Star Stable April Blog: Dressage, Selle Français & Android Launcher Redesign

Dressage

By Pablo Gadea Martinez (Game Designer), Bianca Savazzi (Content Game Designer) & Tula Eriksson Turtiainen

Hello Riders! We are Pablo, Bianca, and Tula, three designers who are excited to share what we have been working on recently: Jorvik Dressage!

Dressage is a wonderful sport that highlights the grace of both horse and rider. It's a sport that not only needs training and discipline from both participants, but a solid bond between them! We are happy to bring Jorvik Dressage into the game. Getting the right feel for gait changes and patterns in the routines has been tricky, and, although we know there’s room for improvement and we’ll continue to improve it, we are really happy with how far we’ve come! While racing and jumping obstacles are great fun, we're continuing our efforts in expanding the equestrian sports and activities. That’s why we have been very passionate about dressage; it’s something we love. 

Before going into detail about what's new in store, we want to thank everyone who played the dressage routine during last year's Equestrian Festival. We greatly appreciate those who showed interest in this content and the feedback we asked you to share with us.

One of the first challenges that we faced was how we wanted to present the sport. There are different levels and classes, so we decided to make our own Jorvik Dressage!

We keep the essence of Dressage but also give ourselves some breathing room to bend some rules so that all players can have a great experience. For example, real routines take several minutes to complete; in our game, most of the time, we want competitions to be shorter. It’s not that we’ll never make long Dressage competitions; we’ll start with short ones and maybe one day attempt longer ones.

If you're a returning rider from last year, you might have noticed that the routine is different now. We designers collaborated with a colleague, Lisa, who assisted dressage judges in official competitions! She made the routine with realism in mind, and we fine-tuned it to be an enjoyable gaming experience on both desktop and mobile. Our main goal is to deliver an experience as close as possible to the real Dressage while keeping the essence of a video game. 

Let’s discuss some of the changes we’ve made from last year:

• One of the most frustrating parts of Dressage last year was the strict timing for the gait change. Since the camera looks at the character’s back, it’s a bit difficult to know the exact moment to change gaits. That led to an experience more frustrating than we intended. To address that, we added what we call “Grace timers.” These allowed us to increase the time in which gaits can be changed without giving penalties, creating a more enjoyable experience for everyone.

• We also created a new hut for the judges that appears both during the Competition and in the world. From now on, we’ll add one to every location where Dressage is added. We hope these landmarks help you find where Dressage takes place and increase your immersion in the world of Jorvik. This first one is themed after Jorvik Stables; we’re looking forward to seeing what the others will look like.

The new hut in Jorvik Stables

• Besides the initial routine, we made a second routine that was released a few weeks after the Equestrian Festival started. Unlike last year, the fun is now here to stay! Having one routine is good, but having two doubles the fun! The second one was designed to be a little trickier, with more demanding gait changes. 

We’re continuously looking for ways to improve Dressage, so please send all your feedback through our social media and support page. It is greatly appreciated.

We do hope you enjoy learning both of the routines and have fun with dressage! Getting dressage into Star Stable Online has been a long ride, and there's still more to come as we continue to work on it and add new routines in the future.

Selle Français

By Alishia Nossborn (3D Artist)

Hello StarFam! 🐎

My name is Alishia, and I am a 3D artist at Star Stable. I had the pleasure of working alongside our talented team, in bringing the Selle Français to life. Pauline, who acted as an equestrian advisor on this project, provided invaluable support and guidance during the research phase. Together, we embarked on the task of creating a lively eventing horse, ready to showcase the breed's versatility.

I did a lot of research on the breed's conformation, and we decided to go for a sporty horse that was fit for eventing. Being a warmblood, it can be difficult to distinguish the Selle Français features from those of other warmbloods. This was one of the challenges I faced during this project; it had to look and feel different from the Dutch and other warmbloods in the game. By picking a sporty look, the Selle Français could be more easily differentiated from other warmbloods, but the focus of the breed standard is mainly aimed at exceptional performance ability. To get the breed’s anatomy correct, I collected a board of beautiful references from horses in the studbook and watched a lot of videos of them moving. A lot of decisions were, as usual, based on the community expectations gathered by our fantastic community team! ✨

Using Autodesk Maya and Zbrush to create the 3D model, I started by creating a silhouette that felt representative of the breed. Same for the mane style that accompanies the Selle Français. From there, I went into the more detailed features.

Once the model was done, I started on the greyscale; this requires a lot of attention to the horse’s anatomy and lighting. By using Zbrush, I could quickly get a good base to paint on through some sculpting and then project those details onto a game-ready model in Substance Painter. The greyscale then goes through a lot of reviews until we reach satisfaction! Considering all the amazing references you can find in the studbook, this horse’s greyscale was a pretty smooth ride.

After that, I moved on to create coats using substance painter, one of my favourite parts of horse creation! 😍 The coat colurs were picked out from the gathered player expectations. Among them was a new rare coat we didn’t have in-game yet, the Sooty Buckskin Pinto. All the coats were made with so much love, and seeing them finished in-game was very exciting, as always! 🎉

As per usual during implementation, you find some interesting.. To say the least… bugs 😂

Look at him go, all ready for his first event! Maybe a bit too excited?

See you around in Jorvik 😎

Launcher’s redesign: Android next!

By Juliana Alonso (Producer of DISCO Tech 💅)

Howdy folks! 🤠 Let me start by introducing my team! We’re called 🪩DISCO Tech 🪩 (feel free to chuckle). “DISCO” is short for “Discovery & Onboarding”, which refers to everything that helps new players find us and onboard, and for returning players to discover more of what Star Stable has to offer… We in DISCO Tech are just one piece of the puzzle that work within this area – the techy puzzle piece. 🤖

What does DISCO Tech do exactly?
Anything, literally ANYTHING, that is not the actual game. Some examples are the redesigned website, the new official webshop, the offer tools that bring you Double Star Coins and bundles, the email systems, the account creation, the server status page… and all of our LAUNCHERS… segway to 👇

Launcher’s redesign – Android’s turn! ✨

The launchers have been getting a facelift, starting with the rollout of the Desktop Launcher in August and iOS Launcher in December. We’ve reached our final step, which is the Android Launcher. 🎉 While you might mainly notice the visuals, there’s much more going on in the background of this redesign. We’ve rebuilt all the code and rearranged the features in order to be able to develop the launchers in new directions going forward. The way they were structured was limiting us, and we believe that there’s a lot we could do to improve your experience when coming back to play. We’re launching it to smaller user groups, so there’s a period of time where you could be seeing the old design and your friends the new one. 👀

This is just the very first iteration

We will continue to rearrange important features, the discovery page, the shop and who knows what else we’ll add in the future 😏 We’ll continue to update the graphic design too over time! The vision is to make the launchers into a more immersive experience, blurring out the lines between the AFK world and Jorvik.