Hi Truckers,

Short, but exciting update; Goals will be live next week! We know, it would be more exciting if Goals was ready today, but as much as we’d love to hand you a pile of busted shit (we wouldn’t), it needs proper love and testing before ya’ll can enjoy it as intended.

After talking for what seems like hours because it was literally hours we’ve come up with a simple, solid, diverse system for goal types, rewards, ascensions, and requirements. Let me explain, but in a bullet point format so it looks deceptively simple:

For new players (and beta testers new to the feature):

• Initially, you’ll receive a handful (number pending) of tutorial goals to familiarize you with Goals and the game in general
• Goals will be simple things like Stop at the Truck Stop, Upgrade your Truck, and/or Click on a Collectible
• Each Goal completed will provide a small reward
• Once you’ve finished these Goals, you’ll get your first set of Daily Goals

For existing players, and those that have already completed the tutorial:

• Every day, you’ll receive 5 random Goals from a pool of 10 types (for now)
• Goals 1 – 4 are simple, fun goals with small rewards like Scrap, Cash, or Pieces
• Goal 5 is to complete all 4 goals and provides a big, random reward like random Part of rare or higher quality, Crate, or Paint set (paint and matching topper)
• Goals reset every 24 hours

TL;DR every day you get 5 new goals with individual rewards. Complete all 5 to claim your big reward! Every Ascension increases requirements and rewards.

We’re currently testing things and tweaking values and maybe even possibly but totally are sneaking in a few little polish tweaks with the upcoming patch.

Once Goals are live, it’s back to the tech overhaul including offline progress, badge rewards, polish/balance, and adding multiple servers (zones). It might sound like a lot but don’t worry because holy shit it really is, but with each sprint we’re that much closer to Early Access. And we couldn’t have made it this far without you. Or anywhere, really. So yeah, thanks for that.

Ya Busy Bois,

Mike/Dan

Hi Truckers,

We’ve been going hard on Goals for a few weeks now (hence the Roman numerals), and Goals has been going hard on us. By that I mean we’ve tweaked this #$@%ing feature several times until it finally felt right. Then, we shoved it into production where Mike is taking iteration #47 and bringing it to life. Don’t believe me? Think I’m just insecure about whether or not people believe me? How dare you:

That right there, is the Alpha/Beta/Not Ready version live on our staging server. As you can see, we’ve added a Goals section to the right panel as the third, and final section. This is the default section which serves as both a tutorial for new players, and daily goals for existing players. We’ve already established how things work so I won’t regurgitate that info, but I will say damn son, it feels good. I refused to Photoshop the staging screenshot for the sake of authenticity (seriously though do you not believe me) but I have the final designs in my back pocket which are now in Mike’s pocket but let me put them in your pockets; your face-pockets:

First of all don’t make fun of my tiny buttons. I’m feeling super vulnerable after the whole believe me thing. Anyways, once a goal has been achieved, you’ll get a checkmark and a button. Hit the button, and claim your reward. Get a summary of what you’ve claimed and that goal is removed from the list. Yeah I know, this doesn’t seem that complicated, but that’s exactly the point. The best UX is the UX that seems the most simple and obvious. In case you’re wondering why we’ve added a detailed window when the reward is already listed on the list view, it’s because some rewards are randomized. Take this example, where you have a reward of random pieces:

And there it is. This way when you get a random engine or paint, the reveal will come once you’ve claimed the reward. Get excited!

We’ll keep you posted as we make additional progress, but assuming nothing breaks, we’re on track for a release in the not-too-distant ™ future.

If you’ve forgotten what’s next/simultaneously in progress, feel free to check the previous blog post below.

Tiny Buttons,

Dan/Mike

Hi Truck Friends,

Today is another day where we talk about things and stuff. Where the $#@k are Goals, you’re probably asking, only instead of asking it’s more like you’re screaming. Great question! A few weeks is the short answer. The long answer is longer, because the short answer probably didn’t really answer your question. Basically Mike is building the entire feature as we (I) speak from the ground up. There’s a tutorial component which is somewhat separate, a Goal refresh (dailies), a randomized pool of actual Goals pulled from, rewards for each Goal, and I’ve dumped multiple mocks in his lap simultaneously because I’m a jerk, etc etc etc. There’s a lot to it, but like we’ve said, it’s our last big feature before we go beyond Open Beta.

After Goals:

• Badge rewards
• Travel desync fix (websocket)
• Massive polish/balance/bug pass
• Backend overhaul w/ offline progress

Right, so about that last one. Mike talked about it a bit last week.  In that post, he eluded to something we’re pumped to elaborate on now:

Zones.

