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.

It’s been a bit of a slog in 3d learning land the past week or so. My plan was to make a super simple mesh, rig it up, and try a little animation. But there was some ambition creep, my simple mesh got fingers and articulations, I experimented and improved my tutorial rig a little, and I spent all yesterday trying to figure out what the best low poly topology for fingers would look like. I have absolutely nothing cool to show for all that, but I learned a lot!

Next I’ll finally have something to animate with, and I might try scrapping this mesh to see if I can refit this rig to a character with different proportions.

I wasn’t at all excited about learning Blender at the start of all this, but it really does do everything Maya did for me. Some things worse, but a lot of things better.

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!

Alex and I talk a little about what we did last week and what’s next for Space Food Truck. Then we return to the land of Dragon Sweat for our weekly SFT key giveaway.

You can watch the previous episodes here on our YouTube, or come say hi on Twitch next time we stream, Fridays at 2:30pm ET.

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.

Our migration to Unity 5 is done! There were a few bugs that snuck past in the migration over the weekend that we tidied up, and we’ll be sure to fix any more that might spring up later. This build is now on the live branch, so for those that were being super helpful and giving it a go on the beta branch over the weekend, feel free to switch over to the normal build. Thanks so much to those that give the beta a spin this weekend!

Fixes

• Fixed audio clipping bug that would cause some background elements to go mute.
• 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.

Things have been quiet on the content front while we lay down some foundational work for Space Food Truck. It’s a bit of a slog now, but in the end we’ll be much more efficient at adding things and fixing bugs. We’ve got lots of cool stuff planned for the future of Space Food Truck, so keep an eye on this news feed!

Part of our overhaul has been upgrading SFT to the latest Unity Engine build. Typically it’s not something I would attempt to do mid-project, but the benefits of not having your environment crash randomly, plus the opportunity to address some bugs in the core engine felt well worth the risk. This transition has not been without a few mind-bending bugs that have made me question causality and the nature of reality. This image pretty well sums it up:

Gameplay

• You can now zoom in/out on the galaxy map with the mouse scroll wheel.

Improvements

• Upgraded SFT project to run on Unity 5 Engine.
• Optimized rendering performance of galaxy map by ~15-20%.
• Event Log is more responsive when closed during ship animations.

Fixes

• Fixed path highlighting bug in galaxy map where some paths would only partially light up.
• Fixed bug where the vent monster could get stuck on the ship after a “spacetime flies” event. (Yikes)

Alex and I return to Space Food Truck‘s Dragon Sweat difficulty, which less than 1% of our players have overcome. We are not the 1%… YET.

You can watch the previous episodes here on our YouTube, or come say hi on Twitch next time we stream, Fridays at 2:30pm ET.