- Vaporwave soundtrack released! - 1 February 2017
This soundtrack is my own special take on the vaporwave genre. All tracks are in MP3 format and encoded at 192kbps. Includes 19 tracks in total. Overall these are distinctly different than the muzak tracks heard before the action parts of the game and deserved to have their own album like this. Some are more upbeat for action scenes, while others are more sad to compliment the player failing a mission or dying. There is a 10% launch sale so grab it now and let these retro beats soothe your nostalgia. ːbrewskyː http://store.steampowered.com/app/571651/
- Muzak soundtrack released! - 3 January 2017
Includes 14 tracks that have been remastered from old records and tapes. All tracks are in MP3 format and encoded at 192kbps. These tracks are heard on the radio during the first level of the game and while traveling to Pluto (before engaging the FTL drive). They are taken from old record and tape recordings my Oma singing from the 50's and 60's. They are digitally remastered for use in the game, and are now available as a standalone soundtrack. http://store.steampowered.com/app/571650
- Trading cards released! - 20 December 2016
The steam trading cards for Space Trucker have been approved and released into the wild as of today. I think you all will like the selection of backgrounds and icons I created for the game and market place. The foil badge in particular is quite special! Happy holidays and happy new year! See you all in 2017. UPDATE 1/2/17: Released the Muzak soundtrack today also on Jan 2nd. Includes 14 tracks in total that are from the radio in game. There is another soundtrack with electronic music that will be released later. http://store.steampowered.com/app/571650
- Day 1 Patch - 25 November 2016
Infamous day 1 patch is ready! - Fixed an issue where a couple of barrels could trap players behind them on Charon. They have been removed to stop this from happening. Happy Turkey Day Also!
- Alternate Timeline - 24 November 2016
Imagine our local galaxy from the top-down perspective, a bird's eye view if you will. You see Earth, the pale blue dot. To the left you have Mercury and Venus, and of course our star the Sun. To the right you have our moon, Mars, and the rest of our collective "backyard". A playground for possibilities which we will use as our canvas for the game. Some of the first thoughts are about ways people would move around this space. What would they be doing? Who would own what? This can be a pretty daunting task, especially when you have the void of blackness looking back at you when you start up the map editor at the start of a project. https://spacetrucker.ca/blog/12_AlternateTimeline07_tn.jpg The only way to combat this void is with planning! This is where things you have probably heard of before like a GDD (Game Design Document) come in handy. The probability this document will remain the…
- Space Trucker is now available on Steam ! - 23 November 2016
WE LOVE WOLVES is proud to announce that our 2nd game known as Space Trucker Is now available on Steam ! Pick up a copy of Space Trucker today by clicking below and add it to your cart! http://store.steampowered.com/app/533320/ Space Trucker is published by WE LOVE WOLVES and it took us only 16 hours to get the game approved to be on Steam thank you everyone in the group who voted for us to get on Steam! Space Trucker has 18 achievements currently we also are currently working on the Steam trading card features which will come out in the next few weeks. Join the official game hub which can be found Here by clicking ‘Follow’ thanks a lot everyone who voted on the game I highly recommend you buy the game today
- Launching @ 11PM PST - 23 November 2016
https://spacetrucker.ca/images/launch_party.jpg
- Entity Creation - 21 November 2016
Creating a new entity starts with the idea of what is needed. If the developer is loading up the engine tools without any clear indication of what they should be doing then they are wasting their time. Sometimes this can be useful when learning a new engine or figuring out the best way to implement something. However, when we are working on the game and trying to get actual work done it is important to have proper game design documents to support the work you are doing so time is not wasted and the best game possible can emerge from the development process. As one stop shop indie development studio time is our most valuable asset, we must make proper use of every hour we use to maximize our offering to the players. We will go through the motions of creating the fusion reactor that is used on the player's ship in Space Trucker. It is a familiar object, is seen often, and can be interacte…
- Little Black Book - 19 November 2016
Have you ever gotten a really great idea at the worst time possible? Such as while stuck in traffic, or on the train where you cannot take the proper time to make a note digitally or otherwise. In moments like this you try and remember the idea long until in full until you get someplace you can write it down. Some of the best ideas for game development and new projects have come from the most unrelated of locations or objects. It would be rash to say this is not an efficient way to get new ideas down, but it is agreeable that something is better than nothing. What matters is that the idea was written down and archived for later use, without this it would be lost in the sea of day to day activity. For each of the game projects I have completed there is typically a notebook like shown below where all of the ideas will go during the early stages of development. Referring to stages of the g…
- Static Lighting - 18 November 2016
