* UPDATE * We've posted a new, post-LD build containing a few bug fixes and online leaderboards.
So here's this game we made. It's all about building subway networks to efficiently deliver passengers to their destination. The controls are all with the mouse and instructions are in the game.
We are thinking about developing this further, so any feedback and suggestions would be great appreciated! And thanks for playing!
This is brilliant! The concept is really clever, and the execution is well done. Music and graphics are polished, too, and they contribute to the theme a lot.
I may have found a bug, though: once you've lost, if you had used up the 5 lines and start a new game you can't draw anymore, so you have to reload the page.
Fantastic, I really feel like the hopeless rail network planner, forever building a mess because you have no clue where you need to expand to next. I get off a station in Melbourne that always announces mind the gap.
Very pleasant to play and a fitting use of the theme.
It can be tricky to pick the right line to extend when there are two ending at the same station - maybe split the end points at the station to make them easier to grab? A little more audio feedback on interactions would also improve the experience. Otherwise though this is very nice and a great entry. Good luck with future development!
Really great. Very simple yet challenging and fun.
A
acatcalledfrank30 Apr 2013, 09:30
I really like it! I can imagine getting into a bit of a trance playing it on a morning commute :)
If it's Unity, presumably you could even make 3D levels in the future for maximum brain-melting.
I found it was sometimes too easy to create extra connections I didn't want and then hard to delete them; once I tried to delete a segment and the whole colour got deleted too! That was a bad day for squares :(
Great game. But there is no real challenge, u can't do shit at the end when u see stations being overcrowded. I'd like a slightly better version so i can play A LOT.
interesting! I thought the difficulty curved up a bit too slowly, but I enjoyed the process of laying out the lines. I wonder if having barriers that you have to route around might add something interesting to the game?
Thanks for the comments everyone! It's great to have so much feedback.
The overriding theme we're hearing (and that we've learned from our meatspace testing too) is that the endgame isn't very satisfying. The ramping up of difficulty is awkward and spawning peeps faster and faster doesn't make for a great finish. We're still pondering which direction to take it (Tetris-style short doomed game or Triple town-style endless-puzzler) and that'll affect how we solve that.
@Aceria, @acatcalledfrank, I've found the line-confusion issue myself as well, we'll be looking at that in the near future. Also line-deletion will get a bit makeover. We had planned to allow you to drag the end of a line back through connected stops to delete only those sections but that didn't make the cut.
@jonbro, that's one feature that we've definitely talking about... a bendy river across the map springs to mind. :)
Brilliant! In theme, easy to learn, good difficulty curve. Also loved the graphics and sound. A speedup button would be nice. Also, I would lik to be able to destroy the external piece of the line without destroying the entire line.
Really lovely game, I was sad to find out you were not able to connect a line with itself (in a circle like manner) which could help out issues you would get eventually. And I would've liked to be able to rightclick just a section to reconnect any mistakes i would've made instead of deleting a whole line.
Very relaxing and fun game. It was fun thinking about how to plan out the routes, but I agree the difficulty could be tuned up a bit. Keep working on it, you have a winner here. I could see this as a wonderful mobile app with touch events.
Brilliant! In theme, easy to learn, good difficulty curve. Also loved the graphics and sound. A speedup button would be nice. Also, I would lik to be able to destroy the external piece of the line without destroying the entire line.
Great game! I made something a bit similar for GPCv17, but you had to build bridges to connect islands, and the people would destroy them after a few uses. Games with graphs are always a ton of fun to play!
The game felt really easy at the beginning but I was stunned at how well the routes would handle all the traffic, got 750 and 930. Anyways, it was a huge chaos in the end, each line was 6-7 stations long.
Thanks so much for all the great comments everyone! We had a design jam on the weekend and have a roadmap for future development and have taken on board a lot of the feedback.
In the meantime, leaderboards are up! Play the deluxe edition and post your stellar scores for the world to see. If you beat the developers then you get a free copy of the game! Which is already free anyway. But this way it's free cos you won it.
Also there are some problems with the leaderboard input on Safari on OSX 10.7 and above. We're very sorry if this affects you, it appears to be a general Unity issue. :(
saw this in the 2nd LD video compilation and was interested just by the looks. and yeah, it's a great game, innovative and minimalistic. absolutely will play this again! good job!
