Hi Truckers,

The moment you’ve all maybe been waiting for has finally arrived; offline progress is live! That’s right, any time you’re offline your truck will keep on truckin’. Your progress is now saved in real-time so say goodbye to those extremely fun and not even remotely annoying desync issues. Now that offline progress actually exists, it’s probably a good time for a quick recap.

Offline progress aka Cruise Control™ effectively puts your truck on auto-drive the moment you disconnect from the server (we’ll let you know with an alert) and keeps going infinitely until you get back. When you do return, and you better damnit because those crates aren’t going to crack themselves, you’ll get another alert letting you know how far you drove, the amount of cash you earned, and any crates you picked up for completing a route. Boom.

A few things of note while offline I’ve mentioned several times in the past but I mean honestly I don’t even read my own posts at this point:

• Buffs are inactive
• Nitro will not trigger (including auto-nitro)
• Parts, upgrades, and shop bonuses are applied to offline power (speed)
• Overall power is reduced while offline

Yeah, that last bullet point. After almost two weeks of testing, we landed on reducing the offline power for a few reasons. First off, it’d blow your mind how fast you can drive across the game world when you’re literally doing anything other than playing the game. You could blow through all that tasty content while drowning in watermelon White Claws and binging Squid Game and if that sounds oddly specific I did that last week; mystery solved.

The point is, building a game so people can avoid playing it as much as possible felt equal parts stupid and hilarious, but also increasing route lengths to obnoxious distances felt like we were punishing the active players. We landed on reducing overall power while offline because it felt like the most fun/fair approach. Active players can keep on truckin’, while offline junkies still make a lot of progress without skipping the entire game. As an added and definitely calculated bonus, we realized this could provide opportunities to introduce “offline parts” like engines or totems that improve offline performance. We’ve always wanted to introduce “builds” to improve player agency and this is the first step in that direction. Let us know what you think!

In addition to offline progress, as mentioned the last few weeks, we needed three very specific alerts. “Alerts” are basically notifications over the game client when we need to tell you something, like the server is going down, you’ve been disconnected, and/or what kind of things you(r truck) did while offline. All three of these have been built, implemented, and tested. Done.

Lastly, with a little time left, we made a few small changes to the timers. The Daily Goals now refresh every 8 hours, down from 24 hours. You probably don’t need a lengthy explanation as to why, so to put it in simple professional game dev terms, it felt bad and now it feels less bad. We also shaved 4 minutes off of the Track cycle, so instead of races every 10 minutes or so, they run every 6. Have fun with that.

Before I wrap this up, I can’t resist the opportunity to thank our players once again. Y’all have been patient and supportive the whole time and we appreciate it. This patch has been a slog but a damn necessary one, damnit. Now that we’ve got offline and real-time progress we can completely focus on balance, polish, and content, and we’re f#$@ing pumped.

Pumped af rn,

Dan & Mike

Hi Truckers,

Short post this week, for reasons. We get that the “coming next week” part of the title excited you slightly less than if it wasn’t there at all, but we’re still ironing out a few bugs and tweaking balance (offline power, server timers, messaging). We’ve put an unreasonable amount of time into this patch so we want to make sure everything is delivered as intended. While we were hoping to release everything today according last week’s update, we also mentioned “no promises” because it turns out that spending a month developing features then less than a week testing them is a terrible idea.

That being said, there are a few reasons to get even more excited about next week. Since we probably don’t need the whole week of testing we might have a little bonus time to work on some extra polish/balance, especially if we decide to reset progress for this big boi patch. Either way, I’ll keep y’all posted and if it feels needed, post an update over the weekend with where we’re at.

Truck It,

Dan & Mike

Hi Truckers,

That’s right, damnit. After over a month of planning and refactoring and consequently abusing our livers we’ve finally hit a huge milestone; the overhaul is almost complete, which includes offline progress. Here’s some of that sweet, sexy proof:

Yep, that’s real and a screenshot I took from our staging server a few minutes ago. Also, everything is now saving in real-time as I mentioned in the previous post. You can close the game at any time, and Cruise Control™ takes over until you return. When you do, that’s the screen you get.

We’re (see: Mike) also currently working through both the Server Shutting Down and Disconnected alerts which provide the player with even more delicious feedback:

While the copy isn’t quite finalized and I’m too lazy to change it for the blog post, the functionality almost is. These are all real screens. Really though.