Servers/Shards, basically. You’ll be able to select your Zone to accommodate your location (US East, US West, EU, etc) and your truck (character) will live in that Zone. Pretty straight forward, especially if you’ve played World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV. This decision will provide a lot of benefits to both our players and our infrastructure so as much as it pains us to add yet another god damn task to our list, it’s a necessity before we open the floodgates.

Also, Goals went through a few design tweaks you haven’t actually seen. This is the finalized list view which shows complete and incomplete goals indicated by the check marks:

Once you’ve clicked into a completed Goal and claimed the reward, it’ll look like this on the list:

That’s all I’ve got. As much as we’d love to be pushing patches fastly and furiously, we’re in that weird limbo where the things we’re working on are taking some time, so hopefully my terrible brand of comedy and stupid words will suffice.

Keep Truckin’,

Mork & Dane

Hi Truckers,

It’s been seven whole days since we last spoke, and we’ve missed ya’ll so here’s another update for you. Don’t worry, this one’s got pretty pictures because words are dumb. While Mike has been crying his way through the backend overhaul and Goals, I’m just over here doing basically nothing just kidding I haven’t slept in two days. Why? Crippling insomnia. Nah just messing with ya’ll (am I though) it’s because I’m working my nuts and bolts off on Badge Rewards!

Here at our two-man company and somewhere in our mission statement (if we actually had one) we always say things are better when you’re winning. While Badges (Achievements/Trophies/Nomenclature) are a pretty cool way to earn meta high fives for doing random things, we also think they should have purpose. There are achievement hunters out there for sure, but as Mike and I are not one of those people, we thought Badges needed another layer. So we gave them one. Dramatically introducing Badge Rewards:

Now you actually have a reason to earn those Badges outside of just impressing your friends as they pretend to get excited that you clicked a button six thousand times. With every Badge earned, your points increase. Every time you hit a milestone, you can claim your reward! Keep in mind, as always, things in that screenshot could change before it goes into production. The milestone rewards may be exclusive to this reward track, a “free” crate, or piles of cash. Either way, we hope this gets you excited to hit those numbers and claim what’s yours.

We’re still going hard on backend and Goals as well, and we’ll provide an update on both as soon as possible; we want do it right. Either way, we appreciate ya’ll playing and all of your feedback. Speaking of which, we still read your Discord and Chat messages every day. We know there are still lingering bugs and we’ve received a ton of feedback/ideas we’d love to implement. They’re on the list, so keep ’em coming. That’s all for now.

Something Something Clever Valediction,

Mike & Dan

Hi Truckers,

I’ll cut to the chase; we’re back on track and burning through the roadmap with some big plans in place. We’ve mainly been focused on getting our last fat boi feature, Goals, into production. You see, we’ve implemented a very complex and unique process or assembly line, if it pleases your vernacular, wherein I design shit and then Mike makes it do shit. We’re about to make it do shit. And by we, I mean Mike, as stated literal seconds ago. Anyways jokes aside, it’s kind of a big deal because as I compulsively can’t stop mentioning this makes STL feature complete (for now). Then we get to focus more on backend things, balance, optimization, and the bucket of polish that is desperately needed.

We’re well aware that words like “optimization” or “balance” or “perflipisklup” don’t mean shit to most of you, or most people in general because they’re vague and/or technical. That’s why today we’re bringing in an expert (guess who) to explain exactly what we’re doing on the backend. I don’t want to steal his (it’s Mike, obviously) thunder but let me preface this next part with yes, it involves resolving desync issues, and yes, it involves actual offline progress. I’ll let Mike take it from here:

—

Hi Kids,

Your weirdly absent step dad here. Yes I am still out getting cigarettes (jk I quit over a year ago who’s the dumb one now). Hopefully you guys have been ok with Dan watching you while I’m stuck in the digital salt mines since I left him $20 to order you a pizza.

Anyways, let’s dive right into our current technical hurdles. As most of you know the biggest issue we have is with travel progress issues and desyncs of your wallets. This stems from the travel/miles system literally being the oldest system we developed that’s still in use. At the time that we added that functionality as our first step towards cloud saves, STL didn’t even have SUPER in the name. We didn’t have any plans for a social system, gifting, crafting, or really any of the awesome features we have now. Fun fact, we were still planning on launching this game on Kongregate! As the other parts of the game have grown up around it, that old bit of code has been struggling — and quite frankly has been a large pain point for some time. While we have fixed most of the desync issues for wallets and travel on the server side, the client still has issues occasionally. Our next big move (after goals) is to rework the travel system to be more modernized and better integrated into our other game systems.

What this means is that rather than trusting the browser to add up all of the miles you pass and send them in bulk, we’ll start sending that data over the websocket connection in real-time. This presents a few big technical challenges, but also a paradigm shift in how your progress will be tracked by our servers. Once we switch over, we’ll know exactly when you stopped playing, where you stopped, and if you were at the truck stop when the client closed. This opens the door for us to implement actual offline progress. We’re talking miles here, people. Crates. Not having to keep the tab open all day and feeling confident that you are still progressing while you sleep. Now obviously we’ll have to limit offline progress a bit, and we don’t have the full details there just yet, but just know that it is coming.

