CarCrash.Tube: Car Crash Simulator · published
The demo passed 1,000 copies in its first two days.
Thank you every crash, every upload and every bug report reached us. We spent the week after launch watching creators play the demo on stream. Not reading reviews: watching where people paused, where they searched the screen, and where they gave up. This update fixes the five spots where players got stuck most often.
Players kept circling the crusher looking for something to press. The wrecking ball has a big red button, so people expected the same here, and many never discovered that you had to stand next to the machine and hold E. The crusher now has its own physical button. Walk up, press it, then hold E to bring the press down. The old way still works, and the safety rules are the same: an empty machine warns you, and it needs a short cooldown between cars. Straight from the Unity editor: the new control box sits right next to the press. Behind the scenes: the Car Crasher model in Blender, clay shading with its wireframe, before it gets textures and goes into the game.
Several of you noticed ugly, smeared reflections on car paint, especially in the paint shop. The cause was two settings working against each other: some car paints were tuned as perfect mirrors, and the screen-space reflections behind them were set up for much rougher surfaces. On a perfect mirror every little reflection error shows. We brought the paint down from "mirror" to "freshly waxed" and retuned the reflection system: it now treats objects as thicker, fades out softly at the screen edges and traces further before giving up. Cars still shine, they just stop flickering.
Same car, same garage, same camera. Before: smeared gray streaks on the door and hood. After: a clean reflection of the shop.
Your recordings appear in the editor as numbered 3-second clips (1, 2, 3…). Clicking a clip always played it, but almost nobody found that out. Instead, players dragged each clip onto the timeline, watched it, decided it wasn't the one, and dragged it back off. Now you just point at a clip. After a quarter of a second, a small player pops up just above your cursor and loops that clip, muted. Move to the next clip and it switches instantly. Move away and it disappears. Finding your best crash angle takes seconds instead of minutes.
Captured in-game: pointing at clip 2 of Cam 2 plays it right above the cursor, inside the tablet.
Lining up boxes by hand was frustrating: a few centimeters off and your wall had gaps, or the stack leaned. Build mode now helps you out.
Side by side: bring an object close to one you already placed and it snaps flush against it, edges lined up.
Stacking: place something on top of a stackable object and it centers itself, or lines up with an edge.
Your call: the snap is gentle. Move the mouse a little further and it lets go, so you can still place things exactly where you want them.
Staged in the Unity editor: the green ghost box snaps against the placed boxes, then centers on top.
Watching streams taught us a lot, but we can't watch everyone. The demo now sends anonymous gameplay events so we can see where players get stuck or stop playing, and fix those spots before the full release. What we look at:
Which tutorial step you were on, and how long each one took
Key moments: the first flight, opening the video editor, publishing your first video
Frame rate, so we can spot performance problems on certain hardware
Errors, so we can fix crashes we would otherwise never hear about
What we never collect: your name, your Steam account, your IP address, or anything you type. Each install gets a random ID that isn't tied to you. Events go to Google Analytics, which we use only to read totals like "30% of players stop at step 4".
The full version of Car Crash Test Garage launches on November 13. We're working on new cars, new props, and new jobs that take you out of the garage. More on those in the next devlog. If the demo made you laugh at least once, adding the game to your Steam wishlist is the single biggest thing you can do to help a small team like ours. And keep the feedback coming: the in-game feedback form goes straight to us.