This game was quite fun. It had a nice relaxing mood, but plenty of serious gameplay. I feel like it could be improved with a pause button that allowed you to keep building/planning - it feels like time pressure doesn't go well with a game that should require careful thought. The game is plenty addicting and innovative as it stands and definitely deserves to be developed further.
Great game. The simple graphics work really well. I like the relaxing music too, most action puzzles like this tend to have music that gets you more pumped up and stressed out as the game speeds up.
I think I spent more than 1 hour playing this game. It's relaxing and challenging at the same time. I'm glad to hear that you want to continue this project.
If it could help I had a bug on the postLD version, erasing a line, the train remained after the line disappeared, then it was impossible to act on this "invisble" line or creating a new one.
Would really love a pause button, even if it were a timed pause, just to re-layout everything. Or give us a way to plan the new tracks while the old ones are running, then switch to the new tracks. Any it's a nice pick up and deliver game.
Here are a few ideas after playing your deluxe version a bunch: - trains should never drop shapes if they are going towards a station that accepts that shape (even if there is a "shorter" route if a 2nd train picks it up). - trains should always pick up shapes if they are going towards a valid station (even if a 2nd train could provide a "shorter" route). - the gameover state shouldn't get triggered if there is a train loading at that station - trains shouldn't leave a station if there are other trains at the station which are still unloading. - there should be a status window that tells you the total length of each track and number of stops - it would be nice if there was a way to see if multiple tracks are overlapping on the same route - it might be nice to be able to setup loops where trains travel in a circle
Awesome! The most minimalistic yet deep game so far.
Here a few suggestion: * Show amount of lines placed. * Make right-clicking while drawing a line cancel the placemet. * Make the player able to loop lines. * Make sure the display of peeps fits in the screen. Also, as comments say, the AI could be improved.
Routing to balance the number of peeps at each subway station interested me! The icons, rules, graphics and story elegantly presented the challenge to me. If you continue to develop this, I wasn't quite sure what the strategy was or if I was executing well until it was too late to reroute, and even then I'm not sure how to increase the maximum number of peeps delivered next time.
Genius! However, there are some things that need fixing: 1) lack of pause feature! 2) sometimes I lose just because one end of the line decides to not respond to any of my actions (even in the post-compo edition) 3) trains shouldn't leave passengers if they go to the station that accepts this type of passengers (even if there's theoretically shorter route). Anyway, I've played this game until I got to the top 10. Really addictive :)
A delight for brains, yet very relaxing. Very well made and elegant. Of course, some polish elements about the ramp, pause, awkward lines and so on would be great, but nothing unusual for a Ludum dare entry.
Great game even now, I can't even fathom how incredibly great it could become after few improvements!
As some people mentioned, circular lines and obstacles would be lots of fun.
Another thing I really miss is proper display of how many and which lines are going between two stations. I was very disappointed when I saw that even in post compo version you still see only one color between stations, no matter how many lines you have there.
We want more ligne and some different link (in a version deluxe deluxe). But your game is amazing, very zen (strange for a subway simulation) and the concept is very powerful. One of my favorite. good job
This is a really addictive game. Loved the visual style and the music plus that feeling you get when your somewhat messy network somehow manages to get loads of passengers to their destinations on time is pretty awesome.
I really liked this! It was hard to stop playing. Great job.
F
flap21 May 2013, 14:30
Oh yes ! Please continue to develop it ! I agree with the need of a pausing button, modifying a line without crushing everything, and circular line...
Other interesting features could : - Data display (number of passengers per bits of line, number of passengers transiting through a station, number of passenger arriving at a station). The screen could for example turn into a grey mode when displaying data : darker/thicker means more people - Displaying correctly twin lines (when too are at the same place)
O
oldbean7 May 2014, 18:52
I love this game! Fantastic! Here are a couple suggestions: 1) Allow for a line to join back up to a station it has already traversed. I could see a true benefit for creating a circular line that just keeps going around, like the yellow (Circle) line in London.
2) Allow for easier visibility of overlapping lines.
Other than that, this is a fantastic game! Thank you for making it!
Comments74
+ a bug after some time command didnt work
I may have found a bug, though: once you've lost, if you had used up the 5 lines and start a new game you can't draw anymore, so you have to reload the page.
Other than this, congratulations!
Thanks for the bug report Ithildin - some people had come across that same issue but I couldn't replicate it until now!
