Oct 27, 2023
Astride - Raidho Games
October has come to an end and thus it is time for another monthly devlog. This month has been quite exciting with more development progress and pitching. The prototype of Astride is coming along nicely and the character is being implemented into the game engine.
My PC decided to act up this month. It was very slow to start and programs took forever to open. So I went over all my files to double-check that I had backup of everything on an external server. I uploaded the missing files, and it was very smart of me to do that. A few days later it lost the connection to one of the hard drives. So I had to order new parts for it. Luckily, I have my tablet to draw on in the meantime.
Then we got the exciting news that we got invited to pitch for NFI (which is a huge part of the application process there). So we prepared a presentation and went to Oslo the following Wednesday to do the presentation. I was very relaxed until there were 10 min left, then I got a little bit nervous. But the pitch went well and now we are waiting for their response. Fingers crossed for a positive answer!
In Norway, we have something in the countryside called "seter" which is an old mountain farm (or forest) that is only used during the summertime. The farm animals can enjoy fresh grass and sun all summer there. During the winter, spring, and autumn the animals will remain on the main farm, and then when summer arrives, they are moved to "the seter". People will stay there for the summer to take care of the animals. This can be used for cows, sheep, goats, horses, etc. I don't know how common the use of seter is today, but when I was a child it was used everywhere where I grew up.
So this is a small example of how a seter can look like. It's often a small timber house and maybe a tiny farm building. They do not need a large farm building since the animals will remain outside for that time period. Since Astride is based on Scandinavian environment, we have to put a seter or two in there. I wanted to have a river in there as well, since they are very common in the mountain area. I drew this seter with some cute sheep. Also, I could not find an English word for seter, so for now I just call it that. Some people in my area even pronounce it with an Æ (Sæter).
In preparation for creating the Arabian horse, I decided to make a new mane style that would fit it. And what style could I make other than the classic, flowy mane with a long bridle path? There definitely are more mane, tail, and forelock types I would like to explore but that will be at a later time. We also have to make sure that all of the parameters with the hair work, like matching white patterns (such as tobiano) and checking that the dun gene is properly displayed in the engine.
Before putting more effort into one workflow, it’s important to make sure that everything works the way we have intended so that there are no wasted hours on features that might not work as intended. I am, however, very excited to see if we can get the different genes and patterns to work alongside the hairs. Especially the tobiano patterns affecting the hairs will bring much more detail into the horses and make them look more natural.
Moving on from mane styles, I started working on the base model to resemble the Arabian horse breed. This is a breed that I have been looking forward to creating due to its unique characteristics. I have to say, I had a lot of fun making this breed and it was nice to work on a much lighter type of horse compared to the last few I’ve been creating. I did spend some time researching the different strains of Arabians and landed on the Egyptian Arabian due to it being the oldest of the bunch.
I wanted to make sure that we properly represented the breed’s characteristics while not exaggerating them too much. This was especially around the dish of the face as some modern Arabian horses have extreme concave nose ridges. While there will be variations of convex/concave nose ridges in all of the horses in Astride with the help of blend keys, the base model of the Arabian shows a moderately concave nose ridge. However, players can breed for a more concave or convex nose ridge.
Here you can see a comparison of the three different stages of developing a new breed. First is the high-poly mesh with all of the details, and then comes the bake where the high-poly mesh is projected on top of a low-poly mesh, and additional details are added. The final stage is when the textures are exported and added to the new breed in Blender for further polishing and tweaking.
Since I’ve been working on new breeds for quite some time now, I decided to pause that for a little bit to focus on polishing textures, creating more textures that will represent the different genetics of the new breeds, and adding to the colors we already have. As you might have noticed in the last devlog, I worked on the splash gene that comes with the Icelandic horse. I might show more of those textures in the next devlog, but so far they have been kind of behind the scenes as I’ve had other things to show.
I did, however, dive back into the bay/buckskin agouti factor. In the current horse creator, players are able to pick a few options in the “agouti” section that affect how the black pigments restrict the coat on the horse’s legs. I’ve been wanting to add more layers to this feature where the players could pick the pigment restriction on the ears, body, and legs separately, but I made a design choice that would cut down on work efforts and make the feature available sooner. This means that there will be one texture that affects the ears, body, and legs as one with more options instead. So far, I’ve created a few options, but with time there will be more to choose from.