You might find it suspicious at this point that I keep reiterating how real these very real screenshots are but that’s because I can barely believe it myself. A month ago we had desyncs and no alerts and we sure as hell didn’t have offline progress. Today we have real-time progress, all 3 alerts, and offline progress. It’s not all quite where it needs to be and we’ve discovered surprisingly few bugs, but we’re testing everything internally and holy shit you guys offline progress is a game changer. Literally, the game is different now.

Anyways, we’re aiming for next week to launch this bad Larry but no promises because if I promise you that the next blog post will be written by Mike and titled “Dan Died.” Beyond that, it’s all balance, polish, and content!

So Close We Can Taste it and it Tastes Like Jeff’s Sausages,

Mike/Dan

Hi Truckers,

Remember last week when I was all like yeah sorry we’re still doing stuff and it’s too technical to get into? Same, because that’s what I said. Well good news bois and girls or whatever you identify as (we identify as trucks). We’ve made massive progress thanks to Mike’s tireless coding-while-screaming technique. That’s right…

Real-time progress is in testing! Now that travel is going through the websocket, your miles, cash, and scrap will be saved in real-time. That means that if you accidentally sneeze and close the tab or set your computer on fire because those are the only two reasons you’d ever want to stop playing, when you come back you’ll be exactly where you left off. This also means you can, in theory, say goodbye to the desync issues of the past. I know you’re all probably thinking that’s amazing it’s about f&$@ing time you nerds well first of all wow calm down ok this was really hard to build and second of all it’s not amazing enough, which brings me to the next topic; offline progress.

Instead of simply returning to an “auto-saved” state with your progress intact, we want to introduce the next step; progress when you’re not playing. This is not a new concept to anyone that has played an idle game before, but for the cool kids this means your truck is effectively on autopilot while you’re not driving it directly. The moment you close the game (or lose connection to the websocket for whatever reason) your Truck drives itself. What are the limitations/benefits/conditions you ask? I’ll break it down.

Cruise Control™ is a concept totally unique and exclusive to Super Truck Life™ and definitely not a term used anywhere else in the world. We do in fact have a lawyer to verify this but I keep them as far away from the blog as possible for… legal reasons. Anyways, CC™ simply looks at your base power, and keeps your truck rolling. This does not include Nitro (because you’re not there to press it), or any active buffs (for reasons). What it does include is base power, upgrades, gear bonuses, and any power-specific items purchased in the Shop. While it’s not going to compete with (active) Truckers smashing the absolute $#@* out of the Nitro button, it’s going to keep driving until you return. Any routes/regions you complete, cash rewards and crates will be there waiting for you.

We’re pretty excited. So much so that I don’t want to dilute that statement with jokes. This whole slog has been a bit of a jerk (Mike’s allergic to jerks), but we’re over this hurdle and pumped for the future. We hope y’all are too.

Respectfully Limited on Idiosyncratic Valedictions,

Dan // Mike

Hi Truckers,

Yes, we’re still working on the backend. Good talk.

Ok, alright, that’s probably not enough. Did you know that my favorite RPG of all time is Final Fantasy VII? It’s true. And that it’s also the 7th weekly update around this backend overhaul that has caused Mike to start crying (more) in the shower? Also true. Unfortunately I don’t have a lot to talk about since it’s all technical and Mike is too busy actually doing it because he’s valuable unlike some handsome asshole who’s writing this sentence.

However, one thing I can talk about is why this is taking as long as it is, and not from a technical standpoint. One of our long-time and awesome players, MadManix, recently mentioned in Discord that we haven’t really added anything new to the game in a while. He’s not wrong. Looking back through our blog and news posts which I actually did for the sake of this paragraph, the last major patch added multiple servers. That was a good day. Unfortunately that day was approximately 49 days ago. Drop the weekends and you’re looking at 34 workdays, which you probably shouldn’t because we often work on weekends. So yeah, it’s been a while (compared to our usual pace). Let me explain (partly) why.

When we started building STL, we were able to commit about half of our time to it while the other half was spent running our own digital shop. As time went on and we realized making video games was more fun than making good money because we’re idiots, we gradually released clients back into the wild to find a new agency while we actively turned down work because we’re idiots.

