Devlog #53: September 2025

UI, Tutorials & Mane

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

New design profile

I’ve been adding shadows and other details to the updated UI for a while, and I’ve more or less finished that part. However, the UI did not work right away when testing it. The designs themselves were fine, but the programming and functionality part of it wasn’t successful. Mostly because I had set it up incorrectly. We decided that it would be better for Ourboros to set it up properly, using my designs. Unfortunately, this means you’ll have to wait a bit longer for the UI update.

I’m very happy with the designs and I’m excited to finally see it in the game, instead of the old black and boring UI.

Image over: Breeding UI panels design. I have prepared space and ideas for stats for when the stat system will be implemented in the future.

Preparing for tutorial

On the other hand, I’ve made some tutorial UI images for different parts of the game. This way, it won’t just be a list with controls in the menu anymore. I will continue to make more as we go. Here are some simple examples that will be put into another UI together with text that explains the tutorial.

Steam post image The images above: Astride has a few ways to change gait and speed, so I had to show all the methods.

Hair upgrade

I want the mane and tail to feel more alive, since they’re very flat in our game right now. I’ve been learning a little bit of blender to try to improve the manes, and Marius has been a great teacher! Basically, what I’m doing is to change the shapes of each hair card to look messier, and fitting them to each horse model. I’m paying extra attention to the manes for the Fjord and Icelandic, so that they’ll have more volume from the root and up, compared to the Norwegian Warmblood. I still need to test them in Unity to see if they actually look good, and then make adjustments if needed. But I believe this will improve the horses visually.

The roots

My edits (I haven’t touched the forelock yet)

The mane of Icelandic in the current build on the itch.io build. See how small and flat it is?

Updating the entire Stable

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

After testing the current stable for a good while, the stable will get a complete do-over. It has been a task that has been worked on back and forth on for a good while. But we finally have landed so much more style-wise with everything. Especially the UI. The stable and UI are reflecting each other, with rich details and a Nordic coziness that we are looking forward to showing you all. Many of you are probably familiar with the Viking style; however, we want to show you another Nordic style that is very beloved here, it’s mainly from the time period 1700 to mid 1800th style and can still be found in old churches, houses, and a lot of cabins across Norway, and other Nordic countries.

The stable itself will no longer have the U-shape, which we think is way too impractical and take up a lot of space. So there will be a rectangular shape, with four entrances, two in the middle, and two on each end. There will be tack rooms and feed rooms, which are easily accessible.

But enough rambling, and more pictures!

This is the tack room and feed room from an early stage; there are a few differences as to the current state. But that’s for another time.

The stalls have also gotten an update!

This is just to get an idea for placement and how large the stable will be. Textures and fine tuning are the next step.

However, some texturing work has been started. And here are some of the textures.

Early stage of textures for the furniture across the stable.

This is a close-up of the finished work for the sink in the feed room and some detail work, this is a column/ archway inside the stable with the Nordic-inspired rose paint-pattern.

More Foals!

By Marius - Animator

After rigging and testing that the foal mesh deformed acceptably it was time to add movement animation. I chose to have the walk animation animated first as we don’t need any other movement animation this early in testing and implementing. While I could lean quite heavily on the walk animation from the horse, I had to tweak it to adhere to the foal's proportions. In addition to the proportion difference I also had to keep in mind that a foal walks more clumsily and awkwardly than a full grown horse, as well as not having the same posture a trained horse would have. So the foal’s neck and head is in a more relaxed pose while the front legs keep their bend for longer after hitting the ground. There were some more small changes here and there I had to change after looking at videos of foals walking.

I originally did not think the walking animation would take as long as it ended up doing, but I forgot how much the turning animations are a pain.

The first import

After finishing the walking animation it was time to test importing the foal into Unity. You usually end up finding problems you did not think of at this stage, and problems I found.

Most of the work when importing is just making sure your import settings are correct. By this point I knew what these were from working on the horse rig and got it done quite fast, especially since I deleted most of the animations set for export in the foal’s blender file that were remaining from the horse.

Making sure the animations that did come with the foal rig worked well, the next step was to start the setup of the foal’s prefab. The prefab is where you attach a lot of the scripts and functionality, but what I’ll focus on this time is the animator. To save time I copied the animator file the full grown horse uses as they will use a lot of the same parameters and setup. Even with that I deleted most of the animations that the foal should not be able to do yet, as I want to only see what the foal actually is able to use. Though when testing the bucking animation and how it transitions into the idle animation it did let me realize I never made a new idle for the foal. I did make it and reimported the foal to have it work properly, but the faulty result is hilarious and serves to show why I can’t use the horse animations on the foal:

While I can easily copy animations from the horse to the foal in blender, Unity sadly can’t retarget animations for different proportioned rigs. Well, it can in certain circumstances, but not on the horse. It is a functionality only available for humanoid rigs, which has strict setup rules that exclude the horse.

Testing the foal

After setting up the foal’s prefab I got to finally test the foal in-game for the first time, and while I did not get the mane and tail to work. The foal itself works, with animations and I got it to use the horse shader making it be able to use every coat the horse is able to. So here is the first test on the foal in-game:

Sadly, I forgot to scale it correctly so it is as tall as a grown up in this shot. And excuse the low resolution and quality, Steam only allows us to upload GIFs with up to 5MB file size.

Night/Day System & Tutorials

By Ouroboros - Programmer

I continued working on the day and night system for the first few days of September before releasing it to test. The current implementation starts the day at 06:00 and ends it at midnight. When midnight is reached, time stops progressing until the player chooses to continue to the next day. One day in-game lasts 45 real life minutes, with it being possible to skip to the next day at any point. We will likely make adjustments to the day length and progression to the next day as we continue development, but this is as good a starting point as any.

Something Astride has been lacking so far is tutorials. I have implemented a simple system for tutorials, and Maja has helped with making the actual tutorials. Two have been added to the test build so far, and more will be added over the coming weeks.

The last part of September has been all about getting the foal model into the game. I have made it so that all horses that are younger than one year use the foal model. Once they turn one year old, the foal model is swapped out for the adult horse model. The work on the foal has included making sure the correct textures are set, that the foal is scaled properly, that it grows as it becomes older, and that it stays with its mother for the first part of its life.

I will continue working on the foal and fix bugs as we head into October. Our goal is to have the release out around mid-October, and there are still things that need to be done for that to happen. Once I am done with the last parts for the foal, it will only be polishing and bug fixing left.

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