I feel like this was the best choice to make as it simplifies the creator while not completely restricting the feature. This means that players can pick the color shade separately from the darker points. The agouti options will be available for the buckskins as well, meaning that you could potentially have some really dark buckskin horses. There might come some restrictions later that make it less likely for a buckskin to have such dark coats, but that is also something we could survey.
As you can see in the GIF above, I have already implemented and tested the agouti pigment restriction and it seems to be working well. There were some issues with the bitrate of the textures as there have been set restrictions in Unity, but we will be working around that to solve the issue. The pigment restriction textures will definitely get more love and attention (and many more variations) later down the line. But for now, I’m glad that it’s working as intended and the people can finally have their dark/seal bay horses.
We put the horse creator scenes in the riding arena temporarily, but it didn't really have the right background. I started working on creating one, but the first few tries were kind of boring and didn't quite have the vibe we wanted. So, I decided to go for something more inspiring.
Turns out, we loved the new background so much that we've decided to turn it into a little horse market. We're thinking of having 12 horses on rotation there (daily or weekly, but we'll see how often works best). The building's design is inspired by these cool old Norwegian structures called "stabbur" from the 1700s.
The big news is we now have a map! It took a bunch of behind-the-scenes work and some back-and-forth, but we've got it. The map will be one of my main focuses for a while, including assets that will be made to give life to Eldheim. but we've got more plans up our sleeves. Stay tuned for an upcoming Patreon blog post where I'll spill the beans on how I made this map.
A lot of the preparations have been to update the riding animations as they have been pushed to the back in favor of the horse animations for quite a while. That is because of a system I made that makes animating the rider very fast when the horse animations are in place, it still took longer than first anticipated though.
The next week went to a little of everything with different minor tweaking, updating and baking all riding animations. As there were very little specific to show, I found a gif with the update to the hand from last month; addressing some feedback I got that made me take some time to have a hand study.
Finally I got to start implementing properly into Unity. One of the first things I did that I can only do in game engine is learn how to and make an animation override for where you look. Now the character is ready for the programmers to make them look at all the stuff you look at (within limits of course), by following your camera movement.
What is cool is that this affects all animations, so if you are riding, walking, running or crouching the character will look where you do!
I had most of the animations to have a full movement set when not riding. While some are not complete yet they are easy to replace with placeholders by modifying existing animations… The jump is not one of them.
I had started on it earlier, but other work got in the way; and I was uncertain of how I wanted to “build” the jump in the animator. The animator is what controls the order and the transitions between animations in Unity. I started by scrapping the old animation and filmed myself jumping. Using that as reference I made a new jumping animation.
The above picture was never posted in our Discord, but was originally meant to be a work in progress post until I managed to implement it into unity and test it properly. It was never meant to be continuously looped like this, as well as it is missing a proper landing animation; so it looks a little silly.
With the jumping animation I could make the prototype for the movement animation system in the animator. This included making parameters that can be used to control the animation triggers. I also found how I want to build the jump animation.
By building the jump I mean how to segment it. You would think I could just have a full jump animation from lift off to landing and call it a day, but it isn’t that simple. That would work if all terrain was flat and there was nothing you could jump up and down. But what if you jump down a hill or up an incline? That would drastically change when the landing would occur. So I have to segment it into lift off, free fall and landing, to give us control over the animations and make leeway to when the landing animation plays.
I also added a small flavor animation to the free fall to make the character more panicked the longer they are in the air. Normally I would wait with such flavor animations, but it wouldn’t take too much time and seemed like a fun assignment that could help liven up the animations.
We switched to the new input system in Unity in preparation for a rebind keys feature in the options menu. We also want to make it in combination with a larger menu update later, but we might add in a temporary solution before that. The current menu setup is something I hacked together with my limited Unity Canvas and UX design skills, so I’m looking forward to a proper menu pass.
An animated character controller has been implemented with a jump, crouch, sprint and head movement to indicate where you’re looking. I’ve yet to figure out how to increase the slope limit so you can run up steep hills at the moment. We will do multiple passes on the character animations, shaders and model but for now I’m just happy to have a character to move around with.
The horse now also moves using a character controller. That means it can run off cliffs, bump into stuff and move with the terrain. The first version on steam was a compromise update because so many people wanted to escape the containment of the fences around the arena, so I deleted a single fence and “hacked” in a way to stick the player on top of the terrain. Looked absolutely bonkers insane but it was meant to be a temporary solution until we got the physics sorted out.
I’ve never felt more comfortable with the project as I am now. There’s proper logging, error handling and a step-by-step connection procedure to hook into. With proper packages for each part of the code we are able to get a nice flat foundation to build the game upon. With the new programmer we’re also able to cover more ground at the same time so I’m no longer the bottleneck when it comes to programming.
