Steaming Ahead - WEEK 03

The third week of work after the Steam Green-lighting has come and gone. So as promised, here is a weekly update on the progress towards the Steam release of The Little Crane That Could.

This week I started to think about actual level design, and what missions to assign to the crane/bulldozer/excavator/whathaveyou. And I am also having second thoughts about the title 'The Little Crane That Could'. The new engine's main feature is the soil-simulation, could it be that the bulldozer and digger will be more prominently feature in the game that the crane?

• The Little Diggers That Could?
• The Little Dozer That Could?
• The Little Machine That Could?
• Mud Machines?
• The Little Crane That Could II?

Frankly, I don't know any more. The steamworks interface lets me rename the game, but it could very well be that this renaming is a one-chance only, so I need to get it right.

So back to the level design... I think that after a driving tutorial, the first mission will be a loading task, where the crane truck will load a pickup truck. So first order of business was putting a pick-up in the game. I decided on using this pickup model from turbo squid. It took me a day to reduce the vertex count of the model so that it was suitable for in-game use, and then I had to rig up the physics for it. I think it looks pretty good, but still needs better audio, because I am still using a very low-revving big old diesel engine sound for all the trucks. It is fine for bulldozers, excavators and big rigs, but for a pickup truck not so much.

With the pickup truck added to the world, I then had to put in a mechanism to switch between vehicles. So first you operate the crane truck so that you can load the pickup truck. Then with the TAB key, you switch controls to the pickup truck so that you can drive around with your freshly loaded cargo.

And lastly, I've been distracted with the design of a new font to be used in my games. I created a low poly font called Dutch-Blunt and I open sourced it.