One of the key elements of Smugglecraft is the ability to build and customize your very own hovercraft. Every cockpit and every wing has a completely different effect on its overall stats, from the hovercrafts max speed to its ability to drag. Every area of interaction is important, from gameplay to start menu to the credits screen. As developers, we focus on interaction. How is interacting with our game fun, compelling, and exciting?

Ain’t she pretty?

This week, Joey completely revamped and rebuilt the Crafting UI from the ground up. After much play testing, we discovered that the original Crafting UI was a little confusing to the players. As game developers, player interactivity comes first, and if any area of the game we sense feels even slightly confusing, it is up to us to have the player be able to have an “Ah ha!” moment, rather than having decipher something that isn’t an in-game puzzle. We understand that sometimes, it can be hard to let go of something you worked so hard on (we spent many an hour building and designing the old Crafting UI). But in the end, we want to give the players the most immersive and smoothest experience as possible, and making the necessary adjustments, even if it takes some extra blood,sweat, and tears, is TOTALLY worth it.

In fact, building the new Crafting UI was pretty fun! It’s great overcoming challenges to help enhance the user experience. We
knew from playtests what resonated with players and what didn’t, so we built the new UI thinking about how to improve what players didn’t understand, while further enhancing the areas that they did. Joey had to math pretty hard to calculate move amounts for the inventory grid and when to move them properly, but the end result is pretty awesome. Theres even a new panel that allows the stats to be viewed on a pentagon grid (if you follow us on instagram, you got a sneak peak at this )!

The new and improved UI feels a lot better and looks snazzier. A huge thank you to the many play testers that helped us understand the Crafting UI better! We’re working hard to give you the best Smuggling experience as possible!

Stay tuned for my dev updates from your favorite indie dev, Happy Badgers Studios.

If you’re looking for a chance to play SmuggleCraft, we’ll be demoing the game at a few upcoming events. We’ll be in attendance at the Saint Louis Science Center’s First Fridays event on Friday, June 5. We also just reserved game demo space at Indianapolis’ Indy PopCon from June 26-28. We hope to see you all there!

Take a look at the gameplay video below, and give us a vote on Greenlight to help us make Steam a reality for SmuggleCraft.

We’ve decided to bring something totally new to the racing genre, because we know we can’t be the only ones who get kinda bored of driving in circles all the time. SmuggleCraft is a fast-paced hovercraft game with randomly generated tracks, a quest-driven branching narrative based on player choice, and fully modular upgradeable vehicles.

In SmuggleCraft, you play Ferre Astraea, a smuggler simply trying to survive in a world that doesn’t make it easy. Dirah is a world in which travel, trade, and technology are highly regulated and virtually inaccessible for most; it’s a world in conflict, with many citizens struggling to survive while others willfully hide behind their own lavish lifestyles, all while revolutionaries fight for change. Meanwhile, you have a big debt to pay, a kickass hovercraft, and an opportunity to affect the fate of your society, for better or for worse.

Gameplay is driven by player-selected missions complete with illegal contraband, high-speed chases, and valuable payouts.

SmuggleCraft looks incredible, thanks to our talented artists Dana, Carol, and TJ, and sounds even better thanks to an original soundtrack by composer Bravendary (Phil Hayes, who also did the music for our previous games Strange Donuts vs. The World and Stodgy Gents).

SmuggleCraft will be released on PlayStation®4 computer entertainment system, PC, Mac, and Linux in early 2016. It’s currently up on Steam Greenlight — we would love if you’d take a moment to vote for us and share it with your friends.

There will be plenty of exciting announcements over the next year, so keep your eyes out for more news, assets, and dev blogs as we continue development!