SmuggleCraft (PS4, Steam) Review

Today is a special day here at SuperPhillip Central. This site is based in St. Louis, Missouri. Occasionally I like to take the time and use SuperPhillip Central to get the word out about local game devs in my city. This is such an occasion with two reviews for some PlayStation 4 and Steam games recently released from two local game devs. 

A problem that some of you might ponder is that knowing the devs or just being in the same city as them, if that will affect my judgment on their games? Will I be more lenient in order to be kind to my local STL game dev or be more critical to appear "unbiased"? Well, I'm going to review these games just like any others from any system from any place in the world, just like I have for the past 8.75 years here at SuperPhillip Central. 

Our first review is for a procedurally generated (I'll define this in the review body if you aren't familiar with the term) hovercraft racer that was funded through the magic of Kickstarter. It met its funding goal and it releases today. It's SmuggleCraft by Happy Badger Studio.

Smugglin' Contraband and Racing at High Speeds: Just Like I Do in Real Life

So few racing games explore using hovercraft. For heaven's sake, Nintendo has all but forgotten the existence of F-Zero as a franchise, but at least PlayStation is bringing back Wipeout, albeit in a collection next month. Thus, we turn to indies for our hovercraft fix. If you're looking for a tight racer with excellent controls, St. Louis-based developer, Happy Badger Studio's game SmuggleCraft is one that nails that important gameplay aspect down pat. It also features a relatively appealing quest-based story mode as well. It's just that other aspects of SmuggleCraft don't go over as well as these.

SmuggleCraft's solo experience consists of a quest system where randomly available quests appear, and you can choose to take them or not. Each quest giver has a token task for you to do, whether it's in the category of getting from the start to the finish, racing one to many vehicles, or towing a vehicle from point to another. The latter is thankfully more fun and less of nuisance than breaking down on the New Jersey Turnpike and needing Avis to come pick you up.

What SmuggleCraft fails to do, however, is explain a lot of concepts to the player. The main one relating to the story is that if you crash and burn, the game takes a roguelike approach, booting you back to the main menu and making you start fresh in the story. Thankfully, things like tutorial missions and the hovercraft pieces you've bought and collected stick with you, but all story progress, money, and parts to build new hovercraft pieces are wiped clean like a slate... the type of slate that mocks you and makes you wonder, "What was the point of all this progress? Why have you forsaken me, Happy Badger Studio?!"

In Dirahl, no one can hear you scream. Well, except for the Wolverangs, of course.

But seriously, folks, the "smuggle" in SmuggleCraft comes from carrying questionable to highly illegal goods for the quest givers. At the end of certain quests, you can betray the quest giver to reap better rewards. However, this puts you in their bad graces. For instance, if you betray someone by stealing medicine for yourself, not only will you get a better reward, but you'll get marked the brand of "thief", and we're not talking the fun "Link, your name is now 'Thief'' for taking a shovel from the shop in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening" type of thief either. We're talking "cops are going to be on your butt now, mister. Bad boys, bad boys. Whatchu gonna do? Whatchu gonna do when they come for you?" type of thief. Cops will come after you aggressively when you're labeled a bad guy. 

On that same token, doing multiple heroic or stand-up smuggler types of things like pilfering from the bad guys will get you to draw their ire, having them chase after you and blast you as you try to survive your regular smuggling and racing runs. You can choose a good path, a bad path, or just take a neutral progression through SmuggleCraft, helping the poor with their needs and wishes in many of their quests, and then betray some of the unluckier ones by surrendering them to the police. Whatever floats your boat-- er-- hovers your craft, man.

Quests and races with harder difficulties mean more challenging track parts get placed along your path.

The solo mode's quest variety could be better, but where that variety is lacking, there is much more to be discovered in the different tracks you smuggle and race upon. That's because they're randomly assembled by numerous track pieces in one of a seemingly endless amount of orders. No two races are ever the same. Sure, within a few races observant players will pick up on familiar track pieces, but the way that Happy Badger created an overall successful algorithm to transition cleanly between one piece to another is really something commendable. Well... for the most part. Sometimes one track piece would lead to another with an odd transition. Then other times it meant that one track piece didn't connect properly to another, creating confusion on where to go, or worse, difficulty in reaching the next piece completely.

