Devlog #47: February 2025

Fighting the light

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

The tack designs continue I was eager to start learning post processing this month, but I needed help from Marius to set up the computer for me and add the assets. Until then I continued with creating concept art for tack and clothing.

Some of the themes this time are the following: Rock Goth Western-inspired style Flower Girly pop

Here are some of them:

Post-processing and the challenges that follows As a small team you sometimes have to learn new skills that will be important for the game’s visual aspect and appearance. I mainly work with concept art, but I have learned to create UI and now I’m learning post-processing for Unity. So the game’s lighting is not the greatest as of now. It’s very warm and a bit dry looking. So this is something I want to change to fit the more Norwegian image.

I have been looking at tutorials for Unity’s built in post-processing system, and for a post-processing asset, as well as a new sky system. The sky is now just blue, and if you’ve ever been in Norway you’ll soon discover that a pure blue sky is a rare one day event. What I mean is that we need clouds, it also makes the environment more exciting. I can't just look up a tutorial and then be able to do anything within that system. No, since we are using URP for our game I can use systems that are available for URP. Beautify 3 looks to be the best for URP games, so I decided to use that asset. The options seem to be quite easy to use, as long as you can see what difference each option makes.

I also spent some time creating a mood board for lights and colors. We’ll see how much these assets let me adjust them.

Azure Sky Over to the sky part. I was so excited to edit the sky, however I quickly discovered it was not that easy. First of all it was added the wrong way, so we had to re-add the system the correct way. Could I finally change the sky? A bit yes, but it wasn’t clear what every option did to the sky and they’ve changed some of the names/words for some of the options, so it was difficult to understand what was what in the beginning. I understand it more now and I’ve managed to change the sky color, looked at the exposure light and added a little bit of clouds. I still need to figure out if I can change the cloud structure in any way, because it turns overcast quite fast if I turn up the cloud intensity.

It was not just the assets that were a bit tricky to learn, but when I actually got to change the settings I soon discovered that it affected the horse in a bad way. White horses turn extremely overexposed in direct sunlight. We believe that this is due to the horse shader not responding to external light properly (reflections).

I also had issues with the fog system, which was frustrating. Because the fog should be very good looking. It just turned the game into a horror game instead. So I use another fog that doesn’t cloud the entire scene.

Creating lights that are not lights So I quickly learned that the light you can add to the game is often not recommended to use. Or you shouldn’t have many of them in your game because light makes the game extremely heavy to run. So I am learning a method that is common in most games: Imitating lights. So what I do is make box volume to the scene, place it where it should be, which in this case is inside the stable and do color adjustments to it. So when you enter the box the light changes. This was going well until I added another white horse and it got overexposed again… Why can’t anything work perfectly immediately? And I discovered that if you ride your horse into the box that camera gets locked behind the rider's seat. Anyways, this method can be used in for example a specific part of a forest if you want to change the mood to something completely different. The possibilities are there.

This is at least a learning experience for me and I’ve already gotten more confident in some of the assets already. I have needed some help from both Ouroboros and Marius, since they both have more knowledge in Unity than me. Thank you! I will continue to learn and adjust parts of it to make a nice looking game. The horse shader issue is not something I can do myself, so that must wait until someone else has time to look at it. Or maybe I can find another way.

A much needed texture update

By Mathilde - Community Manager, 3D-artist

This month, I have been working on some new textures as well as some improvement to the older ones.

First off, something I've been wanting to do for a very long time and have been holding it off until now. The leg markings we currently have in Astride are all just very basic socks from the hooves to the knees. Nothing special, and very generic. But that is what we needed to test if markings would work the way we wanted to. Now, we have a bit more room to play around with, so it was finally time to revisit the leg markings. While they still work as before, I've added more variations in terms of shape and stripes coming from the crown to the hoof. We have now gone from 14 generic leg markings to 15 leg markings with more variation. I hope you will like the new versions as much as I do!

