Star Trucker News

Fellow truckers, we hope you're doing well!

Many of you have asked us when our demo will be back. Well, finally we have an answer for you. Get ready to haul and holler across the stars again on May 20th!

In the meantime, don't forget to follow our social media channels, for more exciting things to come.

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Hey star truckers, Dave and Dan here with another rambling dev blog!

Now that all the excitement of Steam Next Fest is out of the way, we have our heads down and are currently working hard on Star Trucker content.

What does that mean? Well, we’re busy building out sectors to traverse, adding cargo to haul and implementing a truck load of radio chatter.

[h2]Bonus Hustles[/h2]

For the most part radio chatter happens naturally as you complete procedural hauls and unlock certifications. Other truckers in the galaxy will begin to take notice and start offering what we call side-jobs.

We use these side jobs in a couple of ways. Initially they help introduce new jobs and cargo types but as you progress we try to provide some little twists on mechanics and provide players the opportunity to get to know the NPCs a little better.

You don’t have to take these on immediately, but they can act as a nice palette cleanser between procedural jobs and hopefully make you feel like you’re part of a living, breathing galaxy.



[h2]Stella Cast[/h2]

You may have already heard some of these NPCs while playing the demo so it seems only right to officially announce the core cast of characters you’ll encounter as you haul from star to star…

Drum roll please!



Tyler Collins as Dusty Bear. A former sheriff turned trucker who’s always happy to lend a hand or provide advice.



Dev Joshi as Sour Candy. Owns a workshop in Tank Town but often called upon to help with deliveries other drivers tend to avoid.



Jay Britton as Red Eddie. A long haul specialist who likes to make the most of his down time.



Emma Sherrziarko as Moon Baby. A kind hearted trucker who prefers hunting salvage to hauling cargo.



Joy Ofodu as G-Bee. Providing oversight and essential information to truckers across the galaxy.



Peter Baker as Barrow. A veteran trucker who doesn’t mind bending the law if it will help him or his friends.



Lastly our very own audio engineer Ross Stack as Rosso. The galactic scale master in charge of the many weight stations found at key locations across the galaxy

[h2]Cloud Writing[/h2]

As this IS a dev blog, we thought we’d also share a little high level overview of our conversation workflow.

Being such a small team we knew that if we wanted to get the most out of our Star Truckin’ dialogue we’d need to find a way that we could easily iterate on our script, test in engine and avoid manually copy-pasting a short novel's worth of text.

With that in mind we first investigated suitable middleware and then developed some tooling to help us track and automate 1000s of lines of dialogue and voice files.

After a fair bit of searching and experimenting with tools like Twine we eventually settled on a relatively new piece of software called Arcweave. Here’s why…

• It’s super intuitive to use with a very clean layout
  
• Allows the whole team to work on game dialogue simultaneously
  
• Fairly easy to export to a variety of game engines
  

With that locked down our workflow proceeded like this…

First we write a mini-spec for and some example dialogue for a conversation. Next up our writer extraordinaire, Nessa, adapts this into something that makes sense and adds it to Arcweave.

Here’s an example of a small interactive conversation at this point of the process…



Once we’re happy with the way the conversation flows we use some custom scripts to pull it into the game engine. These scripts do some very neat things!

• Generate a string table that will link with our audio files
  
• Generate a conversation flow and basic game logic in-engine
  
• Exports a tracking sheet so we can keep an eye on all VO files
  
• Exports a recording script that provides a familiar way for actors to read lines
  

Here's how the conversation looks after it has been imported into the game engine…



An extract from the tracking sheet...



How the conversation gets formatted for the voice actors…



So in summary a combination of Arcweave and custom scripting…

• Allows us to quickly iterate and preview dialogue
  
• Generates the relevant files for our audio engineer, the voice actors and our game
  
• Helps automate the implementation of 3000+ lines of dialogue!?
  

Still here? Nice. We tried not to go too deep with that little dive into game dialogue but we hope some of you found it at least mildly interesting and that it shows just how much work goes into even a little bit of radio chatter.

That’s all from us for now. Next time we promise more pretty space pictures and less diagrams!

- Dave and Dan

Hi all!

