Train Wars

by lintfordpickle

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.58

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.25

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.95

Theme★★★★★★★★★★4.05

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.52

Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.81

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.06

Background

In a weird society of the future, all human life has moved onto a 'vast' rail network. It's not clear why, but should any of the trains come to a stop, then all life onboard will perish.

In a twist of sadistic fate, there has also been an uprising of evil robots who are intent of crashing their trains into yours. This is how humans have come to life their lives, STUCK in a LOOP of train tracks.

BUGS

- [DONE] There is an issue when you manually move the camera to the top of the map, you can't manually move the camera down. You *can* however use the 're-center camera' button to fix it.
- For details on edits to the Jam version, just check out git hub

Level Editor

This is a really, really rough level editor. One wrong click and you can corrupt the level file, so be prepared to restore the original file from the zip.
It was an oversight of mine that after I had coded the tracks, composed of nodes and edges in a bidirectional graph, that I had no editor to actually create a rail network. Hence the level editor. Here are a list of keys you can use:

Tracks:

- Ctrl + Del : delete all nodes and edges
- Ctrl + Left Click : place node

- left click not on node : deselect all
- left click on node : select node A
- left click on node: select node B (if A already selected)
- c : join selected edges
- v : toggle active edge (pink) between straight track or bezier
- 1 + left click : place bezier control point 1
- 2 + left click : place bezier control point 2
- K / L : toggle active edge (around selected node A)
- H / J : toggle active aux edge (around selected node A)
- U : create junction signal from active edge (node A must have 3 edges attached)
- hold B + left click: place signal box
- hold Z + left click: place lamp

Scenery:

- AltGr + Del : delete all scenery
- AltGr + left mouse : place current scenery tile
- AltGr + 9 : prev scenery tile
- AltGr + 0 : next scenery tile

Tags: #tracks, #train

Genres: puzzle

Comments23

findoff5 Oct 2020, 08:02

Hello, your itch.io page don't work...

Lintfordpickleauthor5 Oct 2020, 10:11

@findoff thanks for the heads up - the page was still in draft mode and not public ^^

Argon6 Oct 2020, 20:00

Nice idea, I love how it requires you to be cautious, first run I was going full speed and just got destroyed... However it's sometime a bit difficult to read the actions like the changing rails direction, maybe some more visual clues and feedbacks would have helped.

Eldelhas6 Oct 2020, 20:00

I played the game until...Igot stucked in a loop, I don't know if you did it on purpose but I found it really funny, love it !! good job on the game, i've seen little like this one so far !

Gonzalol6 Oct 2020, 21:54

Nice designs and concept. It reminds me to the classics.

DaBlob6 Oct 2020, 21:56

I don't know why but I just can't die, promising concept though !

axelrinaldo6 Oct 2020, 22:12

Really nice little game! The train sprite at the top of the screen looks amazing. 5 minutes felt like a tiny bit too drawn out though, something more like three would have been better in my uneducated opinion. :)

digital bacon7 Oct 2020, 08:48

Cute little game. Love the art style, and putting a track editor in was a really great idea. Only problem I had was the small window size which made it difficult to play on a 4K monitor.

Lintfordpickleauthor7 Oct 2020, 15:42

@dablob yeah, I need to have a word with the play-testing department :D

but you are right, I ran out of time before properly testing the game, and I just set the timer arbitrarily to 5 minutes.

Lintfordpickleauthor7 Oct 2020, 15:43

@argon I totally agree. Even early on the first day I realized that the signals were crazy confusing (that was before I put the green arrows in).
It definitely still needs work on the visual cues

Lintfordpickleauthor7 Oct 2020, 15:45

@digital-bacon glad you liked it. The editor was necessary because after I created the rail-network (a directed graph) I realized I had no way to create the tracks - doh!

I still need to write up the instructions for how to use the editor as I have almost all the keys on the keyboard mapped to some function.

Finn Truman8 Oct 2020, 21:27

I enjoyed this! It's nothing amazing, but you've made something technically impressive and you've made something rather unique out of the theme (I really dislike the theme for this LD). It's a bit easy to abuse, though. There is a loop (around the middle, off to the left, it's got four trees in the middle of it) where you can get yourself and lock off all the tracks and they can never get to you.

SpacialSeasoning9 Oct 2020, 04:42

I really like the game. As the last comment said, you can easily discover a loop. It is still fun to get the other trains to crash into each other while you are in the loop.

sanojian10 Oct 2020, 08:38

You should really expand this into a more standard train game (delivering goods, etc). It is technically really impressive, but the gameplay is a bit strange and chaotic.

Marcos Tulio Cavalcante11 Oct 2020, 23:25

The idea is pretty cool, I didn't like the collision sounds, when the camera is focused on the train it could make distant sounds lower, because it looks like the collision is on the train. It would look great with music or background music in the background.

Lisichka13 Oct 2020, 08:44

intresting and cool. I like it!

staircase27a13 Oct 2020, 11:04

Fun game and interesting idea.

Had a little bit of an issue with starting the game. The exe didn't seem to work on my computer but I managed to run it by manually running the jar with the included jre.

Could definitely be interesting extension if you actively had to deliver to certain locations while also keeping alive and not crashing.

Lintfordpickleauthor13 Oct 2020, 16:56

@staircase27a thanks for trying the game and for the feedback.
Could you please let me know what was the issue running the .exe?

If you still have the game folder on your computer, there should be a debug.log file next to the exe file, could you let me know if there was an error message in the log?
Thanks

staircase27a14 Oct 2020, 08:39

@lintfordpickle Hi, I still have the game folder but it didn't produce any log files or any errors that I can see. I have just tried it again and this time it worked but it repeatedly didn't work last time I tried so no idea what is different. Hopefully it was a one off glitch and won't happen for anyone else.

St1ckY15 Oct 2020, 15:08

Cool and impressive! It is really amazing, you did all of this in such a short time. Played with this
interesting mechanic more than any game on LD47. Thank you and good luck!

Yoni16 Oct 2020, 19:15

It is very impressive that you did so much in LDJam (whoa, a LEVEL EDITOR? WTF). But the gameplay could be improved. Basically what I did was force myself into a loop, block other trains from reaching this loop, and spend the remaining 3.5 minutes just waiting.

Geckoo133716 Oct 2020, 20:17

Interesting project with a good vibe. I like especially how you managed the theme - clever and intuitive. As others said, you could improve gameplay, but in less than 72 hours, you did a solid entry. I keep an eye on the main page so as to follow progress of your game. Well done. Thank you for your feedback ++

Satolas19 Oct 2020, 07:03

Wow ! this is super advanced.

You also did a level editor, impressive !
I really liked the game, it was just a bit hard to press on the boxes and since theses have to be activated fast to avoid catastrophic collisions, it could be cool if it would be easier to press on then with a bigger hitbox.
I like the GTA2 style :-)
But is crazy all the stuff an mechanics you developed in 72h !
I was amazed to see that other trains can also crash onto each other.
If you have a minute don't hesitate to check our game.

PS : the idea of @sanojian sounds super cool as well.

Well done mate !

Other games by @lintfordpickle