Greetings all!

If you've been playing or following Screw Drivers for a while (since around mid-September or earlier), you may have noticed that we announced at the time that the game would be one of the early bird titles to support Razer's Sensa HD Haptics peripherals. You know, that gaming cushion that attaches to your chair and can literally kick your butt.

And yes, we kept our word: Screw Drivers supports Sensa HD Haptics peripherals and the Chroma RGB ecosystem from TODAY with the update V0.3.15.9!

But let's start from the beginning, with two questions: 'Why are you doing this?' and 'How should a cushion for my chair improve my gaming experience?'. Let's answer the first question first: The reason is me, Tim. Hi! Well, personally I am very open-minded about such technical gadgets. And I am convinced that an intensive gaming experience can benefit from being more than just an audiovisual experience. I am a big fan of strengthening the immersion of video games to delve even deeper and making it possible to experience them with as many senses as possible.

That's exactly why I'm the one here at Headup who initiates such implementations. So, I asked myself which of our games could benefit most from also being a 'tangible' experience (which is also the answer to the second question).

And a 'sandboxy car crafting and racing game' sounded like a really good fit. After all, in Screw Drivers you can not only assemble your own vehicles physically correctly in the editor, but also drive them and disassemble them back into their individual parts. Jackpot! And all these actions and movements ended up being accompanied and reinforced by haptic feedback.

The gaming cushion (Razer Freyja[www.razer.com]) has six haptic zones: two in the shoulder blade area, two in the lower back area; one each on the left and on the right. Plus one zone under each bun. The haptic feedback can be controlled in terms of intensity and therefore be adapted to different use cases. And with the mixture of a racing game and haptic feedback, most of you will probably think of crashes in no time. And yes, that's exactly what we have implemented haptically, of course; in the three different levels: 'Low', 'Medium' and 'Strong'.

Depending on how intense your crash is, the cushion will let you feel it!

But the combination of Screw Drivers and the cushion gave even more interesting scope! Due to the tires of a vehicle on the left and right side, and the haptic zones on the left and right side of the cushion, you can feel different ground coverings through different haptic feedback: asphalt, grass, gravel, sand and water cause different feedback; also in the 'Low', 'Medium' and 'Strong' levels. So if you drive your vehicle on asphalt on the left and sand on the right, you will feel it through your back and bottom.

But crashes and ground coverings are only two of the examples that could be implemented in Screw Drivers in a very cool 'tangible' way. In addition, different engine RPMs are implemented with different levels of haptic feedback, as well as gear changes and drifts. Furthermore various actions that are necessary in the editor when building a vehicle.

As I said, I am a friend of gimmicks that increase immersion. That's why I also love it when the gameplay is extended beyond the limits of the screen through RGB illumination. And that is the reason why the haptic effects are additionally supported by RGB effects in Razer's Chroma ecosystem. An intensive crash is not only kicking your butt, it will also be communicated through the Chroma peripherals!

Well, in the end I can only speak for us (Creactstudios and Headup) and myself personally, and we are really happy with the results of both Sensa HD Haptics and Chroma and how it supports and accompanies the Screw Drivers experience, immersion, and the fun.

Personally, I love it. ❤️ If I didn't already have it, the cushion would definitely be on top of my Christmas wish list. 🎄

Pre-seasonal greetings!
Tim


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1279510/Screw_Drivers/

Happy DLC Launch Tuesday everybody!

This might become our longest update posting so far, and the reason for that might be that we’re releasing our very first DLC, the Stunt Showdown! If you want to support us and Screw Drivers further, you can now get the Stunt Showdown DLC and unlock Isola Tartaruga, a new volcano with lots of stunt challenges and new building blocks to pimp up your cars and impress the crowds with your jumps, tricks and style!

Check it out, and thank you for all your support throughout our development. We appreciate all of you playing and enjoying our game, and joining us on this crazy adventure. We’re always eager to hear what you think, so feel free to reach out to us on discord, here on Steam or through the feedback form in the main menu. We’re looking forward to hearing from you:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3288110/Screw_Drivers__Stunt_Showdown/



We've also released a new update to Screw Drivers that brings the game to V0.3.15.9. Among other things, it adds custom input mappings, spring loaded shifters and new building parts, and much more!


