Star Stable February Blog - Medieval & Magical Dragon Horses

Medieval Reputation Quests

By Game Master Em (Game Designer)

Greetings be upon you, Starfam! 

Here at the office in Stockholm, winter is slowly (slowly…) melting away and making way for sunlight and warmth, and personally, I’ve switched out my winter coat for a loose tunic, knightly armor, and a sturdy helmet. New Dragon horses, Gauntlet races, and Targeting have been among our updates these past weeks, but today I wish to share some behind-the-scenes of another medieval project I’ve had the pleasure of working on - the new quest chain with Big Bonny and the Medieval Houses! I’ll do my best to avoid big spoilers while still sharing some tidbits, so without further ado - onward, knights! 

When the team sat down to build a new quest chain about the Medieval Houses, we wanted to try going back to our roots - that being silly storylines, creative daily quests, and reputation being used to tell a story in several acts. And everyone loves a mystery, right? With that as our base, we decided to explore a story that has you getting to know the Houses a bit more and learning how each of them might approach problems - whether that be regular camp tasks or perhaps… something else threatening the status quo.

The House Representatives are new faces in this quest chain, and they’re all named after strong women who broke gender stereotypes in the Middle Ages - can you figure out who their historical counterparts are? 

For each act, we added three new daily quests to the roster of what the Representatives might need help with - fitting of how the three Houses would deal with the main problem of the act. Maybe the Blue Oaks would take a more strategic approach while the Yellow Wolves try to tackle the problem more head-on. The memory challenge from the Blue Oaks was one of the quests I worked on, and while it was incredibly fun to build, the search for bugs was an interesting task as I constantly needed to ask myself - “Is it bugged, or is my memory just bad…?” 

As for the more Story-heavy quests at the center of each act… As to not spoil them, I will only say, we hope you’ll like them! They’ve got that classic Star Stable silly humor, gorgeous art, catapults, and, for the first time - Stable Customisation as quest rewards. Jarrod, who worked on the kit, will be sharing some behind-the-scenes about that project in another section of this blog, and we thank him humbly for the House-themed flags! <3 

I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about some of the work behind the quests and that you have as much fun experiencing the story as much as the team had making it! We’d love to hear if there were any of the activities you found extra fun, as we might want to add a few of them as permanent additions to the Medieval Camp even after you’ve completed the storyline.

Until next time, Starfam! <3

Home Stable Customization Kit

By Jarrod Sheldon (Senior Environment Artist)

Stable customization is such a wonderful idea. We have the ability to change our character's appearance, our horse and tack, and now, finally, where our horses live.
Being a part of the Home Stable project and figuring out how it would work was a huge challenge but so worth it. Hearing players enjoying the options and personalization makes every hard hour worth it.

My next task on the project was to make a medieval version, and man was I excited to start right away! I collected my references and wanted to get 3D modeling as soon as possible. I had limited time on this project, so I could only make a few new 3D models, but other themes like Brickhaven have 3D models that can use the medieval theme textures!

Collecting all my references was hard, mainly because they got me so excited to start! But I needed to be patient! The time for creating would come!
I added some music in the background while getting into medieval-mode, and why not hit some Bardcore!? XD

Time to model some 3D prototypes!

After making the stables and gates, getting feedback from the rest of my team, and refining the ideas, it was time to start on the next thing!

I wanted to have a dragon as the ornament, and what better dragon to use than Nomi's beautiful new baby pet dragon! The only problem was that it had a lot of detail which wouldn’t look right as a medieval ornament, so I needed to make a simplified version, and if there is one thing I love, it's simplifying things!

I was quite happy with the result, and I hope Nomi thinks so too! <3

I was fortunate enough to get some help from my intern, Rasmus, and based on his work on previous projects, he was now ready to assist me!

Rasmus made the torch lights and helped me with the beams! The medieval beams were fun ones, as we wanted to make them nice and chunky, with options to change the color of the bolts, clamps, and flags! I was so excited to have the house flags as options for players to complete their customization!
Who knows, maybe we can even have custom logo flags in the future!

Making environment props for Star Stable is such an honor, and I always look forward to reading and watching everyone's responses! It is so nice to have the possibility of making a player's day just that much better in the game!

Magical Dragon Horses Ryume and Keima

By Nomi Bontegard (3D & Animation Artist) and Matilda Geijer (Associate Art Director)

Let us share the process behind the new Dragon horses!

With the popularity of the Medieval Area and the baby dragons, it only seemed right to introduce new Dragon horses to the game! We knew from the start that we wanted to improve their design, aligning them closer to the art style and quality level of the recent magical horses.

Matilda, our Associate Art Director, started the concept process and sketched ideas for how the horns could look, the placement and size of fins, the placement of spikes, the flow of scales, etc… 

Being fantastical creatures, dragons can have such a large variety of shapes, but we also need to stay within the restrictions of the game. It was a lot of fun to imagine what a Dragon horse of Jorvik could look like. 

We had been discussing a black and a white dragon from the beginning. The duality of the two makes for such a great pair; no other color combination seemed just as good for them. Matilda also explored the mouth design. We wanted to be able to make a dragon-like maw that could open more than a regular horse’s mouth can, and that was not a straightforward task. How large should it be? How will it work with bridles? While the concept art serves an important role in envisioning the final product and to start thinking of technical risks and solutions already at an early stage, it was time to start to answer and try out these ideas in practice.

When we had decided which concepts we wanted to move forward with, Nomi, the 3D artist for this horse, could start working on them in 3D. She wanted to keep the soft feeling in the scales from the concepts and kept the level of detail in certain areas while making them more subtle in other places of the body. The result turned out stunning, a satin-like sheen on the scales flowing around the horses’ bodies.

Nomi used Zbrush to model the shapes of the face, tail, and horn details of the dragon horse. She then made it possible to swap between the normal and magical heads through an alpha channel in the UV map, which worked wonders! Imagine what we can do with future magical horses now that we found this little trick.

The result:

But that’s not all! Two of our great animators, Max and Jana, made some unique animations for them. We wanted to really showcase the mouth, so we made some new idles with more mouth movement, a unique roar, and a rearing animation where the horse is breathing FIRE! The fire VFX was made by another of our animators, Ludvig. Along with epic, original sounds created by our sound team!

It’s been great watching these majestic creatures come to life on Jorvik. If only we could learn more of their mysterious past in the Marchenghast Castle…