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.

First some breaking news: Alex and I have decided to bring Space Food Truck to iOS and Android tablets! The PC version should be ready around the end of this year, after which we’ll jump right into optimizing the game for tablets. This way more of our existing fans will have access to Space Food Truck on their platform of choice.

Hard to believe our little Space Food Truck Kickstarter is almost 15 days old, with just 15 days to go! From what we’ve read about Kickstarter, most projects that can reach 20% funding will go on to be completely funded during the last big rush at the end of their campaign. We’re just $1,700 away! Here’s what you can do to help push us over that magic number:

1. Back our Kickstarter (every $1 helps)! If you’ve been putting it off to the end of the campaign, perhaps we can entice you with an Early Bird discount? There are less than 90 left. And if you aren’t completely sold on this game or Kickstarter in general, but you liked one of our previous games, every $1 helps!
2. Retweet our Space Food Truck tweets or share our facebook posts to help us reach more people (big thanks to those of you who have been doing this all along)!
3. Tell your friends about the game! You’ll be wanting a reliable crew to play with, anyway.
4. Your favorite gaming news site probably has a “contact” or “tip us” page for you to suggest games or news stories they should cover.

Thank you to everyone who supported us so far! Our tiny little indie company depends on you guys to keep chugging along. We’re working super hard to make Space Food Truck our best game yet.

Just like that, Space Food Truck has been greenlit for sale on Steam! In just over a week, no less. Thanks to everyone who stepped up and voted for us.

One big request we’ve been getting from you guys was for more gameplay footage, so our programmer Alex was kind enough to record a quick walkthrough for a turn as the Captain. The Captain class has 5 unique job cards to help her explore the galaxy in different ways (this video shows off her main starting job card: Engage!), in addition to 30 other unique items and ingredients that anyone can collect from your on-board shop, the Zapmart.

Bear in mind that most of the polish, sound effects, music and animation get filled in at the end of the project (we are on Kickstarter for a reason), but we hope this and future videos give you get a better idea of what you can expect from Space Food Truck.

So we’ve been campaigning like crazy for one whole week now, and Space Food Truck is up to 13% of our funding goal! It may come down to the wire, but with your help we can finish this game the right way. Real sound effects and music, online play, and slick animations! If you’re interested in helping out, here are a few things you can do:

1. Back Space Food Truck! A lot of people like to wait until the very end of the campaign to jump in, but we’re offering an Early Bird Discount to anyone willing to pull the trigger and pledge now. It would certainly help us freak out less as the campaign continues.
2. Anyone you know with a Steam account can vote for us on Greenlight. We’re 47% of the way to the top 100, and we’ll need every single vote we can muster to push us over the top!
3. Spread the word. It’s a great game for anyone that likes card games, board games, funny games, co-op games, or would be interested in something they can play with their kids.
4. Your favorite gaming news site probably has a “contact” or “tip us” page for you to suggest games or news stories they should cover.

In our smorgasbord of tweets this week, we’ve been including some promo images that I’ve had a blast writing every morning. Below is a roundup of all we’ve posted so far. My personal goal is to have one for every day of our campaign, so 30 pieces in all.

We’re proud to announce that our fifth game project is well underway! Space Food Truck is a tongue-in-cheek, cooperative digital board game for PC, Mac, and Linux. You can check out some early video and read through a wealth of information on our Kickstarter page. We also need all the Greenlight votes we can get to bring this game to Steam!

We’d been lucky enough up to this point to fund all of our projects 100% by our own game sales, but we found ourselves stuck choosing between some pretty brutal feature cuts this time. We could only really afford to finish it on our own if we removed online play, used “clip art” sound effects and music, and axed most of the animation and polish. We hope you’ll consider supporting our Kickstarter to help us take this game to another level. If it looks like something you’d want to play with your friends or family, we could really make this something special with your help!

I know many of you are probably wondering, why a PC game? Space Food Truck is an effort to branch out to a new platform and make something a little deeper than the average mobile game. We’re excited about making the jump to PC/Mac/Linux, and all the game design possibilities that opens up for us. We’d like to thank all of our fans immensely for their support over the years, and we hope you’ll join us on this weird little trip to space!

There’s been a lot of time spent on this blog talking about our fifth game, and we almost have everything we need together to announce it (honestly, I was hoping we’d have it ready this week). I can still give you a little taste, though. Here’s a picture from a few months ago at our first, super-ugly prototype play test. The game being super-ugly, not our testers.

We said we were leaning toward multiplayer, and that’s definitely happening. You’ll also notice our testers staring at a bunch of rectangles, because it’s a digital card game! Much, much more detail coming soon with the big unveiling.