The size of levels in Space Trucker requires there to be several hundred or even thousands of lights depending on the scope being obtained. In order to maintain performance it is necessary to find a reliable method of pre-mapping the lighting data that would normally be rendered in real-time while the game was running. There are other rendering methods such as deferred rendering but these are not silver bullets since you lose out on things like multiple transparencies (looking through a window, that looks over the street, into another window into another building) would be impossible using deferred rendering so this is not a valid way to solve our problem since many of the levels have setups like this where windows and doorways may look into other areas, that will contain windows that look into other areas and so on and so forth. For the development of Space Trucker we will look to olde…
- 2.5 Dimensions - 17 November 2016
Since the late 90's it has been standard to use 3D models in video games to represent characters and geometry. The advantages are pretty clear with being able to rotate in any direction. With the advent of skeletal animation the superiority of animating characters this way becomes the standard. Both of these technologies took a long time to get right and have made games better. Older computers in the early 90's and late 80's would not have the processing power to render characters as 3D models with any sort of speed required for real-time rendering that a real video game needed. At the time it was impressive to just render your environments using models, this was before the creation of modern lighting and shadow casting systems also. Space Trucker wanted to revive some of these aspects for aesthetic reasons since it's storyline takes place in the 90's with an alternate Cold War theme. I…
- Cutting Floor - 16 November 2016
As you develop a game sometimes features you thought would be really cool end up being boring. This while seemingly looks like a design failure can actually be a pretty common occurrence. It's hard to realize how something will feel in a game when you are talking about it or designing it. For this reason the implementation of a given system will typically vary ever so slightly from it's initial design. This is all for a very good reason, the developer should not force features that do not work simply because time was invested into it does not make it worthy of players time. Below we have a shot of how the space trucks energy system was envisioned to function. We took ideas from fusion reactors, stirling engines using heat transfer, pulse generators to start the reactor, drive shafts with energy being converted from various forms to another. https://spacetrucker.ca/blog/06_CuttingFloor01…
- Map Editor - 15 November 2016
When we begin work on a new level there is always this nice feeling in the air. You have the design documents, know what you are making, but overall the excitement is from now being able to see it yet and as you start to place all of the pieces of the level down and fill out rooms it begins to become a place and not just a collection of polygons. A proper game engine will allow you to orchestrate hundreds of simple systems all at once. What does simple mean? Well in essence the KISS principle is something that can save your sanity. It is an acronym for "Keep it simple, stupid". It was supposedly created by the US Navy in the 1960's. It was also a buzzword in the 70's but here we are again using the buzzword for the sake of game development! What better purpose could there be... https://spacetrucker.ca/blog/05_MapEditor01_tn.jpg Above is an example of a door controller system which is us…
- Personal Touch - 14 November 2016
A little over a year ago, right around the time the development of Space Trucker was starting there was a loss in my family. I heard over the phone that my Oma had passed away, I got to talk to her one last time and tell her that I love her which is really more than any of us could ask for. It was a very surreal day, the passing of time felt slower and I was reminded of good times growing up playing in the backyard and swimming in her pool with friends on those hot summers. When all of the assets in her home were being split up amongst the family I found out my sister was going to inherit all of the tapes and records of her singing from the 40's, 50's, and 60's. I remembered then how she used to do show tunes and had a really amazing singing voice. I personally lacked the equipment to transcode from tape and records so I asked her to please create digital copies of these items so I coul…
- Grid Network - 13 November 2016
Imagine having a bunch of machines in a room, each of them does a seperate function. All of them are required to function, and each of them has slightly different requirements. Each machine can have resources that another might need, and each one needs to be ticked but not all the time. The final complication would be the fact that not every machine can query the grid network at the same time since it is single threaded. It sounds daunting at first, especially if you needed to program something like this but the solution can be fairly straightforward if we take advantage of a popular programming pattern known as chain of responsibility. The principle behind this design pattern is that each object in a chain has the ability to pass messages to the next machine it is connected to. Every machine you have would be connected together in a large chain, in code this would take the form of a li…
- Lore Distribution - 12 November 2016
Enter a laboratory that looks ransacked and all but destroyed. There is blood smeared on the floor and walls, in the corner you notice a dimly lit computer terminal with a blinking cursor that beckons you closer. Looking over your shoulder you don’t sense anybody else as you place your fingers on the keyboard and begin to investigate the secrets the terminal holds. The only sounds in the room that of the idle click and clack of the mechanical keyboard as you navigate the menus on the computers monochromatic display. https://spacetrucker.ca/blog/02_LoreDistribution03_tn.gif Space Trucker makes extensive use of interactive terminals. They take many different shapes and sizes, but overall their functionality is the same. When you interact with the terminal you can use the menu driven commands (or numpad) to enter numbers to your corresponding selection. Other systems that use graphical int…