It can be tricky to pick the right line to extend when there are two ending at the same station - maybe split the end points at the station to make them easier to grab? A little more audio feedback on interactions would also improve the experience. Otherwise though this is very nice and a great entry. Good luck with future development!
If it's Unity, presumably you could even make 3D levels in the future for maximum brain-melting.
I found it was sometimes too easy to create extra connections I didn't want and then hard to delete them; once I tried to delete a segment and the whole colour got deleted too! That was a bad day for squares :(
The overriding theme we're hearing (and that we've learned from our meatspace testing too) is that the endgame isn't very satisfying. The ramping up of difficulty is awkward and spawning peeps faster and faster doesn't make for a great finish. We're still pondering which direction to take it (Tetris-style short doomed game or Triple town-style endless-puzzler) and that'll affect how we solve that.
@Aceria, @acatcalledfrank, I've found the line-confusion issue myself as well, we'll be looking at that in the near future. Also line-deletion will get a bit makeover. We had planned to allow you to drag the end of a line back through connected stops to delete only those sections but that didn't make the cut.
@jonbro, that's one feature that we've definitely talking about... a bendy river across the map springs to mind. :)
Overall really nice :)
You need to add highscores with screenshots of how it looked when it collapsed.
I got 730. I bet its pretty fun with those versed in transportation and graphs theories :)
Please make highscores/screenshots for it. If you need help I am willing to help :)
Like others have said, neat clever relaxing/fun game.
The game felt really easy at the beginning but I was stunned at how well the routes would handle all the traffic, got 750 and 930. Anyways, it was a huge chaos in the end, each line was 6-7 stations long.
Very nice job!
I always wanted to make a game with the aesthetics of a metro card, you have found the concept to go with :)
I delivered 1060 peeps.
In the meantime, leaderboards are up! Play the deluxe edition and post your stellar scores for the world to see. If you beat the developers then you get a free copy of the game! Which is already free anyway. But this way it's free cos you won it.
Also there are some problems with the leaderboard input on Safari on OSX 10.7 and above. We're very sorry if this affects you, it appears to be a general Unity issue. :(
843 peeps!
Really needs that way to adjust your existing lines that go to the wrong place, without really screwing up the game though.
It's relaxing and challenging at the same time.
I'm glad to hear that you want to continue this project.
If it could help I had a bug on the postLD version, erasing a line, the train remained after the line disappeared, then it was impossible to act on this "invisble" line or creating a new one.
- trains should never drop shapes if they are going towards a station that accepts that shape (even if there is a "shorter" route if a 2nd train picks it up).
- trains should always pick up shapes if they are going towards a valid station (even if a 2nd train could provide a "shorter" route).
- the gameover state shouldn't get triggered if there is a train loading at that station
- trains shouldn't leave a station if there are other trains at the station which are still unloading.
- there should be a status window that tells you the total length of each track and number of stops
- it would be nice if there was a way to see if multiple tracks are overlapping on the same route
- it might be nice to be able to setup loops where trains travel in a circle
Here a few suggestion:
* Show amount of lines placed.
* Make right-clicking while drawing a line cancel the placemet.
* Make the player able to loop lines.
* Make sure the display of peeps fits in the screen.
Also, as comments say, the AI could be improved.
this was a really relaxing and lovely experience to play
well done :)
1) lack of pause feature!
2) sometimes I lose just because one end of the line decides to not respond to any of my actions (even in the post-compo edition)
3) trains shouldn't leave passengers if they go to the station that accepts this type of passengers (even if there's theoretically shorter route).
Anyway, I've played this game until I got to the top 10. Really addictive :)
As some people mentioned, circular lines and obstacles would be lots of fun.
Another thing I really miss is proper display of how many and which lines are going between two stations. I was very disappointed when I saw that even in post compo version you still see only one color between stations, no matter how many lines you have there.
I agree with the need of a pausing button, modifying a line without crushing everything, and circular line...
Other interesting features could :
- Data display (number of passengers per bits of line, number of passengers transiting through a station, number of passenger arriving at a station). The screen could for example turn into a grey mode when displaying data : darker/thicker means more people
- Displaying correctly twin lines (when too are at the same place)
1) Allow for a line to join back up to a station it has already traversed. I could see a true benefit for creating a circular line that just keeps going around, like the yellow (Circle) line in London.
2) Allow for easier visibility of overlapping lines.
Other than that, this is a fantastic game! Thank you for making it!