ETS 2 Coaches: Meet the Eight-Person Team Behind the DLC
Less than a month after confirming Project Coaches, SCS Software has put faces to the work. The studio introduced the core team behind the Coaches DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2, and it is a smaller group than you might expect: eight people, with colleagues from other departments helping out when needed.
The introductions also make one thing clear. This is no longer a side experiment. SCS now openly calls it a DLC and asks players to wishlist it on Steam.
Who is building it
Dominik, producer. Dominik produced Nordic Horizons before this. He started giving the coach project one day a week while it had no real production support, then slowly built a team and helped secure the vehicle licences. He points out that his map background matters here, because coaches need a lot of map work: rebuilt bus stations, new stops and changes at border crossings.
Petr, senior tester. Petr drove real buses before he tested virtual ones. He checks the things only a driver would notice, like how an automatic gearbox should shift, how a full coach behaves under hard braking and what a hill start feels like with a heavy load.
Josef, junior researcher. Josef gathers references for real bus terminals and has worked on redesigning the stations that are already in the game. He grew up on SCS’s old Bus Driver, which seems to be a theme on this team.
Marek, senior programmer. Almost twelve years at SCS, starting on the map editor and internal tools before moving into gameplay features. Coaches are his first project in a completely new direction for the game.
Vitalii, senior vehicle artist. Vitalii moved from the road department to vehicles and worked his way up from AI cars and cargo to trucks. On Coaches he plans and builds both the exterior and the interior himself, start to finish, for the first time.
Vladimír, vehicle artist. Vladimír joined the vehicle team about a year ago after working on quality control for map DLC assets. His first model in the new role is the MAN Lion’s Coach, which gives us the second confirmed vehicle after the Scania Touring.
Vojta, game designer. Vojta designs the mechanics, UX and UI for coaches, after earlier work on Driving Academy and map features. He describes the project as “a game within the game”, which is a fair summary of the challenge.
Why it matters
A team this size is a reminder of the scope. SCS is not building a separate bus simulator, it is adding a new career to a game designed around trucks. Having a real driver on the test team is a good sign for how the coaches will feel on the road, and the Lion’s Coach mention confirms that more than one manufacturer is on board.
Source: SCS Software blog. Images and video: SCS Software.
