Regular Railway

pete-thorne 2022-10-04 07:16

I really loved this! It must have a been a really effort to deliver this game in the timeframe. Everything was easy enough to understand and I was quickly routing trains to the correct locations. It was pretty tricky on even the second level! Main trains backed up and blocked the portal real quick.

Maybe having a slightly larger selection of tracks to select from would have tweaked that difficulty slightly. Or you could provide a "set" per level and leave out the randomness.

The music helped set the mood really nicely.

This is a very strong game jam entry. I enjoyed it a lot.

One other thing, it was great to see instructions for Mac users - I feel loved!

patomkin 2022-10-04 08:12

Great puzzle game! The tile selection is both free enough to allow for multiple solutions and restrictive enough to make you think about placement. I think a good addition would be not opening the portal until the first track is placed and a level selection screen. Other than that, very good job!

sohei 2022-10-04 13:58

Very good puzzle game. It's impossible to think out a good rout on the go, so thank you for putting a pause option. I make a screenshot of the layout and draw a smart scheme later in the graphic editor. Making proper loops gives satisfaction. So far this is the longest play, throughout the whole game jam. Very deep and interesting challenge. My brain is happy.

developer-on-trip 2022-10-04 15:06

Play it over 30 min without feeling. Insanely good!!

chao 2022-10-04 22:47

Really nice puzzle game with an impressive number of levels. Not sure if I was playing it optimally, my rail engineer brain made me want to have all my tracks looping, and never to toggle the junctions, but it was fun trying laying out the tracks and thinking about how best to solve the levels.

One criticism I have is that the track placement was a little unforgiving. Since you couldn't delete rails that had trains on them, if you made a mistake at the front of your line and wait long enough for a train to reach up to it, it becomes impossible to amend. This made the levels very easy to just straight up lose, demanding a restart, and since some of them were quite long this became really frustrating.

juanrod707 2022-10-05 01:36

Masterpiece of jams, just, speechless. Congratulations to the team for delivering this!

nardandas 2022-10-05 03:17

I echo the concern about the track placement being a little unforgiving. I felt because of that, and the quick flow of the trains, it was very easy to be pressured into running a train into the woods. I think also a lose screen when you have any trains on fire might be good, as it's very very very difficult to recover. I really like the idea though, with some polish it'll be a very fun little puzzle game!

triangletriangle 2022-10-05 10:08

This is fantastic! Really great idea and great implementation, one of the most fun games I have played from this jam. To be honest I was happy to see that you are a team of 5, cos I was about to start feeling bad about how much I accomplished on my own game ;D. But really this is a great piece. My only frustration is the difficulty ramp, it's already too challenging on the second level. I think it's important to give people a few easy wins early, otherwise its too de-motivating to keep trying, unless you're a particular kind of gamer. I think you could introduce the different types of track piece gradually, as they were needed. In a single play session of 20 mins I would want to be able to complete 4 or 5 levels and feel some balance of accomplishment and challenge.

This is just me being picky though. Overall this is a great achievement for you guys and could easily be developed into a full game. I'd love to do the art please! :DD

chingle 2022-10-05 15:01

Great game, I like the puzzle element and it is my kind of jam. Much quality of life has been implemented too so its very outstanding you and your team did this in 3 days. Excellent job of the team!

googlefrog 2022-10-05 15:13

Thanks for all the feedback. We've made a post-jam version, partially because we can't seem to stop making levels, and partially for the practice. It has a full map editor with custom level loading, a few more levels, and trains that can reverse in blocked junctions to switch track. Also more fire. Here it is: https://github.com/NeptunianAxolotl/LD51/releases/tag/PostJam4

The possibility of giving the player more breathing room at the start of levels came up, but we also really liked having the beat of the music line up with train spawns. This complicated things so we weren't able to find a good solution in time. Not spawning trains unless the first piece is placed (suggested by @patomkin) works really well, so the new version has it.

@triangletriangle and @chao we often have a problem with steep learning curves, or with mechanics that are a bit hard to get used to. I like to see progression in games but it is hard to remember that the whole game is new to someone seeing it for the first time. Level makers also seem to find challenging levels more interesting create. If we had more playtesters it could be worth only bringing some in on the last evening. Anyway, to cement the lesson I've made the first few levels a bit easier and added an extra early level to smooth out the curve.