Along with this are some significant upgrades to our backend, including some hot and sweaty distributed websocket action. Currently all of our players connect to a single socket server. This is a bad idea for a number of reasons, but it’s been ok while in beta. As we get closer to a proper launch (Early Access HNNNG) we’ll need to merge our socket servers with our worker nodes so that we have the ability to scale moving forward. That work is already in progress and should be completed soon. This will enable us to run the game for less of our precious dollars while also enabling us to handle more concurrent users at a faster speed (anyone remember our chat slowdowns from December? Yeah neither do I what are we even talking about).

All in all, we’re looking to remove our final source of desyncs, get the game loading quicker, and improve the performance of our systems across the board. It’s a great move all around, but one that will take a bit of time. Once goals is released, I’ll be digging into the tech debt we just went over and then we’re ready to start adding content, polishing, and preparing for that Golden Master. Dan assured me that wasn’t a euphemism and it’s a legit industry term (I’m still not 100% convinced).

I do have a bit of bad news, though. After we go through this process, the fancy “Game Saved!” thumbs up will be removed. I know, I’m crying too.

All kidding aside, thanks for sticking with us! We’re still on track for our planned release and making progress every day. Dan, back to you.

—

Thanks Mike. We spent almost 2 hours talking through the roadmap and priorities, and this is where we landed. TL;DR we get Goals in, then while Mike burns through the backend I play with polish, balance, and idk maybe even some rewards for Badge Points 😉

That’s it for now, kids. Better get back to it.

Let’s Go(als),

Dan|Mike

Hi Truckers,

As you know, we’re currently working on our last mega-feature: Goals. This will add some direction for new players, daily objectives for returning players, and a shiny new reward system that goes with it. Speaking of which, we’re also juggling the Badge points having (even more) purpose with their own rewards. Outside of the things that you see, Mike is still going hard on back end improvements and features as well. This includes resolving the desync issues across the board, pixel perfect camera (sharper game, background tearing), increasing load capacity, and other things smart kids understand whereas I just understand being cool and muscles.

While all of these things are very real and totally happening (how dare you), we also have real life things that sometimes be like they are and do when you least expect them to be them. I’m sure you understand. The point is this week has been a bit of Super Real Life and less the fun truck kind so we didn’t get the chance to smash like we usually do each week. Is smash the right word? Mike is usually here to make me sound less old so blame him. No cap (?).

As always, thanks for playing.

IRL,
Dan & Mike

Hi Truckies,

Super sick update time ya’ll. This week, we’re covering the next feature currently in the design phase; Goooaaals!

What are Goals, you ask? Wouldn’t know, I woke up at 2pm today. In STL, however, every 24 hours we’ll throw a few fun activities (Goals) your way. Knock ’em out and get rewarded for your efforts. Let’s take a look at the prototype:

Goals will be introduced just like a quest tracker in an MMO which would be a great comparison if you actually play MMOs. Clicking on a Goal provides a little more info, like opening a quest journal. If the conditions are met, claim your $#*t! Check out a few examples:

While Mike does nerd things like optimization, sys admin, and fixing thrilling bugs, I’ll be refining and tweaking Goals so they’re ready for dev.

Ok, so here’s the thing we’ve been waiting to announce for a long time now, which is kind of weird that I’m doing it so far down in this post, but only those of you that get this far will probably care so it kind of works itself out:

This is our last major feature.

The next thing we’ll be focusing on is Ascensions (content). Beyond that we have a lot of optimization, polish, and balance to get into. After that, marketing. Something something Endless Road pun but hey, progress. This truck isn’t stopping. We’ve got a long haul and every mile is a mile earned what am I even doing right now.

Relationship Goals,

Mike/Dan

Hi Truckers,

We’ve been hard at work on the new Badge system and let me tell you, it’s kinda rad; Rad Radio rad. But don’t take my word for it because you don’t have to! Badges are live and waiting to be earned.

All 150 of them. Yeah we got carried away, so what. You’ll notice a Badge nav item at the top of the play page — feel free to click around. Badges include icons, names, and point values. We even built a notification with custom sound that pops up in the lower right corner of your browser. They’re like real achievements in a real video game! Holy $#@!

As usual, we wanted to do a little more for this patch and refine our QA process a bit as well. TL;DR version in bullet points after the explosion of words following this sentence.

