Community Report: Steam Next Fest Feedback and Planned Changes
Now that the demo is over, we’re extremely keen to keep players and our community in the loop on how the game is being improved upon. Ernestas, solo developer of Sweet Transit’s focus is finishing content graphics and balancing the Early Access end game. However, due to the amount of feedback, he will focus much more on features as well.
Keep in mind that the Early Access release will only have around 50%~ of the total content that is planned for the 1.0 release, with many systems still in development and some far from finished. Examples such as there being no trading, proper warehouse management, story, or events currently. These elements cannot be added unless the base game is working fully as intended. Our goal is to have a good foundation and build upon it over time. Improvements and balancing will come out together with new content until the final vision is realised.
With all that being said, please see some specific notes and feedback below from Ernestas himself:
“Hello everyone. Thank you for checking out the demo in the Steam Next Festival. The feedback and discussions both on Steam and Discord were fantastic, and gave plenty of food for thought. On-going feedback is always welcome as long as it is constructive. Most of the issues/features that were raised will be addressed in the Early Access release. I will share the more interesting parts instead of just dumping the changelog below.
There were many players having problems starting the game. Sweet Transit is not an easy game even for more experienced players as it encourages different kinds of problem solving. But there is still an issue that the game is not clear enough in some cases on how to solve these problems. It certainly does not help when people tend to skip the tutorial.
There are many changes being made already, here are few:
The demo and the latest build had different signal block systems which caused obvious errors with me juggling between the two versions. During Beta people expressed that they wanted to have more compact rail systems. One option was to create path signals instead of block ones. But that would only trivialize logistics leaving only the city building as the sole challenge.
I decided to split signal blocks in places where no signal can be placed. This allows multiple trains to use the same block and opens up a layer of depth for optimization. The split happens between two rail blocks that cannot have any signals.
During the demo, people expressed that there was no reason to have no wait conditions. And it is true. From now on all new destinations will have a new condition attached to them automatically. I call this condition "Until done" as the train will wait only until it has something to do at that station. There is new "Until full of fuel" condition as well.
Conditions "Until full" or "Until empty" will now take the goods or people filter into consideration.
I plan to try to tackle multi-action destinations. So that you could load/unload/swap workers at the same time. Further to this wait conditions will most likely be minimized by default to improve readability.
In the Demo, village stations could share workers as they were only referencing residentials when counting the available people. Watching the demo I noticed that people expected that workers will pick one of the stations. I redesigned village station logic to allow this. Now people physically move to stations and wait there. By default they will choose a station with smallest number of workers in it. The biggest improvement that comes from this is the ability to imitate "tram" system by transferring workers from one village station to another.
Stations will automatically name themselves based on who they are connected to. If that is a distribution centre with Sawmills, then it will be "Sawmill 1". If it is a village named "York" with 2 stations already connected, then it will be named "York 3" and so on.
It was a hassle to manage routes after removing and redesigning your stations. Now routes will automatically find a new station if the old one is removed. A new station will be selected either if it has the same name or a new station is built in the same location.
Some people expressed that the train pathfinding had problems. This can be true as the train only recalculates paths when starting a journey, on a blocked chain signal or when some rails in the path are destroyed. Now path recalculation happens midway as well if the destination is reserved by another train.
I have added a space counter for signal dragging to make the perfectionists life easier.
Requirement Signals
Requirement signals have few additions as well:
- Recalculate - A train will recalculate its path when passing this signal.
- Influence - To positively or negatively influence train path calculation.
- Travelers - Limits further path to trains with travellers.
Build distances are changed from circles to squares. This should help to pack and plan everything more efficiently.
The game seems to not tell why you cannot build in certain areas. To make those errors clearer now they will float away grabbing your attention. Going forward more will be added.
It was hard to specialize villages when you need production structures to store fish, clothes and so on. Now residences will store goods that they need. Having a village that does not produce anything, just imports will be possible.
Village decorations no longer require the need for a road or any other connection. The decoration system is one with the least development time associated right now. Later down the line it will be more "tactical" in how you want to use it instead of randomly placing it everywhere.
I have added ability to disable production facilities. This will allow to plan bigger farms and factories without worrying that workers will occupy them or upkeep brings you down.
Coal Mine and Sawmill are now always visible in the production tab with tooltip on how to unlock them. This should help new players in figuring out what they need to do.
Most of the UI needs some work and it will come in time. Features are regularly being added leaving UI outdated and unintuitive. While I try to keep it up to date, there is only so much I can do alone with my limited skills and time. If anyone has some ideas on how it could be done better feel free to discuss it with me in Discord. This way, those changes will come sooner as it will save me time in design.
Graphs, unlock tree and other statistics windows are planned with the first Early Access update. A full list of what to expect will come later.
Thank you for reading and for all of your help in trying to help to improve the game. Sweet Transit journey is just getting started. Personally, I am quite excited to see what this game becomes with so many good ideas all around.”