Jokes aside, neither of us regret pivoting to make STL. Here’s the thing though; we played it fast and loose on purpose, killed it in the chaos and built something we loved to build. But eventually, the revenue stops. Clients stop asking if we’re available for a billable project. I start buying 12 year old scotch. Mike has to wait for $500 headphones to go on sale. You know, classic poverty problems. Except the scotch is actually a bottle of prison wine I made in my toilet and Mike is buying $13 ear buds at a pawn shop. And just like that, we’re broke.

The thing is, we weren’t trying to get paid with STL. Any purchase made in the shop was greatly appreciated but primarily gave us insight into what people found value in. The shop itself was a beta test, and if I’m being honest it was really rewarding to see so many people find so much value in the products, so thanks for that (you know who you are, you generous bastards). We didn’t introduce energy mechanics or time limits or any other irritating roadblocks. We weren’t trying to trick anyone or assume we’d pay our bills with a beta. And we didn’t.

Eventually, we had to do the unthinkable: get jobs. That’s why this massive undertaking has been such a god damn struggle bus. Mike is trying to complete all of this while simultaneously working a demanding contract gig and doing weird things like showering and socializing, whatever those are. We both tried the OnlyFans route but we just ended up subscribing to each other.  There’s no plea for sympathy here or a pity party; we’ve just always been honest with you guys (like way, way too honest maybe) and that’s where we are. The pace has slowed down. Not only is this overhaul a beast, but it’s happening while Mike is juggling real life shit. We both are.

On top of that, if Mike falls down a flight of stairs and gets hurt or I end up in prison because I pushed Mike down a flight of stairs production stops. We don’t have a backup team or stunt doubles or doppelgangers that I know of. If one of us gets sick we power through, until we can’t, and production stops. If I don’t stop making the exact same point in different formats right now, production stops.

Anyways, we’re both excited for the future of STL even if things slow down a bit, and we’ll get it to a full release. And maybe, just maybe after that happens we can go back to STL full time and start working on our next big project. Or you guys could just Venmo us a bunch of money. Either one is fine.

Super Truck (for) Life,

D&M

Hi Truckers,

Happy Tuesday, the happiest of all days, because here is yet another blog post. It’s been a while (a week) since I’ve mentioned this, but the overhaul is still in progress and I’m not 100% sure Mike didn’t move to Mexico and quit working on this project entirely. Seriously though, this is easily our biggest push yet and it should be pretty evident by my abuse of copying and pasting the blog title with a slight modification. Mike is currently doing travel ticket stuff and getting everything locked down while I distract you with super cool balance/polish info. Info I pulled directly from our Google Sheet. Check it:

• Fix truck/paint clarity, background tearing
• Less crates, better loot (quality over quantity)
• Longer routes post ascension
• Scrap income
• Twice the buffs
• Buff rebalance
• Storage UI cleanup
• Track improvements
• More radio stations
• Alerts
• Upgrade scaling
• Crafting rebalance
• Endless Road scaling
• Scrapyard pricing
• More Notes
• Badge balance – seriously it’s like 10 badges in the first 10 seconds (oopsies)
• Faster Goals reset
• More leaderboards
• Other shit. Like, a lot of other shit.

We know what you’re thinking — classic Dan & Mike completely obliterating the scope wow great idea can’t wait to play this game in 2028 but here’s the thing: everything we’ve done, from concept to completion is with scaling and tuning in mind. Some systems required a lot more time in order to make sure we could tweak them accordingly. Everything was built to avoid tech debt and general inflexibility in order to facilitate rapid-fire tweaks. Want that one in English? You got it; we made shit to change shit. I didn’t even bother censoring that word because it takes an awkwardly long time to find the right substitute characters. Even explaining that took more time than I anticipa- listen this list might look insane, but the truth is most of those can be done in an exceptionally short amount of time. Most of them.

Thanks again to our players, fans, friends, family, and people that absolutely hate our stupid guts for patience, feedback, support and/or pressure to get things done. We know it’s been a long road but we’re really doing it, man. Mike said I should include a gif to keep you entertained while he eats his feelings so here’s something I found that is not at all reflective of our general disposition here at Strike Interactive:

GG,

Dan. Mike.

Hi Truckers,

It’s a Tuesday so it’s time for another riveting blog post which also occasionally happens on a Wednesday because of Mike and definitely not because of anything I did wrong. Today we’re going to do a deep-ish dive (is that a thing?) into some progress we’ve made.

