SmuggleCraft is KICKSTARTED! THANK YOU!

First things first, we are deeply humbled that the SmuggleCraft Kickstarter Campaign Reached its goal and is successfully funded! It’s because of you, our incredible community, that we are now able to bring SmuggleCraft to its fullest potential. 2 years ago, Happy Badger Studio had a dream of bringing a fresh experience to the racing genre, and without YOU, that dream would not have seen the light of day. We are so excited to get the game into your hands. 

We are so grateful to have such an amazing and supportive community. Thank you so much for all of your love and support. Truly. Thank you. 

PAX East Adventures: 

TJ, Ben, and Richard traveled to Boston in early March to PAX East to show some SmuggleCraft! With our previous PAX being a PAX Rising Booth, this was our first PAX where the space was completely ours to work with! 

SmuggleCraft Updates:

With SmuggleCraft now in Closed Beta, we are learning a lot about what needs improvement and what needs to be added! 

The Beta’s main purpose is the online multiplayer, which has been going great! We ran into a few server issues here and there, but thanks to our awesome team, Smugglers were back online and racing in no time. We’re still working on getting sounds and particle effects pinned down. If you’ve played the beta, you may have noticed you are hearing every single sound that’s happening, including the sounds other players are making even if they aren’t in sight. Don’t worry! We are close to locking it down. Particle effects are undergoing some maintenence, so look forward to seeing beautiful particles while racing online soon. 

The game’s narrative has been fully fleshed out and is currently being added into the game. We have an awesome artist working on something special for the single player campaign, so be ready to be immersed in some awesome Dirahlian story arcs. 

The SmuggleStation

The Happy Badgers crew had quite the kickass time at PlayStation Expo! Over 500 gamers lined up to race Hovercrafts and the responses were overall positive! It was awesome watching players who’ve never seen SmuggleCraft before have a blast drift boosting past another racer. We attended PSX last year, but this year was a lot more fun and involved. A few players even recognized us from last year, and were highly impressed at the games status!

Ben speaking to some Gamers about SmuggleCraft

PSX was WAY busier than last year. The whole convention took place on a single floor, unlike last year where PSX took place on two. The single floor layout helped traffic for all the indie games immensely (though the AAA booth lines were ungodly long which also helpped), and it was easier to navigate around the con in general. By the end, we were suuuper tired. We were constantly on our feet and chatting with other devs and players, so the plane ride back was full of Zzz’s.

The indie games showcased at PSX were some top-notch games. Earthnight has been high on our radar for a while, and it was amazing seeing the game in action, but Battleshift Brigade took home the Happy Badger Best Indie Game of PSX award! Published by adult swim

A big shoutout to all who came by the SmuggleCraft booth! Your limited edition SmuggleCraft PlayStation Theme will be ready very soon! Stay tuned on our twitter page to know when we’ve smuggled the theme online.

People love SmuggleCraft!

“It was cool as fuck.” – Joey Paniello

Surprise stop at Disneyland!

Piecing it together

You know that feeling you get when you put on that pair of pants that hasn’t been worn for a while and find a glorious $20 bill in one of the pockets you completely forgot about? That’s what it feels like when we find part designs that we buried in the backburner a while back so we could focus on the more crucial parts of the game. Probably one of the most exciting parts about developing SmuggleCraft is creating the hovercraft parts (Fun Fact: the engine titled BHF9 stands for “Butt Hole Factor 9”). New parts have been finding their way into the game with every week, and we’ve even added some PlayStation exclusive engines for those who will be playing SmuggleCraft on the PlayStation 4!

The O engine making some noise.

The Porcupine Engine

Got any ideas for ship parts you’d like to see? Let us know below in the comments!

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’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!

• accelerate while turning around wide corners
• high intensity strafing
• hairpin turns – cut acceleration while drifting and reorient craft
• long chill straight stretches
• precarious bridges
• hazardous tunnels
• ramps and jumps

Each terrain piece has a start and end opening that is one of four sizes. A small marker tells unity where these opening are so that they can be lined up. The generator cycles through pieces and chooses randomly from a subset of pieces that have the correct opening size. The generator also needs to keep track of things like pieces already used (so we don’t have repeats in a given track) and kinds of pieces used.

There are also some challenges with the track running into itself, which we may be able to tackle by turning the loading and needed. We’ll also need to get the connections between tracks as seamless as possible which  may take some tweaking in blender as well as adjusting how the connections are made.

There’s certainly more to do, but we’re excited to have a version of our procedural tracks working.

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.