Alaskan Road Truckers News

Hi, Truckers!

You liked our visit to the studio with Pawel Stolarski, our business development specialist. We have another treat! This time, let’s dive into gamedev with Grzesiek ‘Greg’ Gładkowski, who works directly on the game.

Hi Greg! Tell us what you do in Road Studio.

Hoo boy. It’s been a journey for me since I’ve been with the game from the very beginning. I did some modelling, but currently, I'm a Tech Specialist and Enviro Artist. I work on the look of textures in different weather conditions, and on the foliage and generally, the Alaskan flora. This is a rather challenging area and in the past four or so months I’ve been focusing on making our forests and meadows look nice and real.



It’s an appropriate job considering your personal interests, right?

Yes, considering my two, let’s say, hobbies. The first one is 3D graphic design, which I got into around 2004. When Half-Life 2 launched, I spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours with it, or rather with its SDK. My friends and I used to make maps and scenarios for the game, and we got much more into it than in the game itself.

My other thing is my passion for travel. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to visit the far reaches of the world, but whenever I have some free time, I go hiking or biking. Even when I play, I tend to play games where I can roam the world, like The Witcher 3, or, more recently, New World and RDR2.

That’s not Alaska, that’s Zakopane, Poland!

So how do you make the plants and biomes for ATS?

That was one of the first things that we had to work out. At first, we assumed we’d just manually create all the places, but the map is just too big for that, and the Alaskan flora too rich. So we decided to divide our digital Alaska into different ecosystems, which are very much like actual Alaska, with its vast snowy tundras but also warmer places with colorful meadows or picturesque river banks. These ecosystems, to put it simply, work like areas that procedurally spawn certain types of plants characteristic for specific parts of Alaska. We’ve put so much time into researching them that I believe that Maciek, who designed the layout of the map, could very easily get a degree in Alaska’s geography.



Getting to the final look was a process, right? You didn’t do Alaska justice right away

That’s right, and that’s because you have to make everything work together. It’s easy to work on one type of tree and pretty much nail it, but when you put this tree next to a hundred others, you’ll notice it doesn’t look right. You need to have your trees designed in a very specific way, and that’s an interesting subject in itself.

Łukasz Cieciura was the hero who redid many, many models and their geometry to optimize the look of our wildlands, and he’ll tell you more about it in a future post.

This is also a question of performance optimization. It’s easy to faithfully recreate a biome, but it would’ve killed the performance of the game. In real life, the spaces between the trees are filled with ground foliage, ferns, bushes. However, it’s more CPU-effective to lower the canopy on the trees than add millions of individual plants or grass blades. The final result is similar to the real thing, and it sells the atmosphere of Alaska really well while letting you enjoy a high frame rate. So it boils down to balancing the realism and map design to achieve a coherent and believable artistic vision. And achieving this balance is one of my core tasks.

But you aren’t done just yet, correct?

I can’t stress enough that we are still in the process of making our environments. In game development, you don’t go from A to B to C. You create part of A, part of B etc., and you gradually develop each, which results in improving the overall look. Eventually, you put everything together and it clicks, giving you the final vision. That’s why our visuals have been improving so much over the last months, and that’s why they keep looking better and better every week.

Tell us something about your work on the game’s weather.

Basically, when we have an object in the game, my job is to make it look right in different conditions. When it’s wet or covered in snow. So I diversify the object materials, add snow height maps, or make the rain gradually increase the size and depth of puddles. This may sound easy, but we have lots and lots of materials. To handle them, our programmers created a management tool that tells the materials when to change their characteristics.

As for the general solution for the weather, the seasons in Alaska are unlike in the central USA. There are basically two seasons, one warmer and one super cold. A single place can change dramatically over the year, from a frozen nothingness to a lively moorland full of colorful flowers. I’m working on translating this Alaskan atmosphere into our digital world. I’ve spent a lot of time on fog, light intensity, light colors and shadows.

One place can give a completely different vibe depending on the weather

What do you like the most about Alaskan Truck Simulator?

That it puts emphasis on the thing that most simulators tend to treat with less care. While other games like to highlight the goal of your travel, like a city, where you can find an iconic building, what’s in between is just a general representation of the real world. We instead focused on the things you encounter on the way, the small towns that have their own personality, or with certain specks of wilderness that for some reason are very characteristic.

We have our representations of the Magic Bus, the Mukluk Land, built around the characteristic Alaskan shoe, or Chicken, Alaska, where you can find an enormous straw chicken. You can go there or through there, make a stop, exit the truck, sightsee for a bit. It’s so immersive for me, and I hope the players will feel the same way.

Big thanks to Greg for his stories! And thank YOU for reading. See you next time, when we’ll reveal more behind-the-scenes tales about Alaskan Truck Simulator.

Don’t forget to wishlist and recommend our game. To an indie developer, this means a lot as it boosts our visibility on Steam.

Hi, Truckers!

Alaskan Truck Simulator is more than just driving around delivering cargo. As a trucker in the game you’re not stuck behind a wheel, so the game consists of a whole lot more than just a road and a bit of forest on the sides. A whole bunch of things make for the entire game and as we value your opinion a lot, we're curious what you would consider being an important part of the experience.

We’ve created a survey, so please take a minute to answer the questions there. It will show us what has attracted your attention and what makes you wanna play the game.

Go to the survey

Thanks for your help!

Hello, Truckers!

Some time ago we’ve started sharing with you on our social media recommendations of films taking place in or featuring Alaska. Some of these recs come from our community. Here’s the first batch of recs summed up.



The first thing to recommend was quite obvious. Into the Wild is a classic film about a real person, Christopher McCandless, who hiked across Alaska. A gorgeous film full of emotions which will certainly put you into the Alaskan mood.