I have started implementing dressage, and the two first iterations are done. It might not look very impressive, but it will serve as a base for further work. The first iteration included the player being able to interact with an object to start a dressage course. They then had to ride from point to point that were shown on the ground as colored circles. There wasn’t much to it besides that, but it set a standard for how a course is set up, and how the player can start it and progress through it.
The second iteration added to this with a time limit to reach each point, as well as the different points requiring specific gaits. The colored circles on the ground were updated to show time left (circle slowly shrinking) and desired gait (different color for different gait). The first point in a course is special in that it has no time limit or gait, and it is only when the player enters this first point that the course starts for real. I have yet to implement a score system, but I have made room for one.
The dressage is very much a work in progress at this point. We are still settling on how the score should be calculated, how close we can get it to real-life dressage, and if there should be any time limits or not. The most important thing is what feels right and is fun to play. While we have an idea of what we want, we really just have to implement and test to find out what works. I have started working on the third iteration, and not to create a huge hype or anything, but it will contain curves!
In addition to the work I have done on dressage, I have also had to spend some time reading code, documentations, and math. I won’t bore you with the details, but one of the results of all this studying is the “dismount check”. When the player wants to dismount the horse, the “dismount check” makes sure it is safe, and reasonable, to do so. It defaults to dismounting on the left side, but will choose the right side if the left is no good. If neither side is fit for dismounting, then the player will have to find another place to dismount. This is to avoid any…accidents.
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.
Pitch, computer problems, and art
By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist
I started this month by drawing an Arabian since we have been working on the breed lately. And wow! The Arabian horse’s bodies are funny to draw. They are kind of banana-shaped compared to other breeds. What I mean by that is that they are quite curved and very slim at the same time. They are so beautiful! I cannot wait to get this beautiful and fast breed in the game. The 3D models look very good. My PC decided to act up this month. It was very slow to start and programs took forever to open. So I went over all my files to double-check that I had backup of everything on an external server. I uploaded the missing files, and it was very smart of me to do that. A few days later it lost the connection to one of the hard drives. So I had to order new parts for it. Luckily, I have my tablet to draw on in the meantime.
Then we got the exciting news that we got invited to pitch for NFI (which is a huge part of the application process there). So we prepared a presentation and went to Oslo the following Wednesday to do the presentation. I was very relaxed until there were 10 min left, then I got a little bit nervous. But the pitch went well and now we are waiting for their response. Fingers crossed for a positive answer!
In Norway, we have something in the countryside called "seter" which is an old mountain farm (or forest) that is only used during the summertime. The farm animals can enjoy fresh grass and sun all summer there. During the winter, spring, and autumn the animals will remain on the main farm, and then when summer arrives, they are moved to "the seter". People will stay there for the summer to take care of the animals. This can be used for cows, sheep, goats, horses, etc. I don't know how common the use of seter is today, but when I was a child it was used everywhere where I grew up.
So this is a small example of how a seter can look like. It's often a small timber house and maybe a tiny farm building. They do not need a large farm building since the animals will remain outside for that time period. Since Astride is based on Scandinavian environment, we have to put a seter or two in there. I wanted to have a river in there as well, since they are very common in the mountain area. I drew this seter with some cute sheep. Also, I could not find an English word for seter, so for now I just call it that. Some people in my area even pronounce it with an Æ (Sæter).
The Arabian horse and bay variations
By Mathilde - Community Manager, 3D-artist
Months pass by fast! This time, my focus has been on the Arabian horse breed, fine-tuning textures, adjusting tack and horseshoes, making more mane variations, and ensuring all hair fits all the existing horse breeds.In preparation for creating the Arabian horse, I decided to make a new mane style that would fit it. And what style could I make other than the classic, flowy mane with a long bridle path? There definitely are more mane, tail, and forelock types I would like to explore but that will be at a later time. We also have to make sure that all of the parameters with the hair work, like matching white patterns (such as tobiano) and checking that the dun gene is properly displayed in the engine.
Before putting more effort into one workflow, it’s important to make sure that everything works the way we have intended so that there are no wasted hours on features that might not work as intended. I am, however, very excited to see if we can get the different genes and patterns to work alongside the hairs. Especially the tobiano patterns affecting the hairs will bring much more detail into the horses and make them look more natural.
