Howdy truckers,
Looks like the news is out! Star Trucker will be released on September 3rd this year!
It’s been a long journey, and we’re both excited (and terrified!) to see what you all think of the full game when it finally hits Steam in a few months' time.
The release won’t be the end of this haul, though. We’ll continue to provide updates based on your feedback, which conveniently brings us to the meat of this month's dev blog!
Reading the Mail
Your comments and input from playing the demo over the last few months have been invaluable. So we thought now might be a good time to provide an update on the improvements we’ve made based on your feedback.
Truck & Trailer Physics
Firstly, we’ve spent a lot of time updating our truck and trailer physics.
How so? Well, acceleration and top speed are now affected by the combined weight of your hitched trailers. The heavier the load(s), the longer it will take to get up to speed. This also means you’ll need to account for brake distances as it will take a lot longer to bring your truck to a stop when hauling a heavy load.
On the plus side, you’ll get a bit more speed out of the truck when it’s not hitched to a trailer. This should help you get to job boards, garages, and gas stations that little bit quicker.
Cruise Control
While on the subject of speed, we’ve also added cruise control to the cab. It's not as fully featured as those found on a modern vehicle, but it does the job and lets you take your hand off the throttle during those long hauls.
Cruise control lets you manually adjust the target speed and will disable itself if you accelerate for longer than a second, hit the brakes, or have an unfortunate collision.
Emergency Brakes
A feature that didn’t quite make it into the demo but we feel would have been appreciated by some players, the emergency brake quickly brings your truck to a complete stop by expelling air(!) from the cab.
We feel this design is a fair trade-off. We don’t want players to rely on the emergency brake for moment-to-moment gameplay, but it does provide a way to recover from imminent disaster and lapses of concentration.
Quality of Life Improvements
We can’t list them all, but here are some notable bits and pieces we’ve been working on in response to various forum posts, streams and emails.
FOV Slider
A frequently requested feature was the ability to adjust your field of view. Well, good news, now you can!
Relabeled Gravity Access
Lots of players were failing to find the gravity system. Understandable, it is a little hidden. In the short term, we’ve updated our labeling, but we might still need to do more.
Shelf Snapping
Using the truck storage in the demo was a bit fiddly. To counter that, we’ve introduced a form of “shelf snapping”. This makes it a lot easier to quickly place items, especially in those harder-to-reach spots.
Zero-G Item Damage
Some players let us know that items were taking a lot of damage while floating around in zero-g. This was the result of an awkward little bug, which has now been fixed.
Speedier Space Walks
We noticed from watching gameplay streams that accidental ejections, while funny, could be a little frustrating due to the length of time it took to get back to a moving truck.
After tweaking the space walk system, it’s now a little easier to travel longer distances and get back to your cab…well, as long as the drive assist was active!
Save Slots
Lastly, quite a few players conveyed their frustration of having to replay from the start of the demo whenever they died. Fear not! The full game will support multiple save slots as well as an autosave.
Back on the Road
Although this post doesn’t cover everything, we hope it shows how much we’ve appreciated your feedback over the last few months and the positive effect it’s already had on the game.
That said, there’s still a lot to do before release, so I better get back to development!
Check back soon though. In the next post, I’ll give you the lowdown on some of the neat new things you might have spotted in our latest trailer.
- Monster Dave