Another rec by a community member is Big Miracle, a 2012 drama film, based on Tom Rose's 1989 book Freeing the Whales. The plot tells the story of Operation Breakthrough, an international effort to rescue grey whales trapped in ice near Point Barrow in 1988.



If you want to see the wild face of Alaska, try Grizzly Man, a documentary about Timothy Treadwell, who dedicated his life to grizzly bears. For 13 years he visited the Katmai National Park, featured throughout the movie. Be warned though: it’s a sad story.



The last rec from the first batch is a bit different from the rest, as it is a 1995 animated film. Balto, half-wolf and half-husky, gets a chance to become a hero when an outbreak of diphtheria threatens the children of Nome. The animation is based on real events of the winter of 1925, where two huskies Togo and then Balto led the sled dog team to deliver the cure to Nome.

If you want to see more film (or book) recommendations, follow us on our social media pages: Facebook and Twitter

What films or books about Alaska would you like to recommend to other Truckers?

Hi Truckers!

Meet Pawel Stolarski from our team and join him on a tour around the less-known aspects of game development. You’ll learn some fun and surprising things about our title, and see what kind of automobile buffs we have on the team!

So Pawel, tell us what you do for the game.

Pawel Stolarski: I’m a business development specialist with a touch of community manager. The latter means that you can always talk with me on our Discord. But what I do first and foremost is looking for interesting partners that we can add to the game. Let me explain why we’re doing this.

So basically, our game is set in a real place and we want it to be as realistic as possible. To support the realism, it would be nice to use real brands for such things like parts, your CB radio or a dashcam, instead of some fictional substitutes. This goes beyond the truck too, because you can get out of the truck and walk around. You will visit stores or gas stations, so having real places and real objects would be really nice. My job is to find partners who’d like to have their brands featured in the game.




Do the partners add anything to the game aside from their brands?

Yes, they add their expertise which translates to authenticity. Here’s an example. We’re in touch with someone who actually drove trucks up in the North of America. We had our trucks modeled after real trucks, so before this person came on board, we naively thought we'd done everything right from the get-go. But it turned out that the back part of the trucker’s cabin is arranged differently in the North. They have lower temperatures and they have a different way of preparing for the road than, say, in California. Even if you’re a fan of trucks, even if you scan a real truck, such details are not obvious. You need a real, experienced person to point such things out, so a partner who knows everything about the subject is invaluable for the developers.

Here’s another example. Working with companies from the trucking industry gives us deep knowledge about the design of the actual trucks. Not just how they look, but also their physics, the limitations of certain parts, the way they vehicles are assembled. It’s something that you can’t just google, and even truck drivers don’t realize many of these things. We’re making a simulator, so this too is invaluable. And we know that our community is demanding and trusts us to take care of such details.





You’re a total automobile buff, right?

I am! This is why I joined Road Studio. I’ve never been a game developer. However, I’ve always been a gamer and a petrolhead. After doing business development for IT companies for a couple of years, I decided to look for a job in a game studio to combine both my hobbies.

Road Studio was a blessing because it’s exactly what I had hoped to find. It’s a small team where you keep your voice, and it’s a team focused on road games. I have loved this genre since the early Need for Speed titles. Or even older racing games, because my first rig was the legendary ZX Spectrum.


Pawel’s game collection (or rather a small part of it)


As for myself being a petrolhead, I fulfilled my lifelong dream of having a Subaru. If you were raised on the Colin McRae series, you can understand why this was my dream.

Anyway, I got a used car and started my Subaru adventure. I’ve been tuning it for over three years now… with many hardships along the way. F.e. I got hooked with a local community of offroad Subaru fans and... well, I drowned my ride in what seemed like a tiny puddle. It turned out to be as deep as the car.


The incident in question and its aftermath


But I repaired it! But there came another “surprise” my tuned engine exploded with a little help with local rodents... But let’s not delve into details. I rebuilt it again, and it’s beautiful. I also have a less dangerous hobby of collecting Hot Wheels, which I always buy in pairs--one is always for my son to play with.


Confirmed: Pawel is a car buff


You’re not developing the game yourself, but you play it pretty much every day. What can you tell us about it from your point of view?

From my perspective, the most amazing thing is seeing it grow. I have the privilege of being an observer with unlimited access to new builds. While I don’t have the knowledge of the code, I’m an experienced gamer. From this point of view, seeing how the game evolves before your eyes is quite astonishing. The core game is really great and it’s being built upon now. But don’t take my word for it. You’ll see it once it’s ready.

You can meet Pawel on our Discord server, so feel free to join our community! Add our game to your Wishlist and follow us for more updates.

Hello, truckers!

Have you ever heard about the Alaska Veterans Memorial? It is the first memorial dedicated to the state’s veterans. Today we want to give you a sneak peek into how it looks in our game. Yes, we decided to include the memorial, as it is a very important landmark of Alaska.

Here is how it looks on Google Maps:



And here is how it looks in the game:



If that’s the first time you’re hearing about the memorial, here’s some info. The memorial was built in 1983 and features five 20-foot tall concrete panels representing the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines and Coast Guard. On each panel is a short history of that branch's contribution to Alaska. In later years two more plaques were added to honour the Alaska National Guard and Merchant Marines.

The memorial is located in a very picturesque place, between Anchorage and Fairbanks, both of which are represented in our game. The site is surrounded by trees, and on a clear day, visitors can see Denali (previously known as Mount McKinley) which is only 35 miles away from the site.

We could not dismiss the importance of this place, so we simply must have included it in the game! Are you going to stop, get out of your truck and visit it while passing by?