barnabewild 2026-04-20 02:44
Quite complex game, liked the brain teaser!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD59 → Laï Express
By xwilarg
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 131 | 3.52 | 20 | |
| Fun | 94 | 3.55 | 20 | |
| Innovation | 133 | 3.44 | 20 | |
| Theme | 98 | 3.97 | 21 | |
| Graphics | 254 | 2.84 | 21 | |
| Audio | 223 | 2.47 | 20 | |
| Mood | 223 | 2.97 | 21 |
Quite complex game, liked the brain teaser!
maybe i should send this to my train loving sister
Wow, absolutely love this (do I like train management games?! Maybe not crazy, I love base builders etc). Really polished system, didn't experience any problems, just had a lot of fun building solutions and then managing them. I thought the dialogue worked well and the audio was lovely. Did mute the bg music but only because I was playing for so long!
really love this railway patterns 🛤️ 💚 only wish for a way to speed up trains ⚡️ but overall should be charming experience for train lovers 👍
Really cool system and game. It got hard quickly for me (the first level with commercial trains), so I'd have to practice, but it was fun and everything worked!
Very nice, and thanks for sharing! I did enjoy this and loved the way you implemented complex systems.
I found it hard to know which train was which on later levels, but maybe that was intentional.
Good job :)
Thanks for all your feedbacks!
@liam Audio is definitly my weak point so I'm glad you liked it!
@casualnothing Commercial trains is indeed where the difficulty start to spike! A small advice I could give would be to do a separate set of rail to handle them so they don't clutter the rest of the network
@tbk-david Train information is definitly something I would have liked to improve if given more time! A trick is to use the train label (along with their colors) to know where a train is going, for example pAL01 mean it's a passenger train going from Ariëta to Laï
A similar idea came to my mind while brainstorming but i said "it's to compliccated for compo", but you manage to make something solid and far beyond what i would have done, it's impressive ! It's addictive to make our rails and manage trains. Well done !
What a wild game! The moment I realized a single straight track could no longer handle all the trains, I knew I had to start building a complex network. That realization was incredibly fun, and it suddenly made perfect sense why the map needed to be so huge.
This is genuinely a fantastic and highly engaging game, and I learned a lot from playing it. Thank you so much for creating it!
Nice idea and it's initially a bit complicated to grasp. Some the icons could be a bit more explanatory. I derailed a couple of trains because I didn't read the tutorial text properly :laughing:
This was so much fun! Fantastic idea, fantastic execution. I spent so much time playing it just because it's a great game. I'd buy this on Steam if it were expanded into a full game.
The main areas that posed a (non-fun) challenge for me were the contrast of the text, figuring out which train corresponds to which destination (due to 3, 5, 8 looking similar, and 6, 9 being inverted sometimes), and rotating around junctions to the right orientation (since often you might just want two or three valid states).
But really the game was amazing. I ended up making a silly shunting yard approach to (safely) get everyone to their (correct) destinations towards the end of the game, even if this caused some delays. I imagine there could be a lot of potential for more dynamic networks if you could, say, pre-create network configuration and apply them with a click or hotkey, and maybe also automate some things (e.g. "switch this junction after a train passes through it").
I hope you continue expanding this game, because I'd enjoy playing more of it!
Screenshot 2026-04-25 at 5.42.40 PM.png
Thanks for your feedbacks :) @cogcomp @auxiliarymoose UX is indeed definitly I would have liked to improve, and next jam I should definitly pay more attention to that!
Really great rail arrangement btw, I indeed saw some people doing that durin my QA sessions, smart solution to the problem :)
Cool game, I like building games. Nice work =)
Apparently I went around a corner too fast? "An accident happened: hAL08 ran into hAL08" :joy: It was my last train on the last level :cry: A little tweak and 2 more tries, and I did it :).
I went with a pretty manual option for the end, but it just barely worked, as long as I remembered to set lights back to red... Uploads are borked right now, so here's a screenshot: http://pink.thesilentb.com/files/ld59-lai.png ld59-lai.png
I really enjoyed this! I wish the track drawing was just a bit more intuitive (not needing to manually rotate to draw intersections and corners would be nice - I guess I never placed tracks next to each other like some people did, but it seems like you could just paint "track" or "not track" and auto-choose intersections (if you didn't allow placing two in parallel or something) which would probably be more intuitive (but, maybe make for less complicated tracks...). Music got a little repetitive. Just barely remembering to switch the tracks in time always felt good :laughing:.
This is a really clever interpretation of the theme! During the first couple tutorial challenges the animations felt too slow, but I definitely needed the extra time once I had to juggle multiple signals. Very cool.
Thanks for your feedback,
@jimbly I'm impressed you managed to beat the last level with so few tracks, great job! For the "train collides with itself" thing there is indeed a ~~bug~~ feature that make it happen if your turns are too sharp
I'll admit I was a little stubborn about it and it took about 10 tries, and I'd memorized the first 5 or so trains so that helped :laughing:. But, every time there was a crash it was clearly a "oh, I forgot to toggle that signal", not "this layout can't possibly handle this", so I figured I should just try again =). At least a couple times I debated just tearing it all down and making a cheesy "let all trains deploy to separate tracks, then slowly release them" setup...
Interesting game. There's a lot of space to manage all the rails and trains right way. This was really hard to manage all the trains correct way but it gives a satisfaction when you finally do it
Very cool. Feels like a classic 90s PC game. Undo button would be great. I panicked and never finised but il be back for this one.
Fun game. Rail systems are always the funnest part of Factorio but it's different when you have to manually do all the switches and lights