Sometimes we tend to rush things out the door and that’s really cool when it actually f’ing works. When it doesn’t work, we’re unhappy. More importantly, our players are unhappy. This time we tested our asses off and squashed any bugs we found. Badges should be pretty solid, but as always it’s a Beta for a reason; to tell us how stupid we are help make the game better by reporting bugs! Let us know. On top of that, we made a few tweaks a few of you are going to be happy about. Nitro buffs now stack as intended; 2x + 3x = 5x nitro duration. It should be closer to player expectations and less obscure.

We also changed the layout of the Play page as alluded to in the previous post and by alluded to I mean it looks exactly the way we said it would in the last post. It should be a lot easier to navigate 🙂 Also, you can read this post from the News and Updates nav on the play page. So meta.

Another feature we added is a track timer. You can now check the clock to know when to show up to place your bets, watch the race, and/or check race results. It’s something we’ve wanted to add for a long time but also it turns out there are 10,000 god damn things we’ve wanted to add for a long time so now there are slightly less than 10,000. Nailed it.

Lastly, we managed to crush a few bugs. Some were adorably small and needed to die. Others were huge but somehow Stealth 100 because no one noticed until we did. Also, they’re dead, and I’ll never tell you what they were. It’s better you don’t know.

TL;DR:

• Badges are live. 150 of them. Yep.
• Implemented better QA process
• Play page layout nav changed drastically
• News & Updates available on play page
• Track timer with clock and live/results status
• Nitro buff math tweaked by popular demand
• Bugs. Naturally.

Why are you still here? Get trucking and catch a badge! Or 150 of them.

Tiny note: we are planning on adding a lot more badges in the future. This is round one. We also plan on badge leaderboards and a badge reward system (to spend your points). Thought you should know <3

Badge Bois,

Dandles & Mitchins

Hi Truckers,

We are going to be pushing a big boi fat baby mega turbo edition xxl patch in the near future. How near, you ask? Tomorrow near. Which I kind of spoiled in the title (damnit).

This patch will include the brand new Badge system with 150 individual badges ready to be earned. It will also include a brand new sexy Play page layout, a Track timer, bug fixes, and more! Yeah, pretty exciting, but here’s the thing; we’ll be wiping the servers again. Although due to requests in the past and a recent request from your local friendly trucker MadManix, you’ll keep your paints and toppers.

We’ll be pushing this patch around noon-ish MST so that gives you approximately 18 hours from the time of this writing to take a screenshot of the leaderboards to laminate and mount on your wall or fridge or whatever the hell people do with those.

On a personal note, thanks for all your awesome feedback. Thanks for sticking with these two weirdos (us).

XOXO,

D/M

Hi Truckers,

This week we’re going to talk about the progress we’ve made since last week, flex with a few sexy screens, and talk about what’s next. You may remember this (flexible) roadmap we posted a while back:

If this is just a distant memory or you don’t even recognize it congratulations because it’s 98% of the reason I still have night terrors. That aside, we are unbelievably on schedule. We released crafting in the target window, and we’re almost into internal testing for Badges. In April! Like it says! In the f*#@ing roadmap I keep referencing!

What a great segue as always, Dan. Thanks Dan. Once we get badges into internal testing we’re going to take our time (this time) and make sure we don’t end up breaking everything. In the meantime, we’ll also be addressing the bugs I mentioned in the last post, including the known issues with Nitro. The multi-effect crafted parts may or may not (they did) have mildly impacted (destroyed) nitro things. Don’t worry, it’s on the list!

I also might have mentioned the Play page getting a bit of an overhaul? Yeah, about that:

Notice the left nav is a lot less bloated, and a new nav has been introduced above the main panel. The left nav is now dedicated to features/content that require the most interaction. You will likely switch between storage and crafting quite often, for example, and we don’t want the left side to be a convoluted mess (like me). The top nav has been introduced to provide access to information panels such as leaderboards and ascensions, which typically require little to no actual interaction. Interaction: left. Info: top. The information will appear exactly as you expect it to, but this felt a lot more cohesive as we tested:

You might have also noticed on the right, we’ve added News & Updates. Instead of constantly being redirected to a blog or asking ya’ll to open a new tab/window, we’ve made reading these stupid updates easier than ever. You can simply click on- wait, how is this possible?

But wait, there’s more! How could there be more you ask? Honestly I don’t know I blacked out halfway through photoshopping that stupid joke, but there is; we’ve started on the layout and logic behind the Goals feature which is next on the list according to some stupid roadmap we forgot about until we realized we were on schedule and then subsequently pretended to be adhering to for the purpose of this post. So convenient.

I’d show you a screenshot but despite my aggressively confident demeanor I’m a sensitive artist terrified you’ll judge me prematurely. Haha, just kidding you idiots, I’m not insecure at all. here’s a sneak preview:

Hope that helps. Talk soon (next week; it’s literally been every week for months).

Got (Meta) Jokes,

Dan|Mike