Update log
Full Road Kings update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Extracted changes
- Events
- Gameplay
- UI and audio
Hello everyone,
This is our first dev blog, focused on the origins of Road Kings. We’ll take you behind the scenes to share what inspired us to bring this game to life, along with some insights and a few technical details. Let us know if you enjoy this kind of blog, and what you’d like to see in future posts!
Origins
About five years ago, over at Saber and Focus, we started kicking around an idea we were genuinely excited about: what if we built a next-gen trucking simulation game… but with a twist?
Our previous off-road titles had already shown us how much players love mastering tough terrain in mud and snow, but we also saw a growing desire to take powerful trucks beyond the wilderness and out onto the open road. That’s when it clicked: why not bring that same depth and challenge to a long-haul trucking experience?
With that vision in mind, Saber and Focus set out to find the right team to help bring this new take on the genre to life.
Saber Porto
Small, agile, and full of energy, Saber Porto, in Portugal, had supported a number of remasters and ports from their offices on the Douro river. They had built up capable teams in all aspects of development, including physics, modeling, animation, QA, visual effects, props, environments, UI, audio, production, and gameplay programming. After being integrated by Saber, their first title under the Saber Porto banner also gave them valuable experience in the release process. Their vehicle modeling, driving, and open world development in Unreal Engine was a natural fit for what was to become Road Kings.
The project began with veteran Design Director Peter L. Mack and his team creating Road Kings' original mechanics, setting, characters, and stories. While they were researching and prototyping, new leadership joined Saber Porto. Bradley Doan came on as Studio Head, bringing 30 years of AAA game development to the team, followed by Omar Fernandes as Art Director, with more than two decades' experience in AAA games and blockbuster movies. Bryan Griffiths entered as Technical Director, with veteran experience in developing gameplay systems and AI. Of course, many other talented developers make up Saber Porto, who I hope you’ll get to meet in a future post.
Our Vision
“Whatever you eat tonight, whatever you wear, wherever you sleep, remember: it's likely that it was a Trucker that brought you your food, your clothes, and your bed.” Johnny Cash, Sailor on a Concrete Sea, 1970
“Antarctica-like temperatures… deadly tornadoes… the logistics machinery must never stop. Truckers go about picking up and delivering freight.” Freightwaves, 2019
Peter L. Mack, Design Director:
Admittedly, I’m not a truck driver. But at the start of the project, the more I dug into the world of long-haul trucking, the more inspiration I found. I spoke with drivers I knew. How do you find work? How do you manage your time? What do you worry about? I read Finn Murphy’s The Long Haul, listened to “Long Haul Paul” Marhoefer’s Over the Road, and consumed dozens of other works and industry journals. Trucking games have a storied history, going back 40 years. But it was the real-world lives of truckers, and the ups and downs of logistics, that presented a wealth of subjects on which to base the game’s design.
What appeared, over and over, were themes of change. While freight is still the engine driving our world’s economies, it is in a state
Source