Bus Crawl
This game is from ldjam.com, which is currently unavailable.
You can try viewing the original page on Web Archive (may not load correctly).
You can try viewing the original page on Web Archive (may not load correctly).
Where to Play?
Play here! (mirror)
Note: you may be greeted with a white screen for a second or two.. Its loading the map which takes a bit!
Bus Crawl
Inspired by games like OpenTTD, Factorio, MiniMetro and more, I wanted to build a game about expansion.
Goals
Your primary goal is to expand your bus empire deeper and deeper into the city. These poor citizens have no public transit and you are their last hope.Not pictured: all of the crying citizens with no buses to ride!
How to Play
You begin your empire by placing a new route initially. This allows you to start anywhere on the map, but be aware routes after this will cost more the further they are from your first route. Pretend this is your bus depot and headquarters.Two stops cannot be right next to each other, but routes may be close or overlap with each other.
The cost of creating a route is based on a few factors like distance to original stop at the beginning of the game and the ending distance of the second stop compared to the first stop you have picked. This allows you to start local and get more cash before trying to expand deeper.
Repairing
Your buses are not magical. They will require maintenance every so often and can be repaired by simply clicking the wrench icon.While they are broken down they will not make any money. It is in your best interests to repair quickly!
Upgrades
You can upgrade the speed and reliability of your buses, but it costs a good bit and scales aggressively.Tips
If you are tired of repairing a lot, consider building less routes temporarily and upgrading your buses.Technical specifics
This is one big weighted (all positive based on Euclidian distance of nodes) undirected acyclic graph under the hood. A visualization of it looks like:There is a map editor built in, but all of the keybinds are undocumented. If you're interested in playing with the editor, leave a comment and I can give you the rundown.
For pathing and shortest paths by weight, I opted for the Floyd Warshall algorithm. This gives a weight matrix and with minor modifications can rebuild paths from any node to any node.