Mane and tail: revisitThere has been a while since I last did anything with the horse’s hair cards. But now I got the chance to take a look at them again. I had to do some adjustments to the short mane, long mane and redid the forelock for many horses. Since last time, I’ve gotten a better grasp of blender.

The most fun part this time was to fix the forelocks. Since the ones we have are mostly suited for the warmblood, breeds with thicker manes often looked a bit strange. I made sure to look at forelock images of each breed, even though I believe I have a good grasp of how each breed’s forelock tends to look. This resulted in me redoing the Alter Real/Lusitano forelock entirely, as well as the more draft horses like Jutland and Percheron. Mostly all breeds at adjustments.

Examples for edited short forelock: Jutland, Alter Real/Lusitano, Nordland and Fjord

Examples for edited medium/long forelock: Percheron, Icelandic and Alter Real/Lusitano

All the manes, forelocks and tails are sent to Mathilde, so then she will be able to do some more adjustments where needed with both textures and colors visible.
WIP: Painting for the stableWith the exciting stable design coming up we have some free space that’s ideal to put an “illustration/painting”. So I have looked at classical painting to draw some inspiration from. The “painting” will of course be horse themed, featuring a Fjord. I am aiming for the “national romantic vibe”, which was quite popular in Norway during the 1800s.

Now, this is still early progress, but the shapes are coming along fine. The background is slightly inspired by a part of Mjøsa as well. It's been a while since I’ve done an art piece like this. It’s so fun, especially after all the writing I’ve done and am still doing.
LoreAfter writing so much game design last year, it’s just naturally that I write some lore too, even though we have had this planned for a long time. However, we still need some more definition and adjustment to this aspect. This means the property’s story and Eldheim.

The stable is coming along bit by bit, and these are the newest updates. Some textures are broken or have small errors, but they will be fixed before we launch the new stable. For now, the textures are mostly to help see the vision.

Since last time, the floor has been done. The old stone floor with a fan-shaped pattern gave the perfect old stable look that we were aiming for. However, in the stalls, they have upgraded over time, with a more stable material: concrete. With some wood shavings on top (There will be more wood shavings later). At some places in the stable you can also find a beautiful carved pattern.

The doors out to the paddock have also got textures. And we can’t wait to see cute horses peaking through the open windows.

The ceiling has gotten some more support and structure to it. For some reason, the structure stole the texture from another place, so it can borrow that until it has its own texture.

Here is a before-and-after picture. We thought it helped reflect the light better, so it wasn’t a boring void of a ceiling.

Speaking of voids…The main entrance has been through a lot of changes recently!

I struggled a lot with making sense of this main entrance… It gave a sneaky, dark backdoor vibe, where you could expect to be jumped by a ghost rather than being the actual main entrance. So the walls were knocked down and I tried to make it more cozy. But it still didn’t scream “main entrance”. So I tried again… But we all felt that it was unnatural to have a space to sit here. And other equipment already has an assigned space.

But this sitting space is still kind of cute. But just not for the entrance. So it got moved upstairs. The plan is to have a grand painting behind the bench, so when you look up from the first floor, you won't see the bench, but a large painting.
Then… What now, what screams a good first impression for the stable? It was time to think outside the box, or outside the stall (that joke works a lot better in Norwegian). What makes sense to the player, and not necessarily for a stable? A showroom of your achievements and highlights! Like a little progress museum!

Not my proudest artwork… But the vision was more important than the execution. 
By doing this, I came across a few problems. So the decision ended up with Expand the space, rather than force it. I had to fix the wall texture anyway. So now you will be met with a grand hall of fame!

Where two of your beloved horses will greet you from each side of the entrance. For reference, the horses will get large stalls with paddocks.

Lastly! Since this is an old stable, we need some old functions, and at the same time, we changed something in the game design document. There will be a hole in the ceiling and the hay will be pushed down from this room. From here, you fill a wagon with hay and then give it to the horses. 

There will be some changes here as well. - The window will be moved up, and when it is filled with hay, it will look something like this.

You may have noticed that I have sort of disappeared from the devlogs as of late. I've been busy working another part-time job, but this month and February I have more time to spend on Astride before I start working another job in March. While my wish is to be able to work full-time on Astride, I am limited by my personal budget, and the best solution for me at this time is to focus mostly on a different full-time job while doing what I can on Astride in my spare time. This way, the other developers have more finances on their end while I can still be a part of the game and contribute, just at a slower pace.
Thankfully, the other amazing developers of Astride are still going strong even with me stepping aside to stand on the sidelines from time to time. I still have so much faith in this project and do not intent to leave anyone or anything behind.

Moving on from that to what I've been working on lately - the Friesian horse is finally in the works! This breed was chosen by you, the community, and I was honestly so happy that this breed was chosen. I haven't yet worked out a good way to deal with feathers on the legs yet, so please use your imagination for them in the meantime! As for now, I've only done the basics of fitting the base model into a more Friesian-like body type that is ready to get the high-poly sculpt. This is where more/different details are added to make the Friesian stand out even more from the other breeds.

I also have some tack fitting to do, but that will have to wait until I am done with the high-poly sculpture and have somewhat finalized the model. Of course, feedback is more than welcome, I am no Friesian horse expert!

For my part I have been bogged down by computer problems that froze my computer anytime I tried to work in 3D. One day it worked, the next it didn’t. While trying to find out what was wrong, I found that the upgrade from windows 10 to 11 had majorly broken key parts of all Microsoft applications, forcing me to do a reset.  After that it became clear that a reset wasn’t enough to fix things and I had to do a complete formatting of the C drive. The problem still persists, but at least the computer lives long enough to let me diagnose the problem.