Since the Arabian is the new breed that will be implemented next, I wanted to start working on a special gene that comes with them. I am of course talking about the Rabicano gene. Sadly, the Rabicano gene is a bit tricky, considering genetic cause of the Rabicano phenotype has not been discovered yet. It is believed to be a dominant gene, but this is not certain at this point in time. So, since we are the creators of the game, this is where we can take some creative freedom. I suggested that we would make the Rabicano gene in Astride act as an incomplete dominant gene. This means that if a horse has one copy of Rabicano, it will show some tickling and white markings in the fur, while a horse that has two copies of Rabicano will display much more tickling and white areas in the fur.

After coming to this conclusion, I started working on the two phenotypes of Rabicano for Astride. Currently, I have created three variations of each which will be available in the start. In the image above, you can see the the left with one copy of Rabicano, and the right has two copies and is expressing more white tickling.

I also wanted to revise the splash gene textures after taking a closer look at them. I can see now that they were done in a rush, and the details in the eyes were terrible on some of them. So I went back, revised and redid some of the eye textures and they should now look much better.

Lastly, when I've needed a little break from texturing, I've looked at the show jumping courses. So far, I changed the third show jumping course and added two new courses (7 and 8). I also changed the second training course to have four new and exciting exercises that you can challenge yourselves with. I hope you will enjoy them.

All of these texture improvements and changes to the show jumping should be available in the next update, and the Rabicano textures should be available as soon as the Arabian horse breed is implemented.

Technical improvements in the environment

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

Right now, this might not look like an improvement from the pictures—this is just in a test scene, so I don’t accidentally break things. We are using a system that makes the environment less heavy and speeds up some parts of the creation process. The first example is the riding arenas. Before, we had to flatten out a section and paint the ground underneath it manually. But now, the ground texture and flat surface are attached to the prefab (the game object/3D model). So, wherever I move the riding arena, the ground will follow and automatically adjust underneath it.

Speaking of things working, there’s another fun update I want to share—roads! We hope to have some nice, cozy trails in Eldheim, and thanks to this system, we no longer have to hand-paint roads. Instead, we use a spline tool that clears out trees, grass, and other objects as we place the roads. This reduces manual work, which is a big help since we’re such a small team, with only one person currently working on the environment.

This next part isn’t about roads, but it’s another fun example of what we can do! The new method also allows us to create brushes that assign trees, textures, plants, and other details—like rocks, mushrooms, and roots—into a system. With this, we can paint them onto the terrain in clusters instead of placing them one by one and going back and forth. Even with this more automated approach, we can still make manual adjustments, but overall, it speeds up the process a lot!

This has been a very learning-heavy month for me, so I’m glad I got to do some 3D modeling now and then to process everything I’ve learned. Is anyone missing an indoor arena? Well, a new one is here! It’s now closer in style to the stable. The colors look off in this scene due to post-processing and lighting not being set up yet, but it’s coming together!

Lead changes, jump transitions, and more

By Marius - Animator

Expanding lead change animations I have been working on making the lead change viable while turning and at different speeds. Though I am not quite happy with it yet, the animations are in progress for the biggest speed “area” as I need to animate the lead change at each animated speed we have and let the transition calculations take care of the in betweens.

Lead change animations do have a problem though; they are kinda too complex to make fast and you need double the animations for about everything. Normally I would be able to mirror the animation and call it a day when I need canter in another lead change and see how they loop to get the flow of the animation, I can’t do that in the same direct way with lead change animations.

First and foremost, lead change animations do not loop by design, they are meant to end in another position than they started. I can get around this problem by making it a flying lead change so that it ends up in the same position it started, but while doing that I need to be extra careful not to change the start, middle and end poses of the animation as that should be as close to the canter start and end as possible (with some exceptions).

Other than that it is hard to make the lead change feel smooth, especially while turning as any small changes to the bend of the back and neck compound together to highlight any deviant movements. It is a lot more work assuring the sideways movement isn’t too abrupt while also not having it be static in the same bend, as there should be some difference in movement. This is currently not completely fixed, but way better than it was at the start.

Fixing a problem I created Sounds dramatic, but in reality I just had a slight oversight when updating the character rig last month. While I fixed it so that blend shapes can be controlled as we want them, I inadvertently removed the animation looping. How I managed to do that has to do with the solution I found to the blend shape problem: have one rig for blend shape control, another for animation blend shapes.

