#astride

🌾WildHerds Sideview Redline Design Contest🌾

Want your artwork to shape the look of the next-gen horse simulation game? Join our community redlining contest and help us draw the perfect 2D lineart for our horse rig!

🏆 Prizes 🏆

Early Access Key to WildHerds

Custom Horse Coat of your choice, unlockable in-game

Honorable mention in credits

Access to a semi open source project: after the game EA published in 2026-2027, take the code and replace the assets! You'll also get viewing permissions to the back end coding server channels and github repositories. Think of it as a 'Helper Artist or Token Artist' Role

🌾Redline/Contest Guidelines

Side-view “final turnaround” lineart of our horse muscle sketch

Redline style (clean, confident line-work over the sketch)

It will be drawn over in layered chunks to rig (iris, eye, eyelid, nostril, muzzle, head, etc)

Optional: color & shading pass to show your vision

Resolution: Draw at 1,000×1,000 pixels up to 2,000×2,000 pixels

(Final in-game sprite will be hand drawn/simplified to a detailed approximately 500 pixel wide sprite)

The final rig is pixel, therefore an initial visually pleasing lines and curves on the silhouette are important. Every line placement should be intentional [because it will be down to the pixel!]

Think of it as a HARPG/ARPG import template—but instead of coloring on a layer, we are rigging faces so the 2d colored .psd horse looks 3D. By doing it this way we can add hundreds of coat colors by coding unity engine to input these 100 hex codes for the base chestnut on the following layer body pieces. In the end game to get 2 horses that are the exact same is a 1 in 10,000 chance!

An exact 90° side profile turnaround makes every future animation (walk, eat, stampede) look sharp and easy, this angle is important.

By nailing the muscle definition & proportions first, we avoided looking too stylized, now we want community input on the style!

WE ARE NOT asking you to design a whole horse (unless you want to!), we would like head shape ideas, eye ideas, etc.

🏆How Winners Are Chosen [3-5+]🏆

Developer Team

We’ll review all submissions and pick 3–5+ standout redlines based on:

Linework quality: clear contours, confident strokes, consistent pen pressure

Anatomical form: accurate muscle shapes, proportions, and joint pivots

overall style, visual appeal

Rig-friendliness: how easily the shaded design translates into a cut-out puppet (clean breaks, minimal overlap)

Overall composition: balance of detail and simplicity for a 500 px in-game sprite

We want a model that can have 2 modes: cozy and realistic. This will be a settings option and both will have different lighting, color schemes, game difficulties, etc.

Community Vote

Poll to select popular choice(s)

Prizes for All Finalists

Early Access key to WildHerds demo

Custom horse coat import of your choice

Potential team invite as a line-art or coloring artist if your style shines

Bonus Rewards

If your redline includes shading, you’ll receive 2 custom coat colors instead of one, plus future Patreon access.

If one style clearly dominates the vote, we may add extra surprises for that artist as thanks and congratulations!

Effort and Honorable contest entries may get keys or discount codes

🌾Lineart Considerations🌾

Primary focus: crisp, accurate lineart (shading is a plus but secondary)

Key qualities:

Strong, confident strokes with consistent pressure

Opacity control

No broken or jagged lines

Clean separation of parts for easy rigging

Faithful translation of the muscle sketch into polished linework

Secondary (appreciated): tasteful shading that enhances form without over-rendering. Final shading of the rig will be done by Unity engine, and eventually we will have a shaded rig plus a unity shader, however it would be nice to start off with a basic rig shader if possible to see what it even looks like that we can toggle on/off when coding.

Good luck, and we can’t wait to see your best side-view turnaround! Feel free to post and tag my account in any submissions until the game has official social medias (~1 month. We hope to have a social media and final model soft launch at the same time.)

🌾Timeline & How to Enter🌾

Now: Announcing the contest! Get familiar with the horse sketch.

In 2 weeks: We’ll launch our Discord server and open submissions in #redline-contest.

1-2 months from now: contest entries close.

Winners announced: 3-5 days after submissions close. Work immediately begins to put the final lineart [and any possible shading] on a N, E, S, and W facing horse muscle models. Then rigging and unity import begins.

2-4 months: soft tease of a sandbox early access demo mode of a fully animated, rigged, and playable 3D model in a 3D environment with rigged and animated 2.5D foliage/trees and AI 3D model horses.

In 6 months: early access demo release. This will include people with early access keys and backers who have keys and custom role perks will begin to see their horses imported into the game.

[the below gif is a low poly turnaround the devs made based on 1 week polygon form and anatomy studies of mustangs. These studies were taken and created muscle rig sketch concepts]

[Take a screenshot or download the muscle sketch rig concept above to participate in making the final rig concept lineart and/or shading.]

[This dun is an example of a user submission! This user went above and beyond]

The final linework will be rigged into something like this:

[This is not made by our dev team, but by SmackStudios. This is an example of a 2d pixel sprite with faces rigged to be 3d, also sometimes called a HD 2D sprite. The final horse model will be 2-3x the size/resolution; imagine the detail! This is possible through unity engine and Harmony 24 rigging program plugins.]

(Updated from my old post on my SSO blog! Thanks to those who helped link stuff to add to the new list!)

Games that are playable now:

Equestriad World Tour (mobile, free with premium options)

Equestrian the Game (mobile, free with premium options)

Horse Club Adventures (pc, purchasable)

Horse Club Adventures 2: Hazelwood Stories (pc, purchasable)

Horse Reality (browser, free with premium options)

Horse Riding Tales (pc & mobile, free with premium options)

Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch (pc, purchasable)

Horse Valley on Roblox (pc/mac & mobile, free with premium options)

House Flipper - Farm DLC (pc/mac, purchasable DLC to House Flipper)

Rival Stars Horse Racing (pc/mac & mobile, free with premium on mobile, one-time cost on pc)

Spirit - Lucky's Big Adventure (pc, purchasable)

Star Equestrian (mobile & pc, free with premium options)

Star Worm Equestrian (Minecraft mod)

The Ranch of Rivershine (pc, purchasable as Early Access)

The Sims 4 Horse Ranch EP *July 20th 2023. (pc/mac, purchasable DLC, TS4 basegame is free)

Wild Horse Islands on Roblox (pc/mac & mobile, free with premium options)

Wildshade (mobile, free with premium options)

Upcoming projects, with or without demos:

Astride (very small demo available in Early Access on Steam)

Horse Life Simulator

Horse Project (demo available)

Horse Shelter 2022 (demo available on Steam)

My Horse: Bonded Spirits (beware: this game may be a lie)

Rising Star: The Horse Game (pixel art!!!)

Tales of Rein Ravine (demo available on Patreon)

Unbridled: That Horse Game (old riding demo available, horse creator demo coming out soon)

Cause, as a still Patreon (I think it's like a trainwreck, hard to look away), the two updates this month have been on... hands.

But apparently they're implementing dressage at the moment. With a gif of a riderless horse going over a couple of large coloured circles.

I talked about it with ssoblocc when i noticed their most recent devlog, but

This section sums up what Astride is. Introducing themselves with a lot of "We're working on amazing, wonderful features that will elevate your gaming experience" and then it's followed up with what they've actually done, and it's... this

You can now press E on a horse and shift from a POV camera to a camera overseeing the horse. It's not even mounting or dismounting, because there's no rider.

I'm seeing a lot of neutral-negative posts abt it and at least a couple people talk about it like they have. I'm just confused bc I have never heard of the devs saying anything like that, only the community.