Thursday, February 27, 2014

Bus Driver - Pocket Edition

Several exciting things happening within a very short time span now! Today is a first for us - Bus Driver, one of our older games, has received mobile treatment.

Bus Driver - Pocket Edition is now out on Apple's App Store.





The game was ported to iOS by our publishing partner Meridian4; we were not involved in the work on the port directly, but we have provided a ton of feedback. The iPad/iPhone version of the game is trying to stay as true to the original as possible, given the limitation of the device and input controls of course. The game looks quite promising, and the developer of this port still has improvements and more content for the game lined up for future updates.

For the time being, our own focus is squarely at Windows/Linux/Mac versions of our sims for internal development (and there is no need to remind us that the Mac OS port of ETS2 is taking longer than anybody would like, but trust us, we are still working hard on it). However, we need to understand if it would make sense to expand to other platforms. The bigger the snowball gets, the faster it may roll. So we'll be curious to see what happens with this mobile experiment. Keep your fingers crossed! And of course, for Apple gadget fans, if you happen to fancy returning back to our old but evergreen Bus Driver game on a new platform, we wouldn't mind you buying the game! ;)

Scania Truck Driving Simulator is now on Steam!


As you may remember, Scania TDS has been Greenlit on Steam back in October of last year already. We would like to express big thanks to everyone who supported us by voting for the game! Today, the game finally becomes available on Steam. We have been so busy working on improvements for ETS2 and ATS that none of programmers managed to find the time for preparing the game for Steam distribution until now.

If you already own the retail version of Scania TDS and want to have it in your Steam library, you don't need to purchase it again of course. All you need to do is to activate your retail key on Steam - read this Steam Support article to see how to do it.

We are really happy that millions of Steam users will get a chance to try our game. For many of you this game is an old story by now, but we would appreciate if you could still help us - share screenshots on Steam, write a review, make videos and put them in the Steam game hub, join discussions. We are keen to see your contributions. The better the game is accepted during its re-launch in digital distribution, the more resources SCS can invest back into further development of our truck simulators.

We took the opportunity to update the game with new content, too - all Scania TDS customers can download a new update to version 1.6  It includes 2 additional Dangerous Drives levels: "Power Plant Repair" and "Commercial Shooting", and 1 additional Competition level: "Bonus 4." This update is already included in the Steam version. Retail update is on the update page.

You may also be aware that this game has been developed in close cooperation with Scania to promote their Scania Driver Competitions - to quote their press release, "the world’s largest truck driving and training event."



By chance, the release of the game update coincides with the start of a new round of Scania Driver Competitions - "The Scania Driver Competitions 2014 will be the sixth edition of the international event since it began back in 2003. The 2014 competition hopes to attract more than 85,000 truck drivers from 40 countries." Scania has a a funny viral YouTube clip promoting the start of the competitions:


Monday, February 24, 2014

Sound Recording Session - Scania Recovery Truck

We hear you loud and clear - yes indeed, we are taking longer with the 1.9 ETS2 update than we anticipated. Sorry about that. Things have been looking very good for some time already, we are almost there, but we always find out from the beta testing feedback that a tweak is needed here or there. Rather than rushing the patch out, we prefer to tune it until we are happy, you know that this is the way we prefer to work. This upcoming update is of course not the end of the road - we have quite a roadmap of improvements for the game still planned for 2014 and beyond!

To prove that we are still around, here is a little video from a sound recording event we performed over a week ago already, finally we managed to cut it into a cool YouTube movie...