One thing Happy Badger Studio nailed about SmuggleCraft is the feel of driving any given hovercraft. The controls are responsive, fluid, tight, and feel great. Drifting and boosting around turns and corners, propelling one's hovercraft through a cavernous canyon via speed boosts, and jetting across the smooth waves of the ocean all are enjoyable to do. Perhaps my only problem with SmuggleCraft's controls come from manual boosting. How it's intended to work is that when you let off the gas for a couple of seconds and once again step on it, your hovercraft makes a quick boost forward. This works great when you want to drift and then come out of said drift with a boost, but if you get off track (sometimes literally) and discombobulated with your navigation on the procedurally generated tracks, you might need to turn around or course correct. This can be difficult when you're letting go of and then reengaging the gas, forcing small corrections to turn into massive boosts because the craft forces you to do so. Many times I fell off the track completely because I was making small course corrections only to boost off the track entirely.

Drift and boost to perform a drift boost! It's like how to do a drift boost is right in the name!

This would be frustrating in the solo mode because as I said, SmuggleCraft uses a roguelike system to it. However, fortunately, the developers allowed players to pause a quest at any time (even in midair). This allowance gives players the chance to back out of a quest before crashing (and subsequently burning), thus removing the heavy end of their solo mode progress. This grants players the ability to fully enjoy Happy Badger Studio's fun writing and generally engaged story without worry of constantly having to restart it from the very beginning over and over again.

As you complete quests, you gain money and parts to build new hovercraft pieces. These come in various forms with the "best" pieces taking the most funds to craft. Hence, the "craft" portion of the SmuggleCraft name. Wait. Maybe that's more to do with the "hovercraft", but I doubt the developer knows more about where they came up with the name of the game than I, a mere blogger with little knowledge whatsoever. Back to being more serious, the craft pieces come in cockpits, bodies, and the like, offering myriad possibilities to create a custom craft that suits your play style as well as your own personal style in hovercrafts. Move over Capri pants, rear spoilers are so in this upcoming summer.

Outside of solo mode for players, there is multiplayer in both local and online varieties. Both are pretty bare bones in options-- there isn't even an option to switch between vertical and horizontal split-screen, for instance, in local multiplayer. That said, what is here is serviceable enough. Local multiplayer is good for up to four players. Random hovercraft are assigned, and if players don't care for their current selection, they can randomize a new craft. It's mostly for aesthetic purposes anyway. Time of day can be chosen, how long a given race will be (as short as 1.5 minutes to as long as 5 minutes in estimated length), how difficult the race will be (more challenging track pieces are selected, easier to crash, etc.), if pursuers will get involved in the race, and how many victories a given player needs to win the overall round are all available things to select. Online mode has lobbies, but as of this review they were pretty empty. It's both my and the developer's hope that today's release of SmuggleCraft sees action in the lobbies. It probably also has to do with times of day the online is played, setting up times and lobbies with friends, and the like. Regardless, with limited options available and variety, it might be hard to find staying power with SmuggleCraft's multiplayer in the long run.

You can share my couch, and you can share part of my TV screen, but you cannot share my win.

Presentation-wise, SmuggleCraft sports a slick and smooth, simplistic polygonal style to it. Things are made of clear cut polygons, and the game looks gorgeous especially when it rains. Drops patter across the screen, they make the walls, mountains, canyons, and caverns of races glimmer and shine, showcasing their slick qualities, and it's just relaxing to race in. Perhaps it's the art style is a bit too plain and lacking points of interest in races to fully engage players to the degree that Happy Badger Studio would like, but at least it's helped by a seriously chill electronic soundtrack that pulses and pumps as you drive around Dirahl.

Overall, SmuggleCraft is a mixed bag. Its solo mode may give off some appearance of repetition, but it generally is enjoyable as long as you realize how the game's roguelike system works (something the devs fail to explain in-game). Meanwhile, multiplayer doesn't seem to have quite the amount of staying power as I would have hoped with a lack of options and little to really gain from racing for the long haul. Still, with extremely awesome feel of each hovercraft, a capable procedurally generated track system, well-written dialogue, and a lovely if not simple art style, SmuggleCraft may not be masterful, but it's sure as hell nowhere near awful. It's somewhere in existence hovering in between.

[SPC Says: C]

Review copy provided by Happy Badger Studio.

SPC Interviews: Happy Badger Studio (SmuggleCraft)

I've had the privilege of interviewing some great subjects in the past: Sean Velasco of Yacht Club Games (Shovel Knight), Manfred Linzner of Shin'en Multimedia (FAST Racing NEO), and most recently, Big John Games (Cube Creator 3D). However, this interview subject is more personal to me as part of the St. Louis game development community. Happy Badger Studio is stationed right here in St. Louis, and I've known most of the crew there for a couple of years now. It excites me that they're entering console development with their work on the upcoming PlayStation 4 downloadable title SmuggleCraft, an atypical racing game featuring players piloting hovercrafts through procedurally generated courses. See the details of this upcoming PS4 release with my interview with them below.

