Hello! Dave here with a short dev blog in which I give the low-down on recent shenanigans alongside what's going on with a mini Autumn update that should start rollin' out soon...
When we started developing Star Trucker we had no way of knowing the Steam Deck was imminent and that playing PC games on portable devices would become as big as it has today. Now that we know a bunch of players enjoy taking the game “on the road” I decided to spend a bit of time poking our UI with the aim of improving the experience for handheld devices.
The meat of this mini-update is that the game now detects if it’s running on a selection of handheld devices, such as the Steam Deck, and if so enables what we’ve come to call Big HUD mode. This mode boosts the scale of HUD elements, waypoint markers and pop-ups to be more readable. Of course, this might be a bit of a shock to some veteran truckers who already play on a handheld so we’ve also added an option to disable this if you’d prefer the OG look. For those of you who might want a larger UI while playing on desktop we also allow the mode to be manually enabled via the Game Settings. Oh, and as we save game preferences per device, you shouldn’t need to change these settings when moving between your PC and handheld devices.
It’s also worth noting that we made the waypoint visibility angle a bit tighter in Big HUD mode - this basically means you’ll see less waypoint labels grouped together, something we found works very nicely when playing on a small display. In the future we’d love to revisit some of this tech and provide more scaling options for everyone but for now we hope it improves the experience for those on handheld devices or who found some of the key text a little hard on the eyes.
Alongside the Big HUD Mode I’ve also done a pass on the game text and where possible tried to improve legibility using a combination of the following…
Boosting the size of important text that we felt was a too small
Adding drop shadows to text (and icons) that we felt needed it
Tweaking kerning and line spacing to help with separation
To be honest, I was a bit limited as to the extent I could improve things but I think the result is an overall improvement across the board. Just keep in mind a lot of these tweaks will be quite subtle as I didn’t want to rock the metaphorical boat. Wrapping up this section of the dev blog, I’d also like to mention that I’ve learned a lot from revisiting the initial UI implementation and I’ll certainly strive to be a bit more aware of accessibility and scale issues on future projects.
This update should also solve a couple of progression issues and unblock a handful of players who managed to discover those edge cases. There’s also a couple of other little fixes alongside general engine maintenance. With regards to other issues, we’re always looking to squash bugs and resolve edge cases with every update. As we’re such a small team this is easier said than done but please continue to report any issues you encounter to the Raw Fury Support Desk so we can prioritise important issues. In fact, the next big one to tackle will be the mysterious warp asteroids. We haven’t been able to reproduce this issue ourselves but we know it’s out there (we’ve seen the videos!) so we’ll continue to poke things until we work out the cause - and then we'll stomp it 🦶
I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank the players who have taken the time to get in touch about peripherals. It’s always hard to know how this kinda feature will pan out and overall I think it’s held up pretty well and it’s great to hear so many of you are enjoying playing via HOTAS and steering wheels. Saying that we are aware of some specific device combinations that Star Trucker is struggling with. We are currently investigating what’s going on here and we’ll keep you updated when we have news on potential solutions. In the meantime if you have an awesome configuration you’d like to share with us or want to report a specific peripheral problem, please use our Peripheral Support Form to tell us more.
In other news we recently had the opportunity to team up with our good friend Martin. For those who don’t know, Martin is the concept artist who took my original (and very shonky) white box truck and gave it life, oh so many moons ago… This time round he managed to rattle through some fantastic <REDACTED> concepts before moving onto a brand new piece of kinetic key art to celebrate our 1 Year Anniversary*
Follow the links below for higher res versions suitable for desktops and Steam Decks... 1280 x 720
1280 x 800
1920 x 1080
1920 x 1440
2560 x 1440
3840 x 2160 * Yeaaaaah, I know I’m posting this late but I’ve been really busy!?
As I bring this dev blog to an end it’s worth noting that we currently have our heads down and are working hard towards our biggest Star Trucker update yet! Expect a nice chunky blog post next month as we delve into that side of development and a bunch of cool new stuff. Until then, keep the sunny side up and the greasy side down!
Dave ( aka the Art Monster )