I started the new year by picking up where I left off before Christmas: spawning the player character into the game world. Following this, I started enabling a few of the core systems such as the character controller, the camera, some UI, and animations. It might sound pretty straight forward when written like that, but I spent time on each system to clean up, optimize and simplify the code. The camera in particular has taken a lot of work to get right for both first-person and third-person. I was able to simplify the code a significant amount, while also fixing some of the existing issues (no more ending up inside the character’s head).
I have finally reached the point where I’m ready to start making some builds for testing. The main focus will be to test the new multiplayer system, the character controller, and the camera. I want all of these to be as good as possible before moving on. Now that I can make functional builds, I can also start doing some profiling. I have made a temporary test scene that I will tweak to be able to profile different parts such as vegetation rendering, lighting, and physics. It will be interesting to see how much impact the different systems have on the game performance, and how big a difference the optimizations will make.

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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].

Hello, everyone and Happy New Year!

Here are some words about Astride’s progress in 2025 and what our focus will be in 2026.

One year ago, we shared our development goals for 2025. These included horse breeds, foals and breeding, tutorials, horse AI, more tack, client quests, environments updates, and improvements to the horse controller and player character. Now that we have entered a new year, we would like to look back on what we achieved in 2025, before sharing our plans going forward. While all the updates included bug fixes and general improvements, we will focus on the new additions each update introduced.

We started the year strong by releasing an update with horse breeds, updated UI, improved horse creator, a stable, lead change, stirrups, and more color variations for saddle pads. This was a big update where we really nailed down the horse genetics, both for breeds and coat color.

The second update of the year came in May. We had earlier upgraded to Unity 6, which resulted in some shader issues that had caused some delays. While we don’t have any absolute deadlines, we try to set goals for when we want an update to be ready. In addition to the shader issues, this update also ended up needing a lot of testing. The update included a new horse controller with halt and rein-back, option to swap between first-person and third-person, refusals, more leg markings, new show jumping and dressage courses, Arabian as a new breed, Rabicano as a new gene, new gait UI, and improvements to lead change and animation transitions.

The third and last update of 2025 was the breeding update in October. This was another big update that added breeding, stable management, foals, Percheron as a new breed, tutorials, cross country courses, day and night system, time progression, new interaction system, save slots, buying and selling of horses, and being able to own multiple horses.

Looking back at the goals we had set, we were able to complete the following:

• Foal: base mesh and textures, hair, blendshapes and animations

• Breeds: Arabian, Percheron

• Tutorials: tutorials to introduce the players to the game’s controls and gameplay

• Controller upgrade: improve gait transitions, leading, multiple horses

• Player character: first-person and third-person perspective off and on horse, object interactions

We also added a few more color variations for tack, and work on the environment has been ongoing. In addition to this, we added several features that weren’t specified in the development goals, such as cross country and stable management.

We were not able to release Alter Real and Dole, and we did not complete client quests, horse AI, bitless bridle, halter, and clothing options for the character. So what happened? Is horse AI cursed? Will Astride ever get a proper gameplay loop? The truth is that we were going to implement client quests and a wardrobe system before the end of 2025 and then start on horse AI first thing in 2026, but we had to put those plans on ice due to some issues with Unity.

A few weeks before the release of the October update, Unity notified its users that they had discovered a security vulnerability (Ouroboros wrote about this in the October devlog). This was pretty major and affected all the editor versions. Unity gave clear recommendations that everyone should update to the newest editor version where the vulnerability had been fixed. We of course did this, but soon started seeing problems. When initializing the game world, it would suddenly stop spawning objects and loading data. This happened for several of our testers, and debugging gave few answers as to the cause. It appeared to be connected to the save files, but there weren’t actually any issues with the save files and they worked fine on earlier versions of Unity.

After extensive debugging, Ouroboros noticed that everything initialized fine on the server side, but not on the client side. Since Astride supports multiplayer, all the code is set up for client and server. This is also used during single-player, but both the client and server is run locally and doesn’t connect to the internet. Astride uses a server authoritative model, so the client receives much of its data from the server. For some reason, this was not working and the client didn’t receive the data it needed.

Since Unity has several supported major versions of the editor, we tried to upgrade from 6.0 to a newer major version 6.2. The result was that the game wouldn’t run at all due to several errors. The conclusion is that the code we have for creating and initializing the client and server is outdated and won’t work properly on newer versions of Unity. This makes sense considering that Unity has made changes to its multiplayer packages this past year, and this is even more true for DOTS multiplayer (Netcode for entities).

The only way we were able to release the breeding update was by creating a build in an old version of unity and using a patcher (made by Unity) on the build to patch the security vulnerability. This works, but it isn’t ideal as we do want to upgrade Unity to get access to new features and improvements.

The plans for 2026

This brings us to our plans for the immediate future. We have decided to take time doing a more manual update so that we can move to Unity 6.3. Work on this started in October 2025, and we expect to keep working on it at least until summer 2026. Updating to Unity 6.3 is only one part of it, as we intend to take this opportunity to do some heavy optimization, improvements, and polishing. At the moment, we have a project containing all of Astride’s code and assets running in Unity 6.3.0f1 with a new and improved multiplayer system. Almost all the other features and systems are disabled in this project, and the plan is to enable them one at a time so that we can give each the attention it needs. During this time, we will release bite-sized builds to our testers so that we can properly test every part.

This decision is made to keep our players safe from major security holes and to up the game further. This will benefit both Astride and you guys in the future, even though it may take longer to finish the production.  

That’s all we can share for now. This has been a difficult decision to make since it means it will be a while before we can give you any new features. We will continue to post devlogs every month, and we will write an update in regards to our progress and future plans once summer arrives.