Phil Stortzum (PS): Just to bring everyone up to speed, would you tell everyone about Happy Badger Studio, how long you've been a team, past games, and the origins of your studio?

Happy Badger (HB): Happy Badger Studio has been making games since 2011, including mobile titles like Stodgy Gents, The Flip. Cosmic Kitty Pop, and Strange Donuts vs. The World, among others. Long story short, we and several friends came together shortly after graduating from college, and decided to work together to make games.

PS: In our first interview I asked if you were ever going to delve into console gaming. Now, several years later, SmuggleCraft is your console debut, and it’s looking promising. What made you decide now was the time to try your hand at console game development?

HB: It felt like the right time for us to experiment with console game development. We wanted to create something that felt more substantial than a two-minute mobile game, and PC and console seemed like the obvious choice. Once we saw the PlayStation presentation at IndieCade, we were convinced that Sony would be the right platform for us moving forward.

PS: Where did the inspiration to make SmuggleCraft come from? Where did the ideas about the mechanics, narrative, and structure originate?

HB: The idea came out of wanting to question what's typically expected of a racing game, and make something totally unique. We were tired of games that ask you to constantly race around in circles, so our first goal of the prototype was to make a game that was fun to play and had randomly-generated tracks to keep players from memorizing circuit tracks.

PS: When did development for SmuggleCraft begin? What did you work on first for the game?

HB: We started in October of 2014. In the beginning, it was just one or two of us working on it a few hours a week. We spent most of our time in the beginning focusing on controls and the feel of the hovercraft. We knew that it had to feel just right, so we spent a lot of time getting it exactly where we wanted it. It wasn’t until later on that we started adding in better graphics, effects, and additional mechanics.

PS: When is development set to end for SmuggleCraft, and when is the game planned to be released?

HB: We’re aiming to release early 2016. There’s a lot of work left to be done!

PS: Do you worry that the name of SmuggleCraft might lead people to believe your game is related in gameplay style to Minecraft and games of its ilk?

HB: Some people don’t like the name. I guess they think ‘craft’ is overused. It’s a bit polarizing, and we think that’s okay. In the end, it’s a hovercraft game that’s about the skill (or craft) of smuggling, and it also includes craft-able vehicle parts. It seemed too perfect.

PS: SmuggleCraft features procedurally generated courses to speed one’s hovercraft on. How does they work and how hard was it to make it so randomized courses didn’t look or play off-kilter or totally messes?

HB: The track is designed sort of like a puzzle-piece system. The track pieces have a variety of path sizes that connect to other pieces with the same size path. Each track piece is designed carefully with a specific experience in mind, but which pieces will ultimately connect together is randomized.

PS: Not only are the courses procedurally generated, but if I recall correctly, so are the hovercrafts presently. Do you plan to offer hovercraft customization?

HB: Hovercrafts will be customizable. The hovercrafts in the multiplayer demo right now are random to visualize the variety in crafts that there can be, but ultimately players will be able to use their own custom vehicles using modular ship parts.

PS: What does the single-player portion of SmuggleCraft currently offer, and what else do you plan on adding to it? How much variety will there be apart from maneuvering one’s hovercraft from the start of a given course to the finish?

HB: The single player campaign mode will offer a few different quest types for players to enjoy, and an overall narrative that they can play out and will change depending on the quests they take on and the way they play the game.

PS: How is progress measured in SmuggleCraft? How are you going to keep SmuggleCraft in the minds of players for the long-term, so it’s not just played once and then never played again?

HB: Our hope is that players will fall in love with the gameplay in the single player campaign mode, then continue to play as a social experience with the local and online multiplayer functionality. We've found within ourselves that the games that we play the longest and keep coming back to are the ones that give us a great social experience.

PS: When I played SmuggleCraft at your studio, I accumulated credits as I completed racing events. What are they going to be used for?

HB: Credits will primarily be used for the crafting system. Players will be able to use what they collect to make ship parts and upgrade their ships to suit their specific driving preferences.

PS: What are you planning on offering for multiplayer? Will there be local as well as online play, and if so, for how many players? What is your biggest ambition towards multiplayer in SmuggleCraft?

HB: We do plan to offer both local and online. We’d love to be able to offer eight or more players simultaneously online, but we still have a lot of work to do for that, so we’ll see what we can do!

PS: What is each member doing as part of SmuggleCraft’s development?