First, let’s get something out of the way that has nothing to do with the logistical minefield that is the backend rework, and instead talk about this Super™ dope ass Google Sheet we’ve created in order to prep for the polish and balance pass. While I clearly have no idea how to make a Google Sheet sound cooler than it actually is, it’s going to make the production process a lot smoother when we’re ready for that step. Once the sheet has been finalized I’ll go into more detail and share more info. With that out of the way, let’s get into the backend stuff.

In order to talk about what we’ve done, you’ll need to understand where we’ve been. While that may sound like a bastardized version of a Maya Angelou quote it’s the best way I can explain what we’ve been working on this week and also who the hell is Maya Angelou. With our initial ticket system, your save was updated after a few events. Specifically, passing 50 miles, stopping at the truck stop, and completing a route. Remember this little dude right here?

Sure you do. It’s weirdly one of the most praised features we added to the game back in Closed Beta. This adorable little notification brought the assurance our beta testers needed in a time of darkness and desyncs. Savin’ Steve, we’ll call him, was a necessary addition because as complex as STL is we needed a way to communicate exactly when your game was saved since that was unclear to players. Well, Steve’s dead (when we go live).

While Steve did his job in the interim, the game grew exponentially and we kept adding more features. When we first implemented the ticket system, you could only spend scrap and cash at the truck stop. With the addition of new features things started to, how do I put this, implode in on themselves like dying stars. To resolve these issues, we created an individual websocket to count/track your miles in real time. That created its own issues. For example, we’d have to hit the MySQL database way too often to save how much cash you had. To avoid overloading the database with calls every mile in real time, we are simply porting the ticket system to the server. The client can no longer desync because the server is doing all of the estimation in one place and we can keep a running tally of what we call “pocket cash” in redis. Now, any time you hit one of those events or disconnect completely we write your earnings to MySQL at that time. For those of you that are currently suffering from an aneurism after reading that unlike myself who totally understands all of it and how dare you suggest otherwise, let me put it in simpler terms:

The game needs to save your travel in real time so we did a thing that would do that, but it would overloaded our database, so we created an escrow-esque system that holds on to this info and dumps it into the database if the player disconnects. In simpler simpler terms, we save the game when you stop playing. I should have probably said that earlier, but we’re doing some complicated shit that merits further explanation especially for our more tech savvy players 😉

Alright, so what’s next? Probably Weekly Update: Travel & Offline Progress VI because that’s the next Roman Numeral but if you’re looking for specifics we’ll need to make sure your progress is properly stored in this new system. After that, we get to dig into the much anticipated offline progress. Then it’s time to tackle the Super™ Sick Totes Rad AF Google Sheet I still can’t make sound cool.

RIP Steve,

Mike & Dan

Hi Truckers,

This week’s post is all about Roman Numerals, like that one in the title, which means “4.” As in the 4th post about this massive overhaul slog thing we’ve gotten ourselves into. While there isn’t a lot to show off visually, there’s plenty to discuss so this week we’re gonna do that instead.

As we’ve discussed some STL pain points you might have noticed we tend to circle back to travel and offline progress here and there and by that I mean literally in every other blog post since the beginning of (STL) time. Well, without diving into that again Mike has been aggressively trying to optimize travel. Not only do we need it for ya know, a functional and fun game but also because offline progress can’t exist without it. So there’s that. You’re probably wondering how that’s gonna happen. Well first of all Mike recently made some Unity fixes so he can test in-editor. The Dan version of that is Mike can now test things a lot faster since Unity can be a bit of time vampire.

More on topic, Mike recently decoupled a websocket for mileage. Basically that means that mileage (aka travel) is now a completely independent process and won’t be bogged down by chat, badge notifications, friend requests, goals, or all of the other things happening that cause night terrors and functional alcoholism in developers. Unfortunately this solution was totally pointless and stupid and dumb and I’m kidding it’s been working rad af who’s excited (we are).

I asked Mike what the next steps were and he said this in Slack:

See ya’ll next week.

Clever Complimentary Close,

Dan and Mike

Hi Truckers,

Short update this week, but at least this one is on time so it balances out… right? We’re still working on the back-end overhaul. That’s it. Bye.

