Space Food Truck hits Steam Early Access on November 24, so we’re rolling out tutorial videos this week to get our new players up to speed. Today’s topic: playing as Captain! You’ve got a lot of responsibility resting on those shoulder pads, so listen up.

There’s still time to sign up for our mailer. You’ll get an email whenever we release a new game, and 25 lucky subscribers will be getting a free Steam key for Space Food Truck!

Space Food Truck hits Steam Early Access on November 24, so we’re rolling out tutorial videos this week to get our new players up to speed. Today’s topic: the basics! How to read a card, how to charge an ability, and where to find the information you’ll need to strategize.

There’s still time to sign up for our mailer. You’ll get an email whenever we release a new game, and 25 lucky subscribers will be getting a free Steam key for Space Food Truck!

After months of hard work, redesigns, and “I didn’t think that would take that longs”; Space Food Truck is coming to Steam Early Access on November 24th! As you can see (and now hear!), the game has come a long way since Kickstarter.

You can watch your Early Access copy of Space Food Truck grow and mature into its final release state. Tell us what you think! Your feedback will directly affect the game’s final balance and content, helping us find that sweet spot between fun and challenge. We’ll be tweaking the galaxy generation, adding new effects, and doing technical performance stuff; all based on what our Early Access users care about most. And at the end of it all, you’ll have the full release version of Space Food Truck that you helped shape.

Our Early Access will be launching on November 24th at a discounted price, our way of saying thanks for helping us improve the game! Sign up for our newsletter to get an email reminder. 25 lucky subscribers will be getting a free Steam key on release day.

It’s been a busy week! Our release date for the Space Food Truck Early Access has been set: November 24th (you can sign up for an email reminder on release day), and a very slick new trailer is headed your way next week. I’ve also spent the last several days talking to myself in my office, putting together a series of short tutorial videos to get our new players up and running. So lots of interesting content is headed for the blog next week! But not today. Today you just get this.

Alex continues to diligently hunting down any major problems before Early Access starts. He recently conquering a tough-to-reproduce online bug with a little ingenuity. He is become all jobs. He is become all turns. Alex is Space Food Truck.

This week in Space Food Truck: Alex is hooking up some truly fantastic sound design from the amazing Mike Reagan and co., while stuffing as many gameplay improvements as he can fit into our Early Access release next month (you can sign up for an email reminder right here). Hoping to have a trailer ready for you guys in the next week or so, showing off a lot of the improvements we’ve made since Kickstarter.

On my side of things (the art side), I’m still revisiting all the stuff I left “good enough” and generally tidying up. I’m tweaking card artwork, adding goofy things for the character speech bubbles, creating more planet descriptions (we’re up to 139), and adding new customer reviews for the Game Over screen. When you finish a round, you get something like a Yelp review based on how many recipes you completed, and they have been exceedingly fun to write.

I’ll leave you with another bit of updated artwork for an event card called “Eureka!” It’s one of my favorites. You don’t want to be anywhere near the Scientist when he has an idea.

Sound effects from our partners in crime, Mike Reagan and co. (Outwitters, Gauntlet’s Revenge) are trickling in to Space Food Truck, and they sound every bit as amazing as we’ve come to expect. We’ve also added a new error system to the game, which we hope will be even more useful for our alpha players than the existing help menu. Now when you break a rule, the game will go ahead and tell you what’s wrong without you needing to look it up.

And naturally at this stage of development, polish items from the “would be nice” list are slowly finding their way in. Here’s some arrival card artwork that I’d been wanting to take another pass on. It desperately needed more aliens.

Space Food Truck is to Steam’s Early Access next month, so be sure to sign up for an email reminder on release day.

Space Food Truck has presented an interesting challenge for us. It’s a game with tons of sound needs and the potential to do all sorts of cool stuff, but virtually no budget to make any of that happen. So we’ve set aside music and a list of priority sound effects for the professionals to take care of, and the rest is up to us. For the past week or so we’ve been rolling up our sleeves, cracking open our thesauruses for keyword alternatives, and digging through massive databases of sound effects to try and cobble together something awesome. The results have been better than expected.

One piece of advice for any other developers tackling their own sound design: definitely capture a massive video of the game in action. Take it into the video editing software of your choice, and drop sound effects on top of your silent movie. It’s much easier that way to try a bunch of different stuff and do creative mashups of different effects, without having to build and rebuild and test and retest in-game.

We finished an awesome Early Access trailer this week, but we can’t release it until we figure out the ending. “Coming to Steam Early Access (blank)”. Early November feels right, but we’re not committed yet. You can always sign up for an email reminder on release day right here.

My focus has been 100% on the Space Food Truck trailer for the past few days, which feels a little more important for a PC game than it did for mobile. I don’t know if that’s actually the case, but this trailer is definitely getting more love than I’m usually willing to invest.

I spent more than a whole work day just trying to get this one shot set up and animated in Unity. I think I’ve decided that all of our non-gameplay footage is going to be done in-engine, so I can take advantage of stuff like the planet generation system and our particle system to class things up. Here’s how it turned out:

There’s an odd time near the end of production for any game we work on. Most of the artwork is finished, and just as my desk is starting to clear, Alex’s gets buried. He’s digging his way through a mountain of production needs and wants at the moment, squashing bugs and feverishly implementing all the stuff we’ve been talking about adding.

When Alex reaches this last stretch I become playtester in chief, putting all the new additions through their paces. There’s still some artwork and writing for me to pick at, but I have to admit that, on occasion, I’ve engaged in brief flings with certain prototypes.

Hopefully we can still get Early Access out by the end of the month as planned, but it’s looking like we might spill over a little into November. As our alpha players can attest, the builds keep getting better and better. You can sign up for a reminder when Space Food Truck is released right here.

So Alex beat Space Food Truck for the first time ever this week… without me. I’m not sore about it or anything. But I am a little.

Playing start to finish is a very good sign for our upcoming Early Access release! We’re aiming to have the game in shape by the end of October. For anyone unfamiliar with Steam’s Early Access, it basically lets you buy and play the game before it’s technically “done done”, so you guys can give us feedback while we continue working on it. It’s a real, release copy of the game you’re buying, you just get it early. Sign up for an email reminder when Space Food Truck hits Early Access right here.

I’m almost through my list of card animations, which will give me some room to tackle my “Would be Nice” list of things I hoped I had time for. Here’s a mockup for one of the engineer’s cards, “Exterminator”, which removes a pest from your card collection (that solar crab isn’t a pest, he’s just my unfortunate placeholder).