From left to right: T.J. Hughes, Carol Mertz, Joey Paniello,
Ben Triola, Dana Huth (not pictured: Philip Hayes)

HB: Ben Triola: Producer, Designer;
Dana Huth: Creative Director, Level Designer;
Carol Mertz: Narrative Designer, Character Artist;
Joey Paniello: Lead Developer;
TJ Hughes: Technical Artist;
Philip Hayes: Music

PS: You’ve been collaborating with Sony for SmuggleCraft with them giving you access to a PlayStation 4 development kit. How was the process to become a PS4 developer? Has Sony been kind and complementary to your studio?

HB: Sony has been very helpful and supportive throughout the process. We are really grateful to be working on a title for the PlayStation 4.

PS: Where do you see Happy Badger Studio in a year’s time? Five years? If I could be so bold, in ten years' time?

HB: For all of those things: still making great games!

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My thanks to the Happy Badger Studio crew for their time and thoughtful responses through this insanely busy time for them. Stay tuned to SuperPhillip Central for even more interviews in the future of developers both big, small, and everything in between.

MSP Interviews Happy Badger Studios at ASTL 2014

If you didn't know already, SuperPhillip Central is based in St. Louis, Missouri. Not only do we like to cover big name publishers and developers, but we like to share what is going on in our own gaming community, which by the way is rapidly expanding to immense proportions. The indie game community is ever growing, and it's not just on the West and East coasts, either. It's happening in the heartland of the United States as well, and much more than one might think it is.

This is an interview of Happy Badger Games' Ben Triola, conducted by the Mission Start Podcast at the recent AnimeSTL weekend show. If the name Ben Triola is familiar to you, it might be because of our own interview we conducted with him last year.

SPC Interviews: Ben Triola (Happy Badger Studio)

We haven't had an interview in a while at SuperPhillip Central, but this next one is something special. I, SuperPhillip, am the head of this site, but my main job is being a college student here in St. Louis. It's my goal to specialize in game design as a fulltime job. Throughout my college career I've met some interesting people, but Ben Triola is one of the more intriguing characters I've met. He is a member of Happy Badger Studio, conveniently located just outside the St. Louis city limits. Now, I don't know about you, but I was relieved that this group was made up of happy badgers, as the only badgers I've known in the past were really mean drunks.

In all seriousness, I chat with Ben about how Happy Badger Studio came to be, we talk about the studio's Kickstarter and game, we converse about how easy (or hard) the game acceptance process for Apple platforms is, and advice for those who wish to enter the industry. It's a revealing look at an indie studio homegrown in SuperPhillip Central's hometown. I hope you enjoy reading about Happy Badger Studio, Something Fragile (their Kickstarter game), and simply seeing how savvy Ben is.

SuperPhillip (SP): Could you introduce yourself to our readers? What are your favorite games, if you can

name any off hand? What is your background? What made you want to enter the industry?

Ben Triola (BT): I’m an interactive designer / problem solver at Rampant Interactive, as well as a game designer at Happy Badger Studio. Favorite games...really hard question. To name a few: LoZ: Link’s Awakening, Utopia (Intellivision), Reactor (Arcade), Toe Jam & Earl, Mario Kart DS, Bastion.

I started collecting games as a teenager, and began playing a lot of the games I missed out on as a child. It was somewhere around that point that I started getting interested in game design.

SP: Was there ever one game that you made go, “Okay. I HAVE to be in this industry now”?

BT: I don’t really think it was one specific game. I think it was more that as I started to collect, I got a glimpse of games and how they changed and influenced each other over time. That and reading about the early history of game design - I had this feeling of wanting to be a part of it. Obviously it’s too late for me to be a part of the Atari 2600 design team, but I feel like there’s still a lot of unexplored territory in games.

SP: Not only do you design games with Happy Badger, but you also teach at Webster University here in St. Louis. What made you want to go into the teaching side of things?

BT: I don’t know - I like trying new things, and I’m passionate about game history, so I guess it just made sense. I think it’s really important for gamers to have an understanding of where things came from. I’m also one of only a few people in the area to have all these systems and I enjoy sharing those experiences with students.

SP: Speaking of Happy Badger Studio, how did it come to be?

BT: We encouraged some friends of ours to start a game studio, and Rampant Interactive would partner with them to produce and market the games. We completed one game all together, and started on some others - but ultimately their group got busy with other things, and we wanted to keep moving forward at a faster piece. They ended up selling Happy Badger Studio to us and now Rampant Interactive and Happy Badger Studio are under one roof.

SP: What games or people within the industry have inspired your studio, staff, and games, if any?

BT: I think we take inspiration from a lot of different places. We’re really into games that are explorative and experimental. We take inspiration from Atari games, because many of them didn’t build on existing genres, but staked out new ground. We take inspiration from indie games too, like Sword and Sworcery, Bastion, and others. I’ve been to GDC twice now, and that’s a big inspiration as well - I really like the experimental games session, and hearing from developers like Die Gute Fabrik.

