For the last months of the year I’ve been focusing on going through the entire game design document for Astride. The GDD is a living document that is constantly changing and being added to throughout the development. 

This is an important task where I’ve gone into the depth of different systems, evaluating whether they needed more detail, rewriting due to new/change of ideas, clarification or if they are already in a good place. And I’ve restructured the entire document on where all systems and subjects are written and what comes after the other. Some time has also gone to writing about some parts that have not been completely designed yet due to it not being worked on yet.

In some parts the content itself didn’t need to change, just the structure. Reshaping how information is presented makes it easier to read and understand for everyone involved in the project. 

Some of the parts I’ve read through, gone more into depth with and updated/rewritten, if needed:

• Interaction system

• Progression

• Competition

• Quest system

• Horse AI

• Horse breeds

• Breeding

• Wardrobe system

• NPCs

• NPC AI and schedule

I have written over 80 pages. Some of the parts require a lot of thorough research as well, so this is not just me writing on the top of my head. And honestly, I have to say I have never enjoyed writing this much before (that isn’t story writing). It hasn't felt like a burden at all to me. Even though this is a huge task. It has truly been fun and refreshing. 

The next step will be for the rest of the team to read through the updated document that they haven’t seen yet and give some thoughts and feedback. This whole process gives an easier workflow when revisiting plans and ideas. There are first some more writing that are needed, but most of it is done.

I have been working on other tasks as well, but since the majority of my time has gone into text writing and updating the GDD, I don’t have any fun images to share right now. So I’ll share my favorite screenshot from the breeding and foal update! 

I wish you all a wonderful winter season and I wish you a happy new year. I cannot wait for the sun to “turn” and the daylight to become longer again.

Over the last couple of months, I have been working on this stable, which will be the crown of the property. The previous stables that have been made are not going to waste; they will be relocated to other places on the map.

The textures are coming along one by one. This is by far the most complex 3D-model I have ever made. Not only by the mesh but also the textures. Here, it looks more gloomy than what the end result will be in the game engine; these are just screenshots from Blender. However, there is still a lot of work to do. Like the floor, sealing and walls aren’t done yet.

We wanted to give you a stable that makes you feel like you are entering a stable that generations have enjoyed, with a lot of history within its walls. Also, we wanted to give you a bit of our Nordic mystery and magic, with a touch of coziness.

The stable will have 20 large stalls.

Some of the stalls will have an individual door to a paddock (the doors do not have textures yet).

A place to tack up your horses. Missing textures here as well, but you get the idea!

In here you will find the saddles, bridles, and everything you need for riding.

In here you will find the horses feed and snacks. Across on the other side is a room where you will find the hay and other necessities.

Now that we have foals, we will need some more animations than moving and idling. And mostly for it to interact with its mother; I teased it in the last Patreon post, but I have worked on some nursing animations. Weirdly enough this will be the first time I make animations for interacting between two different rigs… outside of horseback riding. It will also be good practice for when I eventually need to make more interaction animations.

Nursing animation turns out to be deceptively hard to make, the foal needs to bend its neck quite a lot and lean down at the same time. There was a lot of discussion on what size the foal should be, but in the end we decided that it should be consistent, relative to the size of the mother. This also made it easier to animate as I don’t need to account for a slew of possible height differences. Otherwise it was the age old quest for good references, and in this case the biggest problem was angle of footage and the foal. For I needed to be able to see how the legs move as they can’t be completely stationary (realistically it can, but it looks stiff animated); but I also needed to be conscious of the foals angle relative to the mother, because this is an interacting animation and needs to have positions in mind. There will probably be more angles for the foal to nurse from, but this was one of the angles I knew we will have a position reference point for in the future.

The dam is just referenced in and cannot be edited, so there is a frame with different head-scaling

For the longest time I have had a major gripe with an animation of mine. In the start it was comical in a sense, but the more time has gone the more it has gone over to me actually cringing on how bad it is. And as you probably realized from the title, it is the jogging animations. To be fair, it is one of, if not the first animation for the character rig I made. And finally I have had time to start updating it.

First and foremost we have the forwards jog, which is the one you will see most of the time as you for the most part move that way. It is also the jogging direction it is easiest to find references from. And while I will need to make other directions too, they will be based on this one. While I am not sure I am 100% happy with it, it is leagues above the old one.

I am currently working on the sideways jog or strafe movement, which is maybe the most frustrating jogging movement to animate; since it is an unnatural movement to do over a length of time at speed. It is absolutely possible of course, but finding references is next to impossible and at least last time I made my own reference… it wasn't good, haha.

In cases where we might want to be jogging slower, we will need a non moving jogging animation to blend between. For the most part this animation will not be visible, but it should keep the movement beats in proportion to the frame count. In this case I kept the frame count the same to make the steps shorter in length as it blends between the animations instead of step speed.

While it feels a little awkward between the arms and legs, it should function as a blending animation. Mostly because it will not actually play when standing still, but will help calculate movements in slower movements. I still have to test it to be sure it works as intended, though.

While working on the jogging animations I noticed that some of the blend shapes for the hands and fingers had become broken over time, or I missed it at the time. Not the most noticeable thing from a distance, but close up there was some jarring movement due to the corrective blend shapes.

While it doesn’t show the biggest fixes, it shows well enough the improvement. I also had to fix some calculations for how the blend shapes are controlled.

After October, I began reading up on profiling and optimizations. I took a deep dive into how Unity’s different profiling tools work and how to read the data they provide. I learned a lot, and I have a pretty good idea on where to focus my effort when it comes to optimizing Astride. Although I always try my best to write performant code, I actually have very little experience with profiling and optimizing. The job naturally fell to me after GreenHorse left the team, but it has been difficult to find the time to learn everything. The recent issues with the Unity editor and having to upgrade to the newest version is proving to be the perfect chance to go through all the different parts of the game and profile them.

Before getting to that part, however, I had to update the multiplayer code. After moving to the newest version of Unity, there was some code that no longer worked. Even though I refer to it as multiplayer code, it is actually used for singleplayer as well. Both game modes use the same setup with client and server worlds, with the difference being that singleplayer keeps everything local instead of connecting to the internet. Before I can start with profiling and optimizing, the code responsible for setting this up needs to be updated so that the game actually runs.

This brings us to the fact that I am not a multiplayer programmer. My job at Raidho Games originally consisted of gameplay- and UI programming. I did have to write code that worked for multiplayer, and through that I learned how it works in general. Writing code to set up the multiplayer is something different again, though. I have spent time reading documentation, forum threads, and gone through several code examples. I also dug through our own code to properly understand the current implementation. There have been some improvements to the multiplayer for Unity DOTS, which made it possible to simplify the code quite a bit.

In the middle of all of this, a bug related to inheritance of face markings was discovered. It took some time before I was able to find the cause, but I was eventually able to fix it. After talking with our testers, I also decided to go ahead and make some improvements to how markings are inherited. The new logic for it is less random and should give more consistent results. There are still improvements that can be made, but those aren’t as fast to do so I will have to come back to it at a later time.

Suffice to say that I have been pretty busy lately. There’s a lot to do and a lot to learn. I have spent the last few days on updating and simplifying the code for loading and unloading scenes, which is also part of the game setup. The only thing that remains before we have Astride up and running in the newest Unity editor, is to connect the updated code to the system that spawns the player character and horses.

Since I haven’t really had any pictures to share for this or the previous devlog, I’m going to end with a picture of my cats (aka my coworkers).

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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[discord.gg]! For additional information about Astride, please visit our official website[www.astride.no].