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.

We decided early on that we wanted to use procedurally generated tracks made up of modular track pieces, the idea being that we can design micro player experiences that will be stitched together randomly for a completely unique set of tracks for every player.

The first battle we had to face, however, was not track generation, but basic hovercraft physics. Hovercrafts are hard to program! While we were looking for inspiration and reference, we also discovered that good examples of hovercrafts in games are relatively few and far between. We’ve been lucky enough to have a small group of game dev friends willing to play our early prototypes and give us feedback to help us get it right. We’ve gone through several iterations of the craft physics, and we’re finally getting it to where we want it.

Hovering mechanics are complicated because there’s a lot to account for; hovercrafts are not real things (unfortunately), so we have to make up a lot of physics that isn’t actually real. We have to closely balance things like momentum and drag, turning force, and velocity, all while monitoring the craft’s relationship with the ground. Check out this unity editor image of the ship – you can see we’re using several raycasts and colliders so that we can appropriately react to terrain and environment.

The feel isn’t perfect yet, but we’re getting there. We’re excited to get some solid controls in and start working on our procedural generator.