SP: What is a typical day at Happy Badger like?

BT: I don’t know if there is a ‘typical’ game - our time is split between Rampant and Happy Badgers, so it can get a little crazy. We try to reserve Mon-Wed for client work and Thur-Friday for games, but inevitably they bleed over and we’re submitting games to Apple on Monday and fixing client problems on Thursday. And there are a lot of times that we use weekends or evening to work on games too. We really like the “Jamming” model of making games, so sometimes we’ll just see how much of a game we can complete in a Saturday.

SP: What programs do you use to make your games?

BT: We use a lot of middleware, like Stencyl, Game Salad, and Corona. We’re also looking into Unity, and UDK, as well as native development for iOS.

SP: How complicated/simple is the process of getting your games accepted by Apple? Are there many hoops to jump through? Is it worth the time and effort?

BT: I think the process is intentionally maddening. There’s a number of different certificates and profiles you have to generate before you can even start - and submitting the game is always a challenge that always seems to take several hours. So yes, there are a lot of hoops, but it’s worth it, and it probably helps cut down on the crap games in the store. It’s worth it to have thousands of people play your games. As far as financially worth it? TBD.

SP: A lot of indie developers have found success on home consoles. Has Happy Badger thought about developing downloadable games for such platforms like the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and so on?

BT: Yes, I think its just a natural progression. Despite Apple’s process, iOS is a really good entry level platform. We’ll build our brand on these games, and move into home consoles in the next year or two. We’re really excited about consoles like Game Stick and Ouya

SP: There has been criticism of smartphone and tablet gaming. Some view the majority of content on places such as Apple’s marketplace as shallow experiences. What is your opinion on that? Do more complicated and involved games like the ones seen on dedicated gaming systems have a place on smartphones and tablets?

BT: I think they do - Sworcery and Bastion both have a good deal of depth and are great tablet experiences. But I also don’t think mobile games need depth. Sometimes its fine to have a game that doesn’t require hours of dedication. I welcome lite gaming, and I think mobile is the perfect platform for it. Take Canabalt or Tiny Wings. These games are simple, but they’re a hell of a lot of fun.

SP: Can you tell us about your Happy Badger’s current Kickstarter? What is the game you want to make? What is the cash goal you’re trying to reach, and how close are you guys to reaching that goal?

BT: With 8 days left we’re at about $7,000 of our $18,000 goal. We really want to make Something Fragile - it’s something we started at the Global Game Jam, and after the response it got we feel like we need to finish it. It’s a poetic game that deals with love and loss - you’re a character that’s carrying a heart; you have to protect it, but sometimes you have to set it down or put it in harm’s way to move forward. I think it’s something a lot of people can relate to. The game also has a striking visual style - all the art is cut out of fabric and stop motion animated.

A level concept from Something Fragile

SP: What are your thoughts on Kickstarters? How has that changed the indie game development scene, if at all?

BT: It’s definitely been an experience - and whether or not we get funded, I’m glad that we decided to do it. I think it’s great for indie games - it’s helped some games get not just funding but an audience as well. I think there’s still room to grow, and it could have a better discovery system, but I think its been positive so far.

SP: This is a purely hypothetical question. If you and your colleagues at Happy Badger had an unlimited budget to make whatever sort of game you wanted for any platform, what type of game would it be and what platform would it be on?

BT: Wow, I think there’s so much that we would do - I definitely want to make some console games - but one concept that I’m really excited about is shared world games on mobile. I really want to explore this area. Shared world is different than MMO in that everyone is still playing what is basically a 1 player game - but the world is shared amongst all the players, and there are global events, and ways players can affect the game world for everyone.

SP: What advice do you have for people interested in entering the game development side of the video game industry?

BT: The biggest advice I can give - if you want to make games, start making them now. Just start doing it. The tools and resources are out there. Programs like Game Maker and Game Salad make creating games incredibly accessible. The only way to become good at it is to start doing it.

SP: Is there anything else you would like to say to the readers of SuperPhillip Central?

BT: I’ve probably talked enough. I would just say to people, keep playing games. And try something that maybe you wouldn’t normally try - first-person shooters can only entertain us for so long - it’s worth seeing what else is out there.

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Our huge thanks to Ben Triola for his time. If you wish to put some money into Something Fragile and back the game, you can do so at this link. The link also shows a video about the game and possesses lots of cool information. Remember that your money is only spent if the Kickstarter reaches its goal. Otherwise you will be refunded how ever much you put in. The game will be made regardless, but if the Kickstarter succeeds, then Happy Badger can make Something Fragile their main focus and push it hard.