Trying to make more forgiving placement was an interesting problem. We were aware of the annoyance of suddenly routing a line into the forest but lacked simple solutions. Trains can't be destroyed as that would undermine the challenge of the game. Junctions seem to be the worst offenders, so I have modified junctions to let trains reverse and change track if blocked. It would be interesting to put the modified game in front of people to see if this is a good enough solution.

@nardandas trains being on fire isn't an automatic loss. I've seen a lot of victories with trains on fire in some corner of the map. So I wouldn't want fire to cause a loss directly. However, fire is a clear loss if it blocks a town that still needs resources. So this now causes a loss, and sets the town on fire for good measure.

People kept making levels after the jam was over, just for fun, so I added a full level editor and custom level loader. I was also curious about how to save and load external levels in Love as I hadn't done it before. The result looks a bit too much like Dwarf Fortress for my liking, but it works. levelEdit.png The jam version of the game has a rudimentary level editor that consists of changing a global constant and copying formatted tables out of the console. This led to more levels than I was expecting in the last few hours (even a basic level editor is really useful). I considered making a custom level system at the time (just loading, not editing and saving) to distribute to playtesters, as some were relying on manual builds which was slowing things down. I couldn't find an immediate way to do it though, so dropped it. Now that I have a level loading system it should help with future games.

nardandas 2022-10-05 15:24

@googlefrog I love the idea to set the town on fire too! Great touch!

tenshi42 2022-10-05 21:13

Nice concept ! Can't notice what to do when fire start except restart the level. Maybe a visual indicator of the 10 seconds would have been great. ( a "spinner" on the portal )

avareii 2022-10-06 11:13

[blog post](https://ldj.am/$308670)

neverlucky 2022-10-06 13:10

Very cute design, music was enjoyable and core gameplay loop was very fun. Issues I had were mostly with trains getting stuck on junctions, but it seems to have been rectified in the post jam updates.

daveco 2022-10-06 13:32

This was really fun! Would love the hotkeys for each item in the shop!

wouter52 2022-10-06 13:41

hehe awesome! I like your games. The graphics are cute and quircky, I like that. The gameplay feels solid, but at first I did not realy know what to do with the trains that delivered their goods. Then they combusted into flames and I got a prompt that all deliveries have been made and that I won. So that is.. surprising haha, was that intended?

The refresh button felt a bit cheap though. What is the point of a shop with a selection of tracks, when you can just click the refreshbutton?

googlefrog 2022-10-06 22:08

The refresh button can only be clicked every ten seconds (to be on theme) which strikes a balance nice between just clicking refresh until you get what you want, and refreshing occasionally to clear a shop with nothing you can use.

chriswiseman 2022-10-10 08:49

Very unique strategy game, also like the use of the music that makes it feel like a western. My flaming trains make me worried I am not very good at this :)

decrementedpalindrome 2022-10-12 22:21

This is a really nice and well rounded game! I got to the narrow pass level before it felt like I couldn't build the track quick enough. The art style and music are consistent and work well together and the gameplay is fun and challenging, I had to have a couple of goes at the first level before I figured out some basic strategies that were enough to get me further. I also liked the personality in the instructions. The main things that I think could be improved (and they are minor) are that it wasn't immediately obvious that the tutorial didn't have a new train spawning every 10 seconds to I was trying to speedily read the text and build before I lost, and there is a small hitch when the music reaches the end and loops (I was playing v1.1). Other than that I can really fault it, so well done!

blazec 2022-10-16 05:30

This game is awesome. I enjoy the idea of a logistics game but with a more pressing time constraint than most

sahan 2022-10-18 22:29

This is a phenomenal game! I legitimately think this isn't too far away from being something you could release as a full game on a mobile app store or steam. The only criticism I have (and I think this is just a nitpick) is that the randomised tile system doesn't really serve much in terms of gameplay, you basically just keep re-rolling till you get the tiles you want. Maybe if you increase the amount of tiles you have access to to 6, and then introduce a delay before the tiles get replaced?

corrupt-spaghetti 2022-10-20 21:26

Fun and challenging! There's a nice balance between the cooldown on the refresh button and how quick the trains pile up.

Rolling a shop with not enough crowbars or too many can be a little frustrating. One nice change might be allowing the player to always have access to the crowbar on a cooldown.

Altogether great game!

molpe 2022-10-23 20:25

Amazing! ♥ One of my favourite games from this LD I played :slight_smile: Love the music! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqMqTx120ho

googlefrog 2023-01-10 03:42

Thanks @molpe. We made a game for LD52 too. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/seeds-of-civilisation