As you can imagine it’s been a pretty crazy week here at Monster HQ and to be honest we’re still a little dazed from the whirlwind of excitement that was Steam Next Fest.

Saying that, I thought now might be a good time to write a round up on the event while things are still fresh in my head.

Read ahead for some developer ramblings…

[h2]The Event[/h2]
Steam Next Fest was always going to be a big week for Star Trucker. It was our first time showing the game outside of expos and our first real test of it running on such a wide range of hardware.

As you might have experienced, the demo was not without issues. Thankfully many of you powered through, providing words of encouragement and useful feedback.

We also had some fabulous guest streams including an interview with the voice of Red Eddie, Jay Britton and another with our lovely Raw Fury game producer, Rasmus. We hope you enjoyed those and we’ll do our best to set up some new informative chats in the near future.

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[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The event also saw streamers from all over the world boot up the demo, crash, deliver, freeze to death and accidentally launch themselves into the harsh void of space. We had a blast watching what we could and it was a genuine relief to see so many excited viewers in the comments and streamers enjoying themselves.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Rocket Powered Wishlists[/h2]
You might not realize it but wishlists are super important for indie developers and small publishers.

Thanks to Steam Next Fest and the incredible response from players we saw a mind-boggling spike of wishlists during the event and gained a ton of new followers keen to keep tabs on the game.



This boost not only helps us reach a larger audience but also shows we’re on the right track with our weird idea of putting big-rigs in space

Oh! And it also helped us land in the official top 50 list alongside a whole lot of other awesome games.


We’re still collating the huge number of comments and survey responses but here are just a few of our takeaways from your feedback on the demo…


[h2]Better Tutorials[/h2]

We absolutely want to do a better job of teaching the essentials while still allowing room for discovery and experimentation.

One small step towards this has been implementing a user manual that can be found in the glove box. This provides a way to revisit any tutorials you encounter and read up on smaller features.

However there’s certainly more we can do beyond this and we have our thinking caps on with that in mind!



[h2]Fine Tuning[/h2]

There’s been a lot of good feedback around game balance. This has been great to read and although some issues were a side effect of an overclocked demo, you’ve still given us some great indicators for where we need to tweak and poke various values.

In fact, items being easily damaged in zero-g has already been addressed and system degradation rates are being adjusted as I type!


[h2]Fair warning [/h2]

We’ve also made a lot of notes from watching streams and playthroughs regarding how we time critical warnings and the visual cues around low oxygen and extreme temperatures.

As part of our balance pass we’ll tweak the min and max temperature limits but more importantly we’ll address how much warning you get when something is wrong.

Hopefully this will provide players more opportunity to rectify cab issues or jump into their space suit before roasting to death or running out of oxygen.


[h2]Tasks and Waypoints[/h2]

We also feel more work can be done around this area of the game, in particular making sure players know where the key locations are for their active quests.

So, more prominent quest waypoints, better guidance and an introduction to the map! Some time will also be spent in making sure task instructions are nice and clear and never cut short.


Well...alongside everything discussed we’re still hard at work building the rest of the galaxy and wrapping up feature work.

Bug squashing and stability improvements are also ongoing and Monster Dan continues to keep his head down as he hooks up various side jobs.

These NPC focused mini quests should provide a great way to learn about mechanics, explore gameplay concepts and provide our voice actors lots of CB slang to chew through!




Lastly I want to take another moment to say how thankful we are to everyone who took the time to play the demo and provide feedback.

Seeing so many people enjoy Star Trucker despite the rough edges has been a heart-warming experience and we can’t wait to share more about the game with you all very soon.

Until then I’ll be down, out and on the side.
- Monster Dave

I've always loved Euro and American Truck Simulator, at least conceptually. But I spent too much of my youth stuck in my parents' car, driving across Europe, to find the series' purposefully mundane road trips particularly novel. Space, though? That's a more thrilling—and crucially dangerous—setting, and the source of Star Trucker's more thrilling journeys...
Read more.

Truckers, today you'll have the opportunity to travel the galaxy and learn more about the Star Trucker production with Rasmus Liljenberg, our Game Producer. Join us today at 8AM PT / 4PM BST / 5PM CET

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2380050