It’s been a long time coming, but Space Food Truck‘s asynchronous update has just been soft launched! I guess it’s only medium-soft; I don’t know if you’re supposed to tell people you’ve soft launched something. Anyway, the Online Games section now supports hopping into a live game lobby to play the whole thing now, or joining an asynchronous (your turn/my turn) game to play at your leisure.

So what’s the difference between our live play and asynchronous? If you happen to have a few players bite immediately on your async lobby, you can play exactly like a live game as long as the current turn’s player is online. The difference is how we deal with players that leave.

In a live game, a dropped player has 60 seconds to rejoin before their slot is forfeited to one of the other players. In asynchronous, when a player leaves the game pauses until they return. Once your turn comes back around, you’ll get a Steam notification. We really want to add a 48 hour time limit to boot inactive players, but we’ve hit some technical snags on that front that we’re trying to work through.

There are a few minor visual bugs in the game list that we’ll be dealing with before we call asynchronous “official”, but otherwise it’s been performing really well for us in testing. This update should make it WAY easier for you lonely hearts to find a crew online. If you encounter any weirdness, let us know at bugs@spacefoodtruck.com. Happy trucking!

The Space Food Truck asynchronous update should be ready to roll out any day now, and I’ve used the extra time to squeeze in some more 3d practice. My Chef is now fully textured, and I even had time to model the Engineer. His head was way more complicated than I had remembered.

Took some time this morning to wrap up my practice model of the #SpaceFoodTruck Engineer. pic.twitter.com/Ke7TmF36oB

— One Man Left Studios (@OneManLeft) August 8, 2016

We were hoping to have Space Food Truck‘s asynchronous update out by now, but we’ll be needing some more time to bug hunt and stabilize everything. On the bright side, that gives me more time to experiment and expand my 3d skillset. I gave that Captain model some bones to make her poseable, and I’ve got the Chef modeled and ready for texturing. Maybe I’ll even have time to model the Engie!

My practice Chef model isn't rigged yet, but he's already a pretty good dancer. #SpaceFoodTruck #gameart pic.twitter.com/kCnRXsyzTD

— One Man Left Studios (@OneManLeft) July 26, 2016

It’s been a little more than 2 months of my crash course back into 3d modeling, texturing, rigging, and animation after a long hiatus. I felt like it was time to put what I’ve been learning into a practical experiment: am I good enough at this to hypothetically remake Space Food Truck as a 3d game? I picked what I felt like was my most challenging character (I’ve never done hair before) and gave it a shot. It’d be fun to rig and animate her a little later on, if I have the time. I have a feeling I won’t.

Alex is almost done developing asynchronous play for good old 2D SFT, and we’ll have an announcement on that release very soon.

I’d hoped to have more cool stuff to show off from my 3d training tangent, but I’ve spent the past week refining that same old Blank Man model and rig. The past two days have been devoted to this one flippin’ shoulder, which is apparently a very tricky part of the anatomy to get right. This model went from “I’ll make a formless blob in the shape of a man and move on” to “I’ll make a person with good edgeflow I can base all my people-shaped models on”. I’ve deleted his hands and shoulders 3 or 4 times each, but I’ve learned a ton buckling down and trying to get it all right.

I believe asynchronous play is coming to Space Food Truck this month, after which I think we’ll do some game design again. I think I remember how to do that.

After a month or so of major overhaul to Space Food Truck‘s networking functionality, we’ve just released a convenient rejoin feature for online games! Now if a player is disconnected mid-turn, they’ll have a full 60 seconds to pick up exactly where they left off. There’s no longer a need for anyone to exit and rehost, or to retake the beginning of your turn to catch up. A popup will appear on the main menu after you’ve disconnected, or you can click “rejoin” in the “Find Online Game” screen.

Of course, this feature is just the first big hurdle we needed to clear on our way toward full asynchronous support. Soon it’ll be much easier to find a crew for a pick-up game of SFT online, and you’ll have the option of taking your turns whenever it’s convenient for you.

Slowly getting more comfortable with the Blender 3d software. Just finished exploring their UV unwrapping tools and some bump mapping workflows. By the time Alex has asychronous play ready for Space Food Truck, I’m hoping to be pretty decent at this!

Alex is still plugging away at the asynchronous update for Space Food Truck, which gives me a few months to learn some new 3d software for future projects. My very limited 3d experience has been in Maya, but we feel like Blender might be a safer bet for us going forward, seeing as it’s free and pretty powerful. The learning curve switching over has been steep, but I’m starting to get the hang of it and its million shortcut keys.

I’ll try to get back in the habit of regular blog updates and post some screenshots of my experiments.

You may have noticed we’ve been pretty quiet here and on social media lately, and that’s because we’re concentrating. But that shouldn’t get in the way of our usual progress reports, so here’s what we’ve been up to!

Alex is squashing bugs and getting the framework up and running for Space Food Truck‘s asynchronous update, which will help users find an online match more easily and will probably take a while. And since I have a bit more time on my hands than I know what to do with, I’m taking the opportunity to bone up on my 3D art skills. You might remember back in Tilt to Live 2 we had the 3D arrow and the 3D brimstone weapon… and that was about it. I’d learned a ton about rigging and animation and stuff, but forgot most of it for never having used it. This time I’m aiming to stick with it, so we can make whatever kind of games we want going forward.

Once the async update is ready, we’ve got all kinds of new card content and gametypes we want to do for SFT. So if new content is what you’re waiting for, keep an eye on this blog!

After adding a few different difficulties to Space Food Truck, our simple “quickmatch” solution for online games felt like it needed a little attention. This weekend we’re testing a new solution in our “thar_be_dragons” beta branch: a lobby screen that lets you browse every available game. It’s pretty simple at the moment, you can quickmatch like old times or be picky, but it lays the groundwork for our next big addition: asynchronous play. We’ll also be adding some better “rejoin” functionality soon for players who get lost in space.

Also new this build: 12 new crisis scenarios (3 for each room).

If you want to help us troubleshoot the new lobby this weekend, right-click Space Food Truck in your Steam games library, click Properties, go to the betas tab and switch to “thar_be_dragons” in the dropdown. As always, let us know what you think either by posting in our Steam discussion group or emailing us directly with any issues you run into at bugs@spacefoodtruck.com.

Gameplay

• 12 new crisis scenarios added
• New character chatter added

Improvements

• New online games lobby.

• Fixed an audio bug involving ship SFX in-game stopping
• Fixed an audio SFX volume adjustment bug after leaving a game.
• Fixed various in-game crashes/hangs from playing cards
• Fixed a crashing bug in the event UI if the player tried to take the damage in some scenarios.
• Fixed a crashing bug involving crises expiring that would hang up online games.