Star Stable April Blog - Equestrian Festival & The Mule

The Equestrian Festival

By Ella Kårefalk (Narrative Design Intern)

The Equestrian Festival, a true sign of spring in Jorvik!

Hey there! My name is Ella, and I am a narrative design intern here at Star Stable! The first major project I got to work on was the Equestrian Festival, and it’s been a blast!

Highlighting equestrian sports, this festival is a favorite of many! (including myself)

Prancing around in fancy pastel sets, leveling up horses in no time, spring vibes galore. What isn't there to love? So, it was an honor that this was not only my first project, but also the first festival I ever worked on!

Let's take a look at some of the design work that goes into the Equestrian Festival each year, why don't we!

When we start working with a festival, it all begins with looking at previous years. We see what worked, what didn't, what might need a refresh, and what needs to be replaced with brand new content.

Creating new content often starts by looking at community wishes and content that is dearly missed. That's how we landed on the treasure hunt! A piece of this dearly missed content was an Easter egg hunt. For many years, you've wished for its return. Therefore, we brought back the essence of an Easter egg hunt with a traditional treasure hunt!

Reduce, reuse, recycle, and all, but we also needed to bring something completely new to the table! For this festival, we needed a smaller piece of content that was going to run in the last week of the festival as it became quite barren when we removed some older content. In a brainstorming session for general content, the idea of pairing riders with the perfect horse was thrown around, and it landed! As the development of the quiz began, we also realized that this content would be a perfect fit (see what I did there?) for the last week. We believed it would be engaging enough to only do for one week; people wouldn't tire of it or miss it, and it's nothing like anything we've ever released. That is what we now call "A perfect fit for a horseshoe." (coming Wednesday 😮)

As you may have noticed, we are also in the process of updating areas and content that has traveled with us for many years now, and with the festival being set in Jorvik Stables, that meant it was Jorvik Stables' turn for a glow up! This doesn't include the most obvious one, retexturing the buildings; it also means updating NPCs with new models, redoing audio, updating the Jorvik Stables Championship, and more! This time around, we did a so-called "facelift" of Jorvik Stables and not a full-fledged update as we've done with locations such as Hollow Woods and the Silverglade Equestrian Center. Why? Well because this was only to "refresh" Jorvik Stables for the major event that the festival is! The large area updates take a lot of work, time, and people, people and time that we simply did not have on top of working on the festival itself! There is also a lot of love and adoration for the nostalgic layout of Jorvik Stables. It's history, isn't it?

This is but a peek into a mere percentage of the work that goes into festivalsl—rinse and repeat five times a year! Of course there’s even more work that I haven’t covered such as item sets, decorations, bug testing etc. but quests are what I generally can speak on as a writer, having my grubby little hands in the texts.

Festivals are an incredibly fun project to work on, and I can't wait to show you what we all will bring to the table for future festivals!

Ta-ta for now!

The Mule

By Ludvig (Animator)

Heee-haaawwwr🎺 Hello, I’m Ludvig, long-time animator at Star Stable.🕺

Mule mule mule. The Mule being the true mischievous stubbornest of equidae animals, we truly had an opportunity to convey personality in the animations. The Mule being half a horse, the reins were a little bit looser. We could experiment with the animations, exaggerating the movements, putting extra attention to the facial expressions, and flop the ears🐰.

Production board of Mule expressions

Mule sneezing idle by Oriana

Work in progress Mule walk by Max

For mule uniqueness, we had a few ideas that we needed to test before production started.
The Mule being sturdy, could we do mountain climbing? Raccoon jumping? Random unpredictability of the mulish quality? Unfortunately, the risk of players venturing out to the Ashlands 🧐 or jumping into places not meant to be jumped into, or random unpredictability becoming too random, it couldn’t be done without proper gameplay design to make it justice or fun enough. We had to stay within the confines of what the SSO Horses are, mostly.

Work in progress of Hee-haw special trick by Ludvig

We finally landed on highlighting the Braying, the wonderful noise the mules can shriek at the top of their lungs, ringing over the hills of Jorvik, let it be heard in every crevice! HAAAWR ahum… excuse me.
And of course, the floppy ears! Oh, the cute long ears! 🥰 

Work in progress of Floppy Groove special gait by Jana

To not have the ears flop all of the time we decided to restrict them to a few moments and have the all out flops as a special gait, the Floppy Groove, just strolling along without a care in the world. If disrupting their groove, instead of rearing this horse/donkey would perform Bucking for mulish stubbornness.

Work in progress of Rearing Bucking animation by Jana

The Audio guys, Daniel and Axel, did great work with sounds, the braying and hee-haws that we could match the movements to. Some of us, especially Jana, got extra excited to animate with the sounds, because it’s something we don’t usually do. We certainly had fun with the mulimations.

Not everyone likes the Mule choir, though. While screaming at us through the screens, a concern was raised that it might be annoying??? I can’t understand why, let them sing, I say, it be balm for the eardrums. 🎶 We mulimators love it 😀

Mules Dancing by Pauline