Keep in mind that the Early Access release will only have around 50%~ of the total content that is planned for the 1.0 release, with many systems still in development and some far from finished. Examples such as there being no trading, proper warehouse management, story, or events currently. These elements cannot be added unless the base game is working fully as intended. Our goal is to have a good foundation and build upon it over time. Improvements and balancing will come out together with new content until the final vision is realised.
With all that being said, please see some specific notes and feedback below from Ernestas himself:
“Hello everyone. Thank you for checking out the demo in the Steam Next Festival. The feedback and discussions both on Steam and Discord were fantastic, and gave plenty of food for thought. On-going feedback is always welcome as long as it is constructive. Most of the issues/features that were raised will be addressed in the Early Access release. I will share the more interesting parts instead of just dumping the changelog below.
Approachability/Onboarding/Tutorialisation
There were many players having problems starting the game. Sweet Transit is not an easy game even for more experienced players as it encourages different kinds of problem solving. But there is still an issue that the game is not clear enough in some cases on how to solve these problems. It certainly does not help when people tend to skip the tutorial.
There are many changes being made already, here are few:
- Automatic route wait conditions.
- New situational advices such as introducing distribution centre or explaining why your current train will not load coal without gondola wagon.
- Ability to see which train is blocking the path.
- Increased small station road range.
- Removed train depot build time and now you can store trains there
Rail System
The demo and the latest build had different signal block systems which caused obvious errors with me juggling between the two versions. During Beta people expressed that they wanted to have more compact rail systems. One option was to create path signals instead of block ones. But that would only trivialize logistics leaving only the city building as the sole challenge.
I decided to split signal blocks in places where no signal can be placed. This allows multiple trains to use the same block and opens up a layer of depth for optimization. The split happens between two rail blocks that cannot have any signals.
Wait Conditions
During the demo, people expressed that there was no reason to have no wait conditions. And it is true. From now on all new destinations will have a new condition attached to them automatically. I call this condition "Until done" as the train will wait only until it has something to do at that station. There is new "Until full of fuel" condition as well.
Conditions "Until full" or "Until empty" will now take the goods or people filter into consideration.
I plan to try to tackle multi-action destinations. So that you could load/unload/swap workers at the same time. Further to this wait conditions will most likely be minimized by default to improve readability.
Village Stations
In the Demo, village stations could share workers as they were only referencing residentials when counting the available people. Watching the demo I noticed that people expected that workers will pick one of the stations. I redesigned village station logic to allow this. Now people physically move to stations and wait there. By default they will choose a station with smallest number of workers in it. The biggest improvement that comes from this is the ability to imitate "tram" system by transferring workers from one village station to another.
Station Naming
Stations will automatically name themselves based on who they are connected to. If that is a distribution centre with Sawmills, then it will be "Sawmill 1". If it is a village named "York" with 2 stations already connected, then it will be named "York 3" and so on.
Station Removal
It was a hassle to manage routes after removing and redesigning your stations. Now routes will automatically find a new station if the old one is removed. A new station will be selected either if it has the same name or a new station is built in the same location.
Train Path
Some people expressed that the train pathfinding had problems. This can be true as the train only recalculates paths when starting a journey, on a blocked chain signal or when some rails in the path are destroyed. Now path recalculation happens midway as well if the destination is reserved by another train.
Signals Dragging
I have added a space counter for signal dragging to make the perfectionists life easier.
Requirement Signals
Requirement signals have few additions as well:
- Recalculate - A train will recalculate its path when passing this signal.
- Influence - To positively or negatively influence train path calculation.
- Travelers - Limits further path to trains with travellers.
Build Distance
Build distances are changed from circles to squares. This should help to pack and plan everything more efficiently.
Error Messages
The game seems to not tell why you cannot build in certain areas. To make those errors clearer now they will float away grabbing your attention. Going forward more will be added.
Residences
It was hard to specialize villages when you need production structures to store fish, clothes and so on. Now residences will store goods that they need. Having a village that does not produce anything, just imports will be possible.
Decorations
Village decorations no longer require the need for a road or any other connection. The decoration system is one with the least development time associated right now. Later down the line it will be more "tactical" in how you want to use it instead of randomly placing it everywhere.
Production Facilities
I have added ability to disable production facilities. This will allow to plan bigger farms and factories without worrying that workers will occupy them or upkeep brings you down.
Coal Mine and Sawmill are now always visible in the production tab with tooltip on how to unlock them. This should help new players in figuring out what they need to do.
UI
Most of the UI needs some work and it will come in time. Features are regularly being added leaving UI outdated and unintuitive. While I try to keep it up to date, there is only so much I can do alone with my limited skills and time. If anyone has some ideas on how it could be done better feel free to discuss it with me in Discord. This way, those changes will come sooner as it will save me time in design.
Graphs, unlock tree and other statistics windows are planned with the first Early Access update. A full list of what to expect will come later.
Thank you for reading and for all of your help in trying to help to improve the game. Sweet Transit journey is just getting started. Personally, I am quite excited to see what this game becomes with so many good ideas all around.”