DevBlog #24 - Ventures Update

Howdy Star Truckers, We’re back with a chunky dev blog to coincide with our largest update yet! There’s plenty to cover so let’s hit the gas and drive into things…

Launch Trailer

First up, our publisher Raw Fury has created a lovely little video for this update. Check it out below!

Home Improvements

Secondly, interior customizations are finally here! You can now overhaul your cab interior with a range of options including new color schemes, dashboard items, wall panels and star strips. You can access this menu by heading down to the lower workbench and interacting with the new board artwork. The primary way to unlock customizations is by levelling up a Business Venture. However, we’ve also included a selection of items you can obtain via cash earned from hauling freight. As more ventures come online, new rewards should always be within reach as you bounce between side jobs, freight hauls and helping out our new NPCs.

Here’s the current list of stuff you can modify within your cab…

• Bedding - Different styles of bed and bedding

• Cab Trim - Material used for paneling found inside the cab

• Color Palettes - Colour themes that adjust the metals, plastics and other elements inside the cab.

• Dash Lighting - Glowing elements such as neon strips and bulbs that fit around the front of the cab

• Maglock Toppers - These attach to the maglock lever and come in a variety of shapes and styles

• Star Strips - Decals that run along the top of the windscreen (both inside and out)

• Space Suits - A variety of different outfits that have unique colours and patterns

• Wall Panels - Changes the large panels found on the mezzanine and inside the airlock

• Dash Accessories - We have two types of accessories. Dashboard items that can be placed in any (or all) of the four positions on the cab dash and Blower items that can be placed on either of the small vents. Some of these dash items are interactive and some blower items will animate at different speeds based on the blower power.

Business Ventures

We spoke a bit about Business Ventures in our previous blog post HERE but for those who want a general overview without dippin’ out of this post we’ve got you covered with a general overview below.

Unlock a Venture

Meet the requirements and you’ll get a holler from a new NPC and gain access to a unique set of jobs relating to that venture.

Complete Venture Jobs

Completing venture jobs will earn you VXP and level up the business.

Earn Rewards

For every level you complete you’ll earn new rewards! From colorful cab palettes and dashboard accessories to valuable items you can horde or sell to nearby traders. Steam post image

Purchase Boosts

To aid progression, you can spend in-world cash on boosts to unlock extra job slots and increase the amount of VXP earned per job.

Clear Prestige Gates

Every 10 levels you’ll encounter prestige gates. Invest in the business to unlock these gates. Doing so will give you a bit more insight into the NPC you’re working with and allow you to continue taking jobs.

Max out your Venture Level

There’s plenty of levels to clear and 3 prestige gates to unlock. Clearing all of these is your primary goal for a Business Venture.

Venture Titles

After maxing out a Venture you have the opportunity to unlock a time limited title for bragging rights. This timer can be extended by continuing to take and complete venture jobs beyond the max level.

It’s also worth noting that you can access the Venture screen at ANY TIME via a new tab in the game menu. Here you can take and cancel jobs or check progress towards your next goal.

We recommend taking Venture Jobs alongside freight hauls to maximize efficiency when navigating the galaxy. In fact this is part of the reason why job cooldowns and venture gates exist.

Venture jobs are intended to compliment the core gameplay loop and not supersede them.

Hop-timized

This update also rolls out improvements to the freight job generator. This includes…

• Faster and more optimized job generation

• More freight jobs visible on job boards

• Fixing an issue with long distance jobs not always generating

Generally this should make the job boards feel a bit more reliable while also squashing some unwanted performance issues that could occur when hopping from sector to sector. In future updates we’ll be looking to increase the number of local jobs, tweak XP payouts and hopefully inject some new job templates and cargo to help things feel a bit more varied.

Height Advantage

Another VERY important feature tucked away in this update is seat controls! Yes, that’s right, you can now adjust the height and position of your seat! Steam post image

You can access these controls via the new buttons located on either side of the cab seats arm rests. Oh and we’ve also added these controls to the custom bindings screen. Handy for those who want to adjust their seat via a hot key! It’s also worth noting that your seat position is saved per session so you’ll need to re-adjust if you start a new game or switch playthroughs. Steam post image

^ Here you can see the difference between positions and the affect it has on your forward view.

Bug Crushing

Lastly we also squashed a couple of long standing big ticket bugs as part of this update…

1. Rogue asteroids should no longer appear during warp preventing unexpected collisions

2. Your truck should no longer drift out of position when at a complete stop

Thanks for your patience while we dealt with these, both were quite difficult to reproduce and fix but should now be a thing of the past!

Support Tickets

As you can imagine this update touches on almost every element of the game and although we’ve spent a lot of time, energy and dollar testing it there’s bound to be some niggles. To that extent we’d like to remind you that if you stumble on a particularly bad bug (or you just want to send some feedback) please head over to the Raw Fury Support Portal and submit a ticker. It makes it a lot easier for us to track and resolve issues this way.

Credits Due

We’d also like to take a moment to thank those who helped contribute to this update. Without them we’d likely have taken many more months completing a fairly epic task list…

• Alex P for dealing with all our 3D art demands. He’s made some awesome new artwork and has a ton of incredibly cool new stuff rolling out in the next couple of updates.

• Darbotron for diving deep into the code base - squashing bugs and expanding our customization system

• Nessa for the top notch new NPC dialogue (We’ll chat more on this in a future dev blog!)

• Panda for developing a bunch of fictional graffiti artists alongside a stellar set of tags and dubs.

• Hanja and Dubravko at Fury Studios for their work on the new billboard designs and UI elements.

• Ross for taking on the gruelling task of chopping up hours of VO sessions and labelling hundreds of audio files correctly.

• We’d also like to give a special shoutout to our friend Kate! You don’t get too many opportunities to work with fabric designers when developing video games but she did a fantastic job on many of the bed patterns you’ll see in this and future updates.

Lastly, a big thanks to all of you who’ve stuck around, providing feedback and sending us your support. It means the world to us and it’s the reason we do what we do ♥️

Venturing Beyond

Rounding up this lengthy dev blog we wanted to let you know that we’ve got a great slate of ventures in the pipeline that we plan to roll out over the year. Each of these will feature a new character, jobs and variety of rewards. Maybe a handful of other surprises too! We’ll be sure to talk more about all of those soon but in the meantime we hope you enjoy this update. 10-10 ‘til next we blog again!

• Dave & Dan ( aka Monster & Monster )