Last night was an exciting first: four unique players all connected online in a round of Space Food Truck. It’s still very rough around the edges, but the session didn’t end with a crash! Someone’s laptop battery ran out… but that was totally not our game’s fault, which is a nice change of pace. While we polish our way toward an Early Access release in a month or so, we’ll leave you with a look at our shiny new damage effects. If you haven’t already, you can always sign up for a reminder when the game launches.
Got a few damage animations working for Space Food Truck! #screenshotsaturday #indiegames #cardgames pic.twitter.com/8XbRmSZ25o
— One Man Left Studios (@OneManLeft) September 12, 2015
As we bring in more alpha testers, Space Food Truck‘s online experience is slowly stabilizing. We’re also starting to work in slick effects for things like ship damage, thanks in part to a cool new particle tool we’re experimenting with. While Alex hunts and squashes show-stopping bugs for our impending Early Access release, I’ve been mocking up some animations to make things shinier. Here’s a look at cooking an ingredient (which is still missing the splash).
Had a very productive meeting yesterday about what Space Food Truck will sound like (decided not to go with the authentic “empty vacuum of space” route, regardless of how much money that would save), and Alex has even started distributing some buggy and broken alpha versions of the game to a few brave souls for first impressions.
The galaxy is feeling really cool in this latest build. We’ve finally filled in enough planets, color schemes, and descriptions to make it fun to explore, and I’d love to add even more if there’s time. That’s thanks to a really cool system Alex put together to quickly generate new planets. It starts with a single illustration, then mixes things up with different color schemes, rings, and moons. Here’s a few of the ways you might see our “ContinentalA” type planet in-game.
As always, you can sign up for a reminder the day Space Food Truck’s Early Access is launched on Steam.
My checklist for our move to Birmingham is finally starting to subside, and I can focus on work again! You guys, I spent four days without the internet. Well I had my phone, but not the REAL internet. The big one with the keyboard. It turns out, all of those CDs and DVDs I’ve been hanging onto from high school do come in handy. The wife and I watched a lot of Metalocalypse.
I was going to type up something neat about our new planet and nebula generation systems, or the sweet ending we just wrote for the game yesterday. But I owe the company 9 hours of missed work, so I’m just going to jump back into it. Next week, post with substance!
As always, you can sign up right here for a reminder when Space Food Truck’s Early Access hits Steam.
Crazy week at OML. I’m packing up my apartment to move to a new city, working overtime for all those days off I’ll need to set up our new place. But the Space Food Truck, she waits for no man. We chug on.
Online play presents some interesting new design challenges we hadn’t considered. In local play it’s super easy to tell whose turn it is by the avatar and hand of cards at the bottom. But online you can actually poke around the ship and plan ahead while your teammates go, looking at your own hand and avatar the whole time, so it’s easy to lose track of where the game is. We’re adding some new UI elements to remedy that, along with a “Whoever’s Turn” announcement a la Outwitters. That should definitely clear things up.
Our first few playtests performed admirably, but ultimately hit some game-stopping bugs we’ll need to squish. Somewhere out in space, a frozen food truck waits for an arrival card that will never show up. We’re excited to get everything up and running online so we can bring more players on board for alpha testing!
Long time no update! Chalk it up to marketing fatigue after that long Kickstarter promotional push, I guess.
The most notable milestone this week: Alex and I will be doing our first online playtest of Space Food Truck today. Up until now we’ve just been screen sharing over Skype with one of us playing dungeon master. Getting online working clears a huge hurdle in production for us. It was very nearly cut altogether for budget reasons, but what’s a multiplayer game without online play? We decided to tough it out.
And I couldn’t leave you guys without something pretty to look at. I’m doing big illustrations like the one below for the game over screen. I won’t show you the “win” ending, but here’s what it looks like when the dangers of the galaxy finally wear you down.
As always, you can sign up for a reminder the day Space Food Truck’s Early Access is launched on Steam.
Sadly, time is running out for our Space Food Truck Kickstarter and it seems we won’t be meeting our funding goal. But this is not the end! If you’ll follow this link and sign up for our mailing list, we’ll send you an email as soon as Space Food Truck is available on Steam Early Access.
We may not have our dream budget, but we do have a really fun co-op game that’s already working, plus a few more months of existing funds to bring it all together. If our Early Access performs well, we may even gain enough revenue to add the polish and sound we were dreaming of for the final release.
Thanks very much to those of you who believed in us and backed Space Food Truck! We’re nothing without fans like you. Now we march onward, to Early Access!
So we have less than 2 days left for the Space Food Truck Kickstarter! If you’ve been on the fence, let me just say that the game is going to be hilarious. Whether you’re playing it alone or with a full crew of 4, it’s stuffed with more jokes and cool artwork than we’ve ever put into a game before. We’re working very hard to make it the best thing we’ve ever done, and I hope you’ll take one last look at the info on our Kickstarter page and decide to go for it.
On a personal note, man are we tired of tweeting and facebook posts. Self-promotion is a rough gig, and whether we reach our funding goal or not, it’ll be nice to focus on the game again for a change. Thanks for enduring all of our shameless self-promotion. Next stop: beta release of Space Food Truck, which will be an even cooler game if you back our Kickstarter! I’m sorry… plugging the Kickstarter is just muscle memory at this point. Did I just make that a fifth link? I have to stop.
New stuff is added to Space Food Truck every day, and we’re just finishing up our planet generation system for the upcoming beta release! We’ve been slowly pouring all of the “world-building” content in, and it’s kind of magical to see our galaxy start coming to life.
When you launch a game, our system procedurally generates a galaxy of 100 planets, hides all of the traps and ingredients among them, then determines what each planet looks like. Scramboron may be a tiny ringed gas planet one game, or a huge cybernetic planet the next!
It’s been even more fun generating volumes of flavor text to attach to each planet. As you rollover planets on your map, the Captain has attached notes that make everything feel more alive. We plan on adding as many of these as we can think of, so you guys can have fun poking around the galaxy just to see what’s there. You’ll find stuff like:
Hyrune
My homeworld of born leaders. Captain is actually the lowest rank we have.
Uma Flux
Population: 5. Wait, now it’s six. Five again.
Arachnia
A sylk rich planet mostly overrun by giant spiders. We’re arming the resistance with full bellies.
P’lanett
I don’t recall anything interesting about this planet.
Gena Hex
Their population dwindled to one, so the last Hexling turned to cloning. He wasn’t their finest specimen, but I guess he is now.
We’re aiming for at least 200 different planet descriptions, and we’re determined to get there for the release version. If you have a good planet text idea AND we have your permission to use it in our game, post it in the comments. If we like it, we might add it in!
Thanks to everyone who’s supported our Space Food Truck Kickstarter so far! There’s only a few days left for us to reach our goal, so we’d appreciate it if you’d consider sharing or liking our facebook posts, or favoriting and retweeting us as we approach the big deadline. This game is going to be our best yet, and it’ll be even better if we can reach our funding goal!
We’ve just released this new video for Space Food Truck with a broad overview of all the things you can do in the game. It doesn’t get into role specifics like repairing and upgrading the ship or how cooking works, but does show you everything from moving around the ship to trading cards with other players. Check it out, and consider backing our Kickstarter if you haven’t already (every $1 helps!). We can make this game much cooler with your support! Thanks a bunch to everyone who has already pledged.