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.
Bonus Hustles
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.
Stella Cast
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
Cloud Writing
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