We love our racing games here at P&L, so as soon as we got wind of SmugggleCraft we had to know more. We cought up with Carol Mertz from Happy Badger Studio to get the low down on this quest-based hovercraft game.
Happy Badger Studio is a small team of independent game developers located in St. Louis, Missouri. They like to experiment with art styles, game genres, and play mechanics and they don't come much more indie than this.
From watching the early gameplay trailer, SmuggleCraft certainly looks like a whole heap of fun. Can you tell us the premise of the game?
At its core, SmuggleCraft is a hovercraft racing game with procedurally generated levels, set in a bright yet unforgiving world. In the game, you’re a smuggler in a place where travel and trade are highly restricted, which provides you with a lot of power in how you can shape the world around you. The decisions you make, the quests you take on, and the way you fulfill those missions affect how the political landscape shifts, and ultimately how the story progresses.
How long have you been working on SmuggleCraft?
We’ve been working on SmuggleCraft since October 2014. Our studio is funded by client projects, so we have to share our time between client work and games work, so we’ve only been able to work on SmuggleCraft a couple of days per week since then.
How big or small is the team at Happy Badger, and would you say you are a true indie developer?
We have a core team of 5 people in the studio, plus we occasionally bring on folks for contract work; in this case, we have two extra folks helping us with music and sound design. Since we’re responsible for the whole process from start-to-finish (including management, production, PR, and self-publishing) it’s safe to say we’re very much indie.
How many different game modes will there be?
Right now, we’re planning for single-player campaign mode (which will have several different quest types integrated into the story), local multiplayer racing, and online multiplayer racing. Our first priority is to finish the single-player campaign mode, then we’ll start working on network features — once we have a firm idea of what we can do for that, we’ll announce the max number of online players.
Have you thought about the game’s trophies yet or is this a way off?
We’ve started kicking around some trophy ideas, but we want to perfect gameplay before we start putting too much focus on achievements. We’re still early enough in development that, even if we get our hearts set on a certain trophy, it may wind up having to get cut or changed by the end of development for one reason or another. No one wants that to happen!
new for 2016
"We haven’t announced Vita compatibility yet, but I can definitely say it’s not out of the question"
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