Devlog #61: June 2026

Stories & Concept Art

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

Just like May, June has been filled with writing for both stories and quests. I’ve been focusing especially on what will be the “main story”. It’s a big task, but I’m making progress. I’m not finished with writing it yet, but most of it is planned out. Now, it’s about making all the different elements fit together. Like writing the dialogue and connecting everything to gameplay and progression. I also have to think about the map and the places where things are happening. It can quickly become confusing. But, if it’s written messy at first, I'll just go over and clean it up afterwards. I’m looking forward to the summer vacation, even though writing is very fun, it can be mentally exhausting. Especially when writing multiple stories at once. For the story (or stories), I’ve done quite a bit of research to make certain elements of the story believable. The text can be inspired by and rooted in reality, even though it's a fictional world. It gives the narrative its own charm. I’ve decided not to share too much about the story. First, it needs to first be completed, proofread and then rewritten based on feedback. And second, what’s the fun in spoiling it? What I can say is that the player will of course be in charge of running the business (breeding, training, and competing), but also take on some different tasks as well. With all this writing on the main story and other stories, I realized the need for a few additional NPCs to fill certain roles. So, I took a break to sketch some concepts for them, which was really refreshing. The NPCs also need to be designed, not only visually, but also personality-wise. For me this is coming into place at the same time. There's not much to show when it comes to text work, but it will all be worth it when it’s finished and added to the game. See you all in August!

The Paddocks

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

This month, I've been working on a few environmental assets that support the natural horse-keeping direction I'm aiming for. The first is a traditional hay feeder inspired by historical farm architecture. The structure itself is finished, although I still need to create the hay that will fill it.

I've also built a vintage water pump and trough. This was a fun asset to work on because it allowed me to add small decorative details and craftsmanship-inspired carvings that fit the world of Astride.

Finally, I've created a shelter where horses can escape the wind and rain. The design is inspired by both traditional Scandinavian farm buildings and modern paddock paradise ideas.

These may seem like small additions, but together they help make the horse environments feel more believable and functional. Creating spaces that look like places where horses would genuinely live is an important part of the overall vision for Astride. And lastly… I have been working on something secret!!!

LODs & Animation

By Marius - Animator

LOD Most of this month has gone to more LOD work as I needed to make LODs for the clothes, so that they too will change depending on how far away they are.

I started with the vest and will use it as an example as I continue, since it is the easier shape of all the meshes. For the most part LOD as a concept is quite easy, and depending on the mesh… it is. As the vest below shows, it is basically just removing edge loops from the mesh in a way that keeps most of the shape and details.

Steam post image Different LOD levels of the character's vest. In this case the vest was very easy, but not every piece of clothing was, as things like UV seams, triangles and even the edge loops themselves can complicate the process of removing edge loops. Then it was just doing that process for every bit of clothing and trying not to destroy the UV map or the shape and silhouette of the character.

Steam post image The end result of the character in LOD3, the lowest LOD. Animation Animation-wise, I have mostly added a bone for the first person camera and decided on its movement for each animation. This was decided after we noticed that you got the heads movement from the animation when moving, and realized that it could in the worst case lead to motion sickness. This also got me to take a look if there were any problems with any of the animations and fix them.

World Streaming

By Ouroboros - Programmer

I ended up setting world streaming aside for a bit to do some optimizations for the vegetation assets. The result is that all of the vegetation only uses two different shaders now instead of eight. While I was at it, I also cleaned up the rest of our assets to make sure we didn’t have any unused ones taking up space. Unity is supposed to not include unused assets in builds, but it seems things sometimes slip through. Shader variants in particular can take up a lot of space, so we want to try and keep it as simple as possible to have better control over what gets included in builds. With the assets taken care of, I continued with world streaming. I split the game world into different sections, where each section has multiple scenes. The different scenes will be loaded and unloaded based on how far away the player is. A lot of data is needed for all of this to work. Each section needs its own unique ID, along with its position, size, references to its neighbors, and references to its scenes. While the game is running, the player’s position has to be checked against that of the sections to find out what section the player is currently in. Three systems will split the work between them, and two of them are already up and running in slightly simplified versions. The first system is for initializing the world and the sections at startup, making sure the correct scenes are loaded in so that the player can be safely spawned. The second system is for keeping track of which section the player is in, along with where in the section. Some scenes will load or unload depending on how far into a section the player is. This brings us to the third system, which is responsible for the actual streaming. Continuing from where the initializing system left off, it uses the data from the tracking system to decide what scenes to load and when. I will continue working on these systems in the near future. I’m at a stage where I have gotten over the most difficult part, so I’m hoping it won’t be long before I have world streaming working well enough to begin some testing.

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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 .