Star Stable June Game Blog: Jorvik Mountain Horse & Voices from SSE

The Jorvik Mountain Horse

By Alishia (3D Artist - Characters)

Hiya there StarFam, it’s horsey time! 🐴

Have you ever heard of the Jorvik Mountain horse? No? Well, let me tell you about it!

Soon, Jorvik will have its very own Mountain horse, aaaall the way from eastern Kentucky! Get on the trail, only you, or bring your favourite trail buddies and ride through the mountains!

Working on this horse has been interesting, to say the least. Starting out with the team actually getting the opportunity to meet the breed it is based on! Early this year, once I knew which breed I’d be working on, I instantly started reading up on it. To my very surprise I stumbled upon a stud farm not too far from us here in Sweden! “Ullekalv Mellangård” is Sweden's first Rocky Mountain Horse breeder. How lucky? I made it my mission to get my team there for some field research. The owner, Ingrid, was incredibly welcoming and helpful with planning our little visit.

During our trip, we learned a lot. We got to see the breed up close, ask questions, sift through many magazines, take a bunch of photos and videos—anything that could help us during production. We also just enjoyed our fantastic time at the farm around the horses! One crucial discovery made during the trip was that the horse breed's name was Trademarked—oh no, shocking 🫨. Therefore, the name of the horse breed from the mountains turned into the Jorvik Mountain horse!

Since Ullekalv had so many beautiful horses, we asked if there was one specific horse they’d like to see in the game. “I believe that would be Percy!”, a very sweet, calm, and horse typical of the breed! She is indeed a very charming horse, and how exciting for me to get to recreate her, a gorgeous silver buckskin🐴

  1.from our visit 2. source: RPM’s Silver Persuasion - Ullekalv  3. Percy & me

After our visit, the team was left inspired and filled with much new knowledge! 🤓

ONTO PRODUCTION!

Even though this horse couldn’t use the original name, we wanted to follow as much of the same breed standards as we could, still honouring the breed the Jorvik Mountain Horse is based on. During our research, our animator, Pauline, found some state symbols, such as the tulip tree and cardinal bird, which inspired us to incorporate some of them into this breed!

The extra mane with the poplar tulip from the tulip tree.

Early prototyping and idea visualisation of the special move from Pauline using the Mustang horse.
A cardinal feather falling from the sky is caught and given as a gift to the player.

Some progress on the special animation with temporary textures.

Picking the coats for this horse was exciting. Since the silver gene is common for this horse, there were a lot of cool coats and ideas to choose from. After reviewing your feedback and expectations, the coats were decided. Of course, we would be making the classic Chocolate coat (Silver Black)! Initially, I didn’t think these horses could look very different in colours to be honest, but I was wrong! They do have other colours than chocolate. The silver, among other genes, really makes for a bunch of different variations! (After the Criollo, I thought this was gonna be a really simple one 😂) Loads of dapples and loads of silver, still a lot of interesting details even with the simpler coats!

How the chocolate started, yikes, and end result, yay! ✨

We also wanted to show off its natural ambling 4-beat gait, something that really makes this horse special! The gaits are so smooth and comfortable that they make for a perfect trail riding companion! Since the ambling gait is natural within this breed, the movements are not excessive or forced. To show these gaits, the horse was given a trail walk as well as a pleasure gait with hoof lifts no higher than the knees!

Tiny peak at the Trail Walk

Our tech artist Francis and Pauline testing out the rig! 👀

That’s all for this time, see you on the trail!⭐

Voices from SSE - IT

By Povve (IT Admin)

Heyo!

Let’s start with introductions!
Hi, I’m Povi/Povve/Povilas/the slightly scruffy looking IT guy, and I’m an IT Admin.

How about you? Wow, <insert your name here> is such an amazing name, so nice to meet you!

Back on track. We’ve heard your cries! “Omg we want to learn about the IT department”, “Please give us the stories of the security side, it’s so cool and interesting”. You flatter me, really. So let me tell you a bit about the grind that is working IT for Star Stable.

The team is me (Hi!) and my manager, and honestly, what more could you ask for?

The two of us are responsible for some of the most slept on parts that any game company has to deal with. We’re talking enthralling stuff like cyber security, office security, employee accounts, computers, and most importantly, that one printer in the office that refuses to cooperate. There’s plenty more but honestly half the time even I don’t know what I’m doing.

Week to week is wildly different so it’s hard to explain in a single post what we do, but to really make it simple: our main mission is to make sure everyone else can do their job.

Sometimes it just means giving them computers and all the tools they need, sometimes it means silently crying because of some bug that just doesn’t make sense, and sometimes it means creating cool looking dashboards like this one.
This dashboard shows an internal tool called “Perforce”, a software used by artists and developers alike. So it being down would make us very sad.

I mean look at it, I made it myself and still don’t understand half of it. How cool is that??
I even made it go all red and the :D becomes D: if something is wrong, because who's going to stop me?

We also buy stuff, build stuff, and break stuff. Which typically leads to my desk being covered with computers. Even as I write this, I have 3 laptops, 1 macbook, and a phone surrounding me, truly feeling like a hacker.

Speaking of hackers though: Cyber security!

While we don’t work with the player-side of things (sorry gang), we are the ones who make sure that all the people working here won’t get hacked, phished, smished (yes, that’s a real thing), or other kinds of -ished. 

Now we’re talking learning all kinds of new things. For every app, email, website that exists, there’s always the chance to get hacked, and trying to stay on top of that means always having to learn and implement the new (and usually expensive) tools.

In all honesty though, I do love my role here. I get to play around with tech stuff daily, always have a chance to learn new things, get to meet all the cool (and slightly dorky) people in the office, and every now and again get dragged into random cameos in Tiktoks/Insta posts (look for the slightly scruffy looking IT guy).