EARLY ACCESS SUPER TRUCK LIFE

Weekly Update: Truck Chat

Hi Truckies,

Time for another weekly update, and today we’ll be discussing the brand new chat system that comes fully equipped with a way to DM your friends. You know, the friends that you’ll be able to add detailed in our last update.

Chat has undergone a few big boi changes that make it more robust, feature-heavy, and just useful in general. When we started the site we added a very simple, mostly functional chat that Mike hacked together in a day. It was a great temporary solution we knew we’d revisit later. Well, we revisited the absolute shit out of it. Let’s jump in.

We’ll start with the layout (without giving away too much about the overall page layout):

Take a look at the channels menu on the left. Right now, we’re in General chat (highlighted in blue) where Dan & Mike are having an extremely deep and unplanned conversation about the thing I’m literally talking about.

Trade and Track are two additional channels also available and contain their own chats.

Notice the divided section below “Track.” That is where friends are listed. In the extremely rare event that you’re not me (Dan) you’ll have more than one friend (Mike) — let’s check out Mike’s channels:

You’ll notice that Mike has two friends; Dan and Mitchel. One is white, the other grey. Dan is online. Mitchel is not.

Maybe Dan will send a message for the purpose of this screenshot:

Wow what are the odds? You’ll notice a dot appear when there’s a new unread message. It’ll go away when you click on the channel.

Let’s recap:

  • Multiple group channels
  • New message notifications
  • Online/offline color coding
  • DM channel for each friend

Yeah, it’s all there. Now you’ll be able to add friends on the fly or with friend codes, which will automatically create DM channels for each of them. It’s almost as if we intentionally built the friends feature and tested the hell out of it because we knew this was coming.

Our goal, as previously stated, is to build a social network with the features you know and love without a bunch of bloated bullshit. We also always spend a lot of time trying to make things simple and approachable. Hopefully we got that right! Now that friends, chat, and DMs are tested and functional, we just need to tackle the last challenge to pull it all together; gifting. Once that’s in, the network is complete (for now) and it’s on to the race track!

Naturally, somewhere in between these updates we got inspired and added more things that I’m not sure we can talk about just yet, but soon.

Truck It Real Good,

Dordles & Mordles