Cargo Truck Simulator: Roads

Most mobile truck games fake their physics with arcade tuning: trucks feel weightless, cargo is glued to the bed and difficulty comes from timers rather than driving. We wanted a game where the load, the road and the truck behave like the real thing and still feel good on a touchscreen.

It also had to run on mid-range Android phones, support ten languages from day one and ship with a live backend for accounts, progression and leaderboards.

Players plan each trip (cargo, weather and time of day), then drive hairpins, desert switchbacks and coastal highways while crates, barrels, pipes, glass and boards shift as independent physics bodies. Clean deliveries earn coins for engine, transmission, suspension, tyre and brake upgrades across three trucks.

Accounts work without passwords through Play Games, Game Center, Google and Apple sign-in. A Symfony and PostgreSQL backend handles progression, purchases, leaderboards with anti-cheat plausibility checks, push notifications and email.

The game follows a strict “physics before tuning” rule: driving behaviour is derived from equations with real units instead of magic numbers. Steering authority comes from the bicycle model and the remaining grip and rollover budget, and automatic lane changes follow smooth minimum-jerk trajectories.

Tracks are assembled from a modular road catalogue on a 20-metre grid with numerically validated joints. Every runtime service has a single owner and is passed through dependency injection. The GitLab pipeline runs thousands of tests, signs builds and promotes them through Google Play tracks automatically, while Prometheus, Grafana and Sentry watch production.

Cargo Truck went from the first public build to a Google Play production release in a few weeks. It has passed 1,250 installs in 178 countries, turns 42% of store visitors into players, and the iOS version is in App Store review.