The problem lies in the fact that the blend shape control rig should have all blend shapes available as it needs to be the base rig, the animation rig on the other hand needs to only have the blend shapes that are controlled by character movement. So when I added the animation rig I forgot to go through every animation and add that they are looping to the ones that should loop. This led to the character animations freezing, when any animation was done playing, until new input came and ordered it to transition into a new animation where the same problem would repeat.

Luckily, the fix was very easy, but time consuming for what it was. The solution was to go through every animation in the animation rig and tick a box for looping animations if the animation should loop. Can’t remember quite how long it took, but what I guess was around an hour of just clicking boxes does blur into a mush of time.

Jump transition I looked into a bug that happens if you do a lead change just before a jump. When this bug happens, the horse does the lead change animation before the jumping animation is played, leading to doing a lead change animation through the jump and then jumping after. After some testing I found out that it was because there was no interruption source for when transitioning into the lead change. This means that there is nothing that could stop a lead change animation from happening after it started. While the solution was easy enough, I did have to do some research into interruption sources as I have not dabbled with them that much before. Now the jump animation should be prioritized over other animations so that they do not stop the horse from jumping. More testing will be needed though.

Helping with sky and rendering A lot of time has gone to help with setup and use of rendering tools and fog/skybox assets as Maja is starting her journey to learn and help on the 3D side of development, when not working 2D or managing business.

Camera, horse controller & refusals

By Ouroboros - Programmer

At the end of January, I had just about made it possible to switch between first-person and third-person camera. I continued working on this in February as there were still a lot of improvements to be made. Up until now, we have disabled the character mesh while in first person. I wanted to change this, but it took a decent amount of tweaking to stop the camera from going inside the character. This was even more difficult when the character was on the horse as there are more animations that make the character lean forward or to the side. I eventually reached a point where the camera behaved in a way I was happy with and that will hopefully not cause motion sickness.

I decided to focus on the animation system after the camera. The original plan for Astride was to use motion matching for animations, but we eventually went away from this approach. The animation system created for the motion matching still existed and we kept using it to access animation data in DOTS. This was a very complex system considering we only needed a small amount of animation data, so I did a thorough cleanup and removed any logic we didn’t need. The result is a much simpler system that will be easier to manage, and only does exactly what we need it to do. While I was at it, I also implemented the refusal animation for the horse. It was mostly to test the changes I had made, and there are still some adjustments to make (the camera is currently bugging out a bit), but it works.

I spent the last part of February on the horse controller. It will take some time before it is done, as there are several features we want to add or improve. Part of the work on the horse controller is also to better separate the code for the player character and the horse, which will make it easier when implementing the horse AI. Other priorities for the horse controller are to improve the gait transitions, make it possible to reverse, and try to make the turning better. It’s going to be a lot of trial and error to get it right, but I’m really excited to be working on it.

Assets and face rigs

By Mathie - Intern

Asset design More assets! I’ve been on the grind and have continued creating designs for assets, there’s been a lot of decorative environment assets such as columns, stairs, milk ramps… I could go on but you get the gist!

When thinking of ways to decorate the milk ramps and other interiors I came to think of the Eldhest collectibles and their designs. Could I apply similar aesthetics to a minor decorative asset? Using horseshoes as decor isn't too uncommon (I used to have one in my room as a kid!) and the moment I stumbled upon pictures of painted horseshoes I knew I wanted to create some concepts for Astride. The mindset behind these assets has been to create a “lot with a little” and “recycle” base assets to create visual variety in a more resource effective manner. Some may notice a certain style of floral patterns being repeated in some designs. I have been incorporating designs inspired by Rose-painting for the sake of some classic Scandinavian vibes.

Blender and facial rigging Some time was spent figuring out an effective pipeline that allows blendshapes to be exported from Blender into Unity. The blendshapes are already present on the model itself, so what I’ve been doing is assigning shape keys to specific bones and controllers that will allow me to create a more emotive character. I’m more of an animator than a rigger, but this has been quite insightful of the process that goes into creating a rig.

The bigger challenges have been keeping track of navigation in Blender and some of the math that goes into setting up the drivers and making sure it all goes smoothly. Although despite everything, there's never quite a dull moment when mixing and matching the different blendshapes together.

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