Hi Truckers,

Before we get into the details of today’s post, let’s start with the obvious; Happy Holidays! Whether you’ve already celebrated your holiday or you’re about to we hope y’all have a good one. No jokes here, just actual sincerity. I know, it makes us uncomfortable too. With that out of the way, let’s talk about Fleet!

Fleet, if you’re just catching up, is our final mini-game being added to STL before we tackle the final round of polish, bug fixes, and an official “ending” to STL with credits and everything. Spoiler: the entire thing was made by the two of us but we had some help from some very talented friends on the radio and of course our amazing playerbase that has both helped us mold STL into something rad while simultaneously propelling our initial scope into another f#@&ing dimension. It’s your fault this game is taking so long, is what we’re saying. Just kidding. Anyways, back to Fleet. Here it is on our staging server, in testing:

As you can see, I’ve navigated to the Fleet mini-game via the left nav. This brings up the Team (default) view for Fleet. The percentage directly under the nav icon/label is the current progress of the total progress bar. In other words, you can see how close you are to claiming a crate without having to go directly into Fleet. Amazing.

I’ll avoid posting redundant screenshots since we covered Fleet in a lot of detail in prior posts, but everything is currently functional on our end: stats, progress bars, experience and levels, gear swaps, paint/topper swaps, and recently Mike has built out the entirety of the Hire view functionality:

You can reroll for a new batch of drivers or wait for the timer to reset, hire drivers if you’ve got the scrap, and replace other drivers if your team is full. As of this writing we’ve only found one noticeable bug but Mike is confident he can work that one out pretty easily. The focus is primarily on balancing rewards, driver performance, leveling, and progress between ascensions. The trickiest part of this is to encourage interaction and engagement without feeling obligatory. Like any mini-game, it’s entirely optional, but we hope that by achieving that balance you’ll have a good time gearing, customizing, hiring, and firing your way to free crates. I can honestly say so far it’s fun and the foundation is pretty damn addictive; I got pulled into rerolling just to find the newest and greatest driver to add my team, swapped some parts and paints, and found cracking crates a lot more rewarding when I knew I wasn’t just looting for me, but for my Fleet. “Wow, you liked your own mini-game that you made? That’s unbelievable!” said no one but part of the testing phase is actually playing the game to see if it’s fun — it’s not all bug fixes and UI/UX.

That’s it for this week’s post, and while we’ll be sure to post again next week please keep in mind we might be off the grid the next few days to get some much needed downtime with family and friends and/or a lot of spiked eggnog and trying on another god damn charcoal-grey fleece that’s way too tight (mom please stop).

Happy Holidays,

STL Team