend between feminine and masculine I made a system for blending the textures too. Now this system is not the one we will use in the game, but something I have in Blender to be able to switch textures easily based on need. Anyway, there were some lingering problems in that system I had to fix as it broke about every texture change I did.

After it got pushed higher up on priority, we got those missing textures and finally could replace the placeholders. To give an example of how bad some of the placeholders were: the whole torso had the face texture. It gave the approximate correct skin tone where it mattered, but hidden by the clothes; the character used to have a second face on the stomach when it was masculine.

For a long time, the hands and fingers have been categorized as “good enough for now” as game hands normally don’t need that many options, and we haven’t got to any animations that have needed that many finger movements yet. Well, after I tried to copy a pose from Maja’s artwork, which included a hand pose, I had to lift the hand deformation way up in priority, for they were horrible. This led to a long study of hands and deformations. There will come a "part one" of this study as a Patreon post next week.

In summary: Hands are weird!

I want to add that the gif below is not the end result of the deformation fixes. I got good feedback on Discord on stuff I had overlooked or hadn’t had time to fix correctly before I had to post work in progress. Most of the issues are fixed now though.

As I am prepping the character to be added into the game I need to add the movement options that players need access to. One of the movements that are easily overlooked is backward, in a lot of cases it is just the forward movement played backward since it is close enough. I don’t want to do that, though. Mostly because our approximate realism does not give way to that type of shortcut. As a start, it is a good idea though. Start by duplicating the forward walk and reverse it, then adjust as needed.

The gif below is a “first” iteration of the backward walk, which is why it looks a little stiff. After this iteration, I did drag someone away to film references, especially since backward walking is more nuanced changes rather than big adjustments… after reversing the base walk.

While filming references it was back to sneaking around the office, only backwards this time.
Originally I did have the same looking backward pose as the walking backward pose but after a small talk with Green Horse, I got reminded that head movement will most likely be controlled by the player input and camera angle and not only the animation information per se.

So far all crouching animations have been a challenge. Crouching movement differs widely depending on how low you crouch and even if height isn’t a factor the weight distribution changes are more pronounced to compensate for generally slower movement as well as a lower center of mass.

Still some stuff that needs adjustments like the knee jerk when the foot is lifted and some weird arm movement on the right arm, but otherwise it is good.

Collisions and controllers

By Green Horse - Programmer

Collision has been an interesting challenge to tackle. I’m happy to say that it’s working, although it’s not perfect yet. We can now collide with the terrain, trees, rocks, and everything else. After getting the character controller working I retrofitted the controller to work with the horse, so it’s actually a human character controller with the will of a horse. Even if it sounds silly I think it’s a good move in order to reduce the amount of work on the controllers. Eventually, a horse “AI” will be built around this controller allowing it to avoid cliffs, trees, and other extremely dangerous things such as puddles and plastic bags.

Interaction is an essential part of any video game. I’ve made a generic interaction system that we can use for all kinds of interaction in the game. Interaction such as mounting/dismounting, picking up objects, toggling switches, opening doors, and much more. Since Astride will be a physics-based multiplayer game I’m very excited for the opportunities this enables. My goal is for players to interact with the world like in the roleplaying servers you would find in games like Garry’s Mod. At the moment, only mounting and dismounting the horse is in the game, but I can’t wait to add physical objects to goof around with.

We now have extensive logging of what’s going on at all times so that it’s easier to track down bugs and fix them.

A new start

By Ouroboros - Programmer

It has been a month since I started working on Astride, and time sure has raced by! I have read a lot of code in order to learn the ins and outs of the game. To further familiarize myself with the project, I have been working on some smaller tasks. These include some tweaks to the camera to make it ready for the player character, making improvements to show jumping, and writing some behind-the-scenes code to make development a bit easier for us going forward. I still have some ways to go, but both Astride and I are steadily making progress.

Please be aware that the content featured in these devlogs represents an ongoing work in progress and may be subject to further changes. We are committed to continuously developing and refining our game. To stay informed about the latest updates and connect with the rest of the Astride community, we invite you to join our dedicated Discord server community here! For additional information about Astride, please visit our official website.