Just kidding. While Mike digs through the weeds or trudges through the swamps or whatever weird colloquialism you’re most comfortable with happens, I’ve started a spreadsheet for balance & polish in order to be ready to tackle it once the overhaul is complete. That way we won’t waste any time digging through coffee-stained notes and burnt-edged treasure maps trying to figure out just what in the f#@! we actually wanted to change. Throughout this project we’ve taken a lot of notes and had a lot of conversations and while we typically pounce on ideas we’re both overly stoked about, others fall by the wayside in some document where potentially good ideas go to die. Not this time, baby. This time we’ll have everything compiled into one place and Mike/Dan approved as our priority punch list. These are anything from balancing prices and rewards to UI tweaks to route lengths. It will almost certainly include adding sound effects and more radio stations as well. We’ve been dying to do a massive polish pass on the game for a while so we think it’s going to be kind of a big deal when we’re done.

That being said, while we’ll keep you updated each week, there may not be much to report until we get much closer to the overhaul completion. We’ve also discussed how our weekly updates are a lot especially by most game studio standards, but since we’re in full sprint we feel like these are necessary. Either way, I’ll let you know if/when that changes.

A Couple of Idioms,

Dan & Mike

Hi Truckers,

It’s that time again. Again. While Mike is still going hard on the backend overhaul and getting both travel & offline progress completed, I wanted to dip into some details of the balance overhaul we’re working on simultaneously. Specifically, some of the changes that are coming to improve game polish while also making sure the game balance feels rewarding and fun. Now, I know what you’re thinking or hopefully thinking; STL is already so fun, how could you possibly make it better? Aw, shucks. Really though, we know some things are a little wack and also out of whack that need attention. While Mike is burning the candle at both ends, we’ve slowly been compiling a sheet so it’s ready to tackle beyond travel and offline completion. Let’s start with a few basics:

• Route length
• Sound design
• Radio stations
• Scrap income/balance
• Crate rarity
• Rewards

And other things. Its always been our focus for the player to have fun. That might sound like a trivial and obvious component of game design but the truth is sometimes it isn’t. While I personally appreciate and love many roguelikes/lites, RPGs, and souls games, the ones I truly enjoy are those that have balanced challenge and reward while also respecting the player’s time and investment. Here’s a fun fact: we initially had a mechanic in place where you had to refuel in some way in order to make your truck even function at optimal performance. Like if you ran out of fuel eventually your truck would sputter along. So fun. Also, yikes. Eventually we decided on optimal fun with ways to make your truck harder, better, and faster daft punk style without feeling crippled because you didn’t have to keep up with painfully tedious maintenance mechanics. Seriously, if someone can explain to me how durability is a fun mechanic in games I’d love to hear it. That being said, we still have to find a balance between simply handing the player everything while making them feel like they’ve earned a reward worth earning. Game design.

Moving on. Let’s talk crates. The trend we’ve seen is that while people enjoy cracking them open (including serious diligence in claiming the free daily), there is an abundance of garbage received due to our balancing of loot tables. On top of that, there’s no shortage of crates earned in the game, so what you end up with is a lot of crates with a lot of garbage. That’s not ideal. We’ve been discussing ways for crates to be slightly more sparse, while containing potentially better rewards. Quality over quantity and all that. We also need to tweak the scrap income so scrap feels more valuable. This relates to scrapping, buffs, and vending machine prices as well. Not to mention the Track, which needs some love.

We also realized that while we’re pretty happy with the route length prior to ascension 1, offline progress and scrapyard improvements will make the distance less considerable so those will be increased over time. This, of course, will be a serious consideration as we add more ascensions, or simply put, more content.

Lastly, while sound design isn’t part of the balance pass so desperately needed, it’s a huge component of overall polish. We’re missing sound cues on multiple interface elements and we really, really want more radio stations including a DVD commentary-style station where Mike and I talk in non-southern accents (unless…?) about this ridiculous game we’ve built for no discernible reason.

There’s a lot more to cover here but this blog post is already starting to get away from me. However, I’m actively asking ya’ll to start offering suggestions in Discord as we get closer to finalizing the list of things we really, really want to tackle before Early Access. That vertical slice will never be perfect, but damnit we’re going to try. In the meantime, we’ll let you know when Travel & Offline progress is ready, but perhaps I’ll share the actual Google Sheet for balance and polish changes as we get closer cause as you know, transparency is kind of our thing.

Still Truckin’,

Dan/Mike