Moving on from mane styles, I started working on the base model to resemble the Arabian horse breed. This is a breed that I have been looking forward to creating due to its unique characteristics. I have to say, I had a lot of fun making this breed and it was nice to work on a much lighter type of horse compared to the last few I’ve been creating. I did spend some time researching the different strains of Arabians and landed on the Egyptian Arabian due to it being the oldest of the bunch.
I wanted to make sure that we properly represented the breed’s characteristics while not exaggerating them too much. This was especially around the dish of the face as some modern Arabian horses have extreme concave nose ridges. While there will be variations of convex/concave nose ridges in all of the horses in Astride with the help of blend keys, the base model of the Arabian shows a moderately concave nose ridge. However, players can breed for a more concave or convex nose ridge.
Here you can see a comparison of the three different stages of developing a new breed. First is the high-poly mesh with all of the details, and then comes the bake where the high-poly mesh is projected on top of a low-poly mesh, and additional details are added. The final stage is when the textures are exported and added to the new breed in Blender for further polishing and tweaking.
Since I’ve been working on new breeds for quite some time now, I decided to pause that for a little bit to focus on polishing textures, creating more textures that will represent the different genetics of the new breeds, and adding to the colors we already have. As you might have noticed in the last devlog, I worked on the splash gene that comes with the Icelandic horse. I might show more of those textures in the next devlog, but so far they have been kind of behind the scenes as I’ve had other things to show.
I did, however, dive back into the bay/buckskin agouti factor. In the current horse creator, players are able to pick a few options in the “agouti” section that affect how the black pigments restrict the coat on the horse’s legs. I’ve been wanting to add more layers to this feature where the players could pick the pigment restriction on the ears, body, and legs separately, but I made a design choice that would cut down on work efforts and make the feature available sooner. This means that there will be one texture that affects the ears, body, and legs as one with more options instead. So far, I’ve created a few options, but with time there will be more to choose from.
I feel like this was the best choice to make as it simplifies the creator while not completely restricting the feature. This means that players can pick the color shade separately from the darker points. The agouti options will be available for the buckskins as well, meaning that you could potentially have some really dark buckskin horses. There might come some restrictions later that make it less likely for a buckskin to have such dark coats, but that is also something we could survey.
As you can see in the GIF above, I have already implemented and tested the agouti pigment restriction and it seems to be working well. There were some issues with the bitrate of the textures as there have been set restrictions in Unity, but we will be working around that to solve the issue. The pigment restriction textures will definitely get more love and attention (and many more variations) later down the line. But for now, I’m glad that it’s working as intended and the people can finally have their dark/seal bay horses.
Horse market and map
By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist
This devlog is going to be a bit shorter than usual. Maja and I have been all about the NFI Pitch project lately.We put the horse creator scenes in the riding arena temporarily, but it didn't really have the right background. I started working on creating one, but the first few tries were kind of boring and didn't quite have the vibe we wanted. So, I decided to go for something more inspiring.
Turns out, we loved the new background so much that we've decided to turn it into a little horse market. We're thinking of having 12 horses on rotation there (daily or weekly, but we'll see how often works best). The building's design is inspired by these cool old Norwegian structures called "stabbur" from the 1700s.
The big news is we now have a map! It took a bunch of behind-the-scenes work and some back-and-forth, but we've got it. The map will be one of my main focuses for a while, including assets that will be made to give life to Eldheim. but we've got more plans up our sleeves. Stay tuned for an upcoming Patreon blog post where I'll spill the beans on how I made this map.
Character to Unity
By Marius - Animator
Over the last few months I have been working on preparing the implementation of the player character into Unity. Finally I am at the stage where I can actually start implementing.A lot of the preparations have been to update the riding animations as they have been pushed to the back in favor of the horse animations for quite a while. That is because of a system I made that makes animating the rider very fast when the horse animations are in place, it still took longer than first anticipated though.
The next week went to a little of everything with different minor tweaking, updating and baking all riding animations. As there were very little specific to show, I found a gif with the update to the hand from last month; addressing some feedback I got that made me take some time to have a hand study.
Finally I got to start implementing properly into Unity. One of the first things I did that I can only do in game engine is learn how to and make an animation override for where you look. Now the character is ready for the programmers to make them look at all the stuff you look at (within limits of course), by following your camera movement.
What is cool is that this affects all animations, so if you are riding, walking, running or crouching the character will look where you do!
I had most of the animations to have a full movement set when not riding. While some are not complete yet they are easy to replace with placeholders by modifying existing animations… The jump is not one of them.