Custom Input Mappings
You can now change and define your own inputs to most driving and building actions. This allows you to rebind the air control both on controller and keyboard. You can also change the bindings for gear shifting, which allows you to use manual gear shifts on controller as well.

And this now also allows for the usage of most steering wheels. I only tested it with my old G25 steering wheel, but the game should detect all kinds of input axles, so hopefully most devices will work. You can also enable or disable the steering angle limit at high speeds, which is useful when driving with keyboard, but when using a controller or steering wheel, it might feel more natural to turn that off.


Spring Loaded Shifters

• We changed the shifting times of gear shifters in general. Before, the time it took to shift gears up and down was constant at around 150ms. Now, the game calculated all the weight attached to the tip of a gear shifter. The heavier the mechanical assembly attached to the gear shifter is, the slower it will shift gears using that gear shifter. So if you want to reduce the shift times, you have to reduce the weight attached to the tip of the shifter as much as possible by using short axles and few and small gears.
  
• We also introduce two new building parts: The spring loaded shifters. They work exactly like the normal gear shifters, but compared to the normal ones, these have a difference in shifting times when contracting or extending the shifter. Due to the spring, moving the tip of the shifter to the outside is extremely fast, while contracting the spring and moving the tip to the inside of the shifter takes slightly more time. On average, the spring loaded shifters have faster shift times than the normal shifters. And their shift times also depend on the attached weight.
  
• Shift times of normal shifters: Between 100ms and 300ms
  
• Shift times of spring loaded shifters (Moving tip outwards): Between 20ms and 80ms
  
• Shift times of spring loaded shifters (Moving tip inwards): Between 150ms and 350ms

New Building Parts

• Exhaust: The exhaust is only decorative. It produces some light, environmental friendly smoke when accelerating. When when shifting gears, it sometimes spits a little bit of fire.
  
• Headlight and brake light: We added two light parts to the game. The headlights, which you can switch on and off with an assigned key. And the brake lights, which light up when you’re braking.
  
• Seat: You can now attach a Driving Seat to your car to access first person driving. The camera will then be a little above the seats position. For now only the Seat will be dropped but soon we will add some nice module expansions for the Seat!

Wheels now have Camber

• We added camber to the wheels in the game. Here we made the following changes to the dirt and the street suspensions:
  
• Street suspensions: If you enable the advanced building mode in the general settings menu, you can now configure camber for the street suspensions. This allows you to possibly increase grip in fast driven corners.
  
• Dirt suspensions: Since dirt suspensions were essentially better in all aspects compared to the street suspensions, we introduced a “natural” camber for the dirt suspensions. They now tilt the wheel when the spring is being compressed or relaxed. This should slightly worsen the general grip and handling of dirt suspensions, since the wheels aren’t planted flat to the surface all the time anymore. Our goal is to make them look funny because of the camber, but also to create a difference between street and dirt suspensions, so both have a field of application for different kinds of vehicle types.

Minor Changes

• When calculating a vehicle in the building editor and closing the analysis window, unconnected parts of the vehicle will fly away for a couple of seconds, so you can see which parts of the vehicle are not connected to the rest of the vehicle.
  
• We updated the leaderboards graphic to show the player names and actual times of players around yourself.
  
• We added two new optional challenges to Isola tornanti.
  
• When calculating the strength and stiffness of suspensions, the game now looks at the weight of the attached rigidbody individually, instead of considering the total weight of a vehicle.
  
• To prevent abuse of the car classes system, the game now only considers the weight of the lightest rigidbody for the car classes, instead of using the total weight. (Catapult class is planned but we haven’t gotten to implement it yet)
  
• Moved all the ghost races data of bronze, silver and gold times to a separate folder, so it’s not loaded into the RAM when not needed.
  
• We updated the weights of all gears and axles. They are now much lighter than before, allowing for bigger and more complex gear transmissions without impacting the weight of the vehicle too much.
  
• Reworked the glass material

Bug Fixes

• Fixed and polished terrain on Isola tornanti
  
• Added outside map catcher to Isola tornanti to prevent cars from falling through the ground and not respawning.
  
• Optional challenges weren’t playable in creative mode, if you only play the tech tree career. Now they also appear, if you beat the Secret Queen in the tech tree career.

Drive safe, friends!
Marc and Simon / Creactstudios


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1279510/Screw_Drivers/