Star Stable August Game Blog: Andalusian & Retrofitting

The (new and improved) Andalusian aka the “Horse of Kings”

By Kyly Sheldon (Senior 3D Artist)

Horse of kings, you say?
With pedigrees recorded as early as the 13th century and breeding programs established by royalty, this breed was popular in royal courts and riding academies and prized by European nobility for their beauty, charisma, and athleticism. So valued were these horses that the Spanish government even gifted them to foreign rulers as a tool of diplomacy from the Renaissance all the way up to the 17th century. Talking about fancy things, their Spanish name is right up there - “Pura Raza Española” (PRE). How fabulous. <3

For our remake of the beloved Andalusian, we worked hard on a new model, textures and animations. But don’t stress though, it has still retained its feisty personality ;)

With this new production we were sure to include some fan favourites from the current Andalusian, while also adding some extra flair to this flashy equine.

For the Andalusian we decided to go with a Dressage vibe with some Working Equitation inspo thrown in for a little extra spice. Speaking of which, we have a sporty new tight running braid plus tail knot, often seen on Lusitanos too.

Regarding health and welfare, we were very mindful about addressing certain common issues. For gaits we made sure no front legs were paddling to the sides, in movement we kept the horse on or in front of the vertical, and detailed discussions were had about a healthy neck thickness with no EMS (Equine Metabolic Syndrome) in sight.

Our new and improved Andalusian is all packaged and ready for its arrival at Jorvik Stables on September 10th. We hope you enjoy riding it as much as we enjoyed making it <3

Retrofitting Update

By Lotta (Art Lead)

Okay! Let’s do it! Let’s talk about Retrofitting AGAIN! :D 

Hello everyone, I hope you know me by now. It’s me, Lotta, your loyal character/creature art lead and servant. 

Soooo, how are we doing? I’ve been in this retrofitting tack trench for 1,5 half years and I must say, I’m starting to see the light of the tunnel. I know, I know, I said that before, but this time I think I really mean it. This winter, we finished up the system part of the new tack system, and this spring, we’ve been working laboriously on fixing the skinning on all the tack in the game to make sure we can fit it on all horses. 

Now, during the summer, we laid up the entirety of the Gen 3 breeds in a long list and just started to slowly chip away at porting them. It’s been me and Lotta who have been fighting in the trenches, porting them all. Eh… No, Lotta is not my clone, but she happens to share the same name, she’s also a 3D artist, and she’s also really into horses. She’s our super-skilled freelancer from the Netherlands. 

Every Monday I post a little status report with a diagram showing how we’re doing. This is how it’s looking today. Not bad, eh? 

What’s taking time for us now is the QA process to go through and check every tack piece on every horse in every animation. The porting from the old to the new system goes fairly quickly. It takes us about one day per horse. But a lot of time adds up with bug fixing and QA checking. We are still figuring out how much time we need to spend on testing.

We have another release planned for after summer, 17 Sep, this time it will be 3 horses again. The dutch warmblood, the Jorvik warmblood, and the English thoroughbred. 

I know, I know. The dutchy and the Jorvik warmblood were already fully retrofitted with the old system, but since they are very popular horses, we decided to take them early anyway so that when we release new tack, they can wear it right away! Going forward, we will try to coordinate new tack system releases with some of the horses in bazaars. It will likely not be all bazaars or all horses in a particular bazaar; it all depends on how our testing goes!

Oh, speaking of tack! Since you're already here and listening to me blabber, I can also tell you about the new saddles I made! Ain’t they pretty? They are still waiting for the final skinning and for QA to have time to test them. It’s a bareback pad, a new western saddle, allround saddle, and an Icelandic version of a dressage saddle. When I made these, I tried out a new workflow I haven’t used so much before. I 3D-scanned the saddles of my co-riding horses. And then I cleaned up the scan data and created these models. They didn’t turn out exactly like the original ones (due to copyright reasons), but I got a lot for free. Especially those weird angles and shapes saddles have.

I’ve also tried to make a bunch of other items, like blankets, ear bonnets and such. 

The new types of tack will have to wait a bit. There we are blocked by several things. One of the biggest is how the equipment system is working. We simply don’t have slots for every type of tack piece we want to add. Our gameplay programmers are working on a new system to make it easier for us to add and change what the horses can equip. I’m really looking forward to that!

I think that’s it for this time! 

This has been a long and difficult project, and I would like to thank you all for your patience.

Also, I want to say a big thank you to the rest of the team, Petar, Oliver, Francis, Natalia and Amanda.