I had started on it earlier, but other work got in the way; and I was uncertain of how I wanted to “build” the jump in the animator. The animator is what controls the order and the transitions between animations in Unity. I started by scrapping the old animation and filmed myself jumping. Using that as reference I made a new jumping animation.
The above picture was never posted in our Discord, but was originally meant to be a work in progress post until I managed to implement it into unity and test it properly. It was never meant to be continuously looped like this, as well as it is missing a proper landing animation; so it looks a little silly.
With the jumping animation I could make the prototype for the movement animation system in the animator. This included making parameters that can be used to control the animation triggers. I also found how I want to build the jump animation.
By building the jump I mean how to segment it. You would think I could just have a full jump animation from lift off to landing and call it a day, but it isn’t that simple. That would work if all terrain was flat and there was nothing you could jump up and down. But what if you jump down a hill or up an incline? That would drastically change when the landing would occur. So I have to segment it into lift off, free fall and landing, to give us control over the animations and make leeway to when the landing animation plays.
I also added a small flavor animation to the free fall to make the character more panicked the longer they are in the air. Normally I would wait with such flavor animations, but it wouldn’t take too much time and seemed like a fun assignment that could help liven up the animations.
Character and controllers
By Green Horse - Programmer
We now have a mounting feature where you will take control of the horse if you press E in close proximity. This will move your character to be on top of it and change to a third person view. At the moment we haven’t added the riding animations, so the character is not animated on top of the horse. An interaction system was made to be able to support this feature, so many more interactions can now be made using this system like picking up and carrying props, pressing buttons etc…We switched to the new input system in Unity in preparation for a rebind keys feature in the options menu. We also want to make it in combination with a larger menu update later, but we might add in a temporary solution before that. The current menu setup is something I hacked together with my limited Unity Canvas and UX design skills, so I’m looking forward to a proper menu pass.
An animated character controller has been implemented with a jump, crouch, sprint and head movement to indicate where you’re looking. I’ve yet to figure out how to increase the slope limit so you can run up steep hills at the moment. We will do multiple passes on the character animations, shaders and model but for now I’m just happy to have a character to move around with.
The horse now also moves using a character controller. That means it can run off cliffs, bump into stuff and move with the terrain. The first version on steam was a compromise update because so many people wanted to escape the containment of the fences around the arena, so I deleted a single fence and “hacked” in a way to stick the player on top of the terrain. Looked absolutely bonkers insane but it was meant to be a temporary solution until we got the physics sorted out.
I’ve never felt more comfortable with the project as I am now. There’s proper logging, error handling and a step-by-step connection procedure to hook into. With proper packages for each part of the code we are able to get a nice flat foundation to build the game upon. With the new programmer we’re also able to cover more ground at the same time so I’m no longer the bottleneck when it comes to programming.
Dressage
By Ouroboros - Programmer
I have to admit that this month started out a bit slow for me. I had several moments where I simply had to stop and reorganize. All a part of still being quite new to the job. It luckily got better, and I have started to feel like I am truly settling in.I have started implementing dressage, and the two first iterations are done. It might not look very impressive, but it will serve as a base for further work. The first iteration included the player being able to interact with an object to start a dressage course. They then had to ride from point to point that were shown on the ground as colored circles. There wasn’t much to it besides that, but it set a standard for how a course is set up, and how the player can start it and progress through it.
The second iteration added to this with a time limit to reach each point, as well as the different points requiring specific gaits. The colored circles on the ground were updated to show time left (circle slowly shrinking) and desired gait (different color for different gait). The first point in a course is special in that it has no time limit or gait, and it is only when the player enters this first point that the course starts for real. I have yet to implement a score system, but I have made room for one.
The dressage is very much a work in progress at this point. We are still settling on how the score should be calculated, how close we can get it to real-life dressage, and if there should be any time limits or not. The most important thing is what feels right and is fun to play. While we have an idea of what we want, we really just have to implement and test to find out what works. I have started working on the third iteration, and not to create a huge hype or anything, but it will contain curves!
In addition to the work I have done on dressage, I have also had to spend some time reading code, documentations, and math. I won’t bore you with the details, but one of the results of all this studying is the “dismount check”. When the player wants to dismount the horse, the “dismount check” makes sure it is safe, and reasonable, to do so. It defaults to dismounting on the left side, but will choose the right side if the left is no good. If neither side is fit for dismounting, then the player will have to find another place to dismount. This is to avoid any…accidents.
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.
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