Train Metropolis News

[p]Train Metropolis upgrades system has been adjusted to add greater challenge and depth. Plus in this devlog other minor changes are detailed:[/p][p] [/p][h2]Upgraded Upgrades[/h2][p]For a while, I've felt like the train upgrade system in Train Metropolis was a bit undercooked. On the surface it provide lots of different choices for specialising trains and thus interesting decisions about how to spent your hard earned in-game cash. However, it never quite felt like it was really giving players reason to think. I realised that since there was no limit to the number of upgrades a train can have, players can just spend on whatever upgrade is immediately useful and affordable, and know it'll give immediate progress, plus probably pay itself back fairly quickly.

In the latest update to the game, trains are now limited to 4 upgrade slots (types of upgrades). Each upgrade slot can be levelled up itself, so that part is unchanged. However now players need to really think through which upgrades they want on each train. It also makes trains less interchangeable, meaning players need to think through which trains they put on what lines, especially when it comes to upgrading districts and all the route changes that entails.[/p][p][/p][h2]Engine Works[/h2][p]The game now has auto-save feature, which kicks in every 15 minutes. I've also upgraded the version of Unity the game uses to patch a recently discovered security flaw. Plus a few other minor bugs have been fixed in this patch. I'm still on the lookout for bugs and unresolved issues, so please report any problems you have here in the Bugs Thread: [/p][p]https://steamcommunity.com/app/955220/discussions/0/523083364935145233/
[/p][h2]Next Station[/h2][p]Overall I'm quite happy with the state of Train Metropolis. Technically it feels solid (though I could come to regret saying that if this latest patch proves buggier than in testing).

Probably if I'm being honest though, Train Metropolis doesn't quite fulfil that fantasy of operating a train company and building a city. It feels a little on-rails, if you'll forgive the pun. I'm still keen to at least get a web-browser demo version out. After that though, I'll have to see how it performs in terms of long term sales before I decide if it's worth expanding out the content.

Mostly though I want to take the lessons from Train Metropolis into future games. I'm currently planning a new city builder type idle clicker game, which should go into production in the new year if other projects stay on schedule. I'll let you know more details when they're ready for announcing. In the meantime, enjoy the new challenges of the upgrade system, and again, shout if you find any bugs![/p]

Since Train Metropolis came out, I've fixed a lot of bugs and made some major changes to the UI. Thanks for all the feedback and bug reports in the last week. Here's all the changes made:

[h2]Coach Class[/h2]

It all started with the best of intentions. Two days before launch I had finished working on the game. It had been thoroughly tested and the stable build was uploaded and ready for launch day. So I decided to make a few minor improvements that had been annoying me personally.

Big mistake!

First I made carriages/wagons reflect what was actually being carried in them. This should have been a purely cosmetic change, but because of the way I was recycling carriage models when trains change cargo type, it caused players an error soon as they tried to sell a train.

Embarrassing, but I managed to fix this on launch day within a few hours of it being reported.

[h2]Zoom[/h2]

Even more problematic was the second change I made. I fixed the zoom sensitivity so that the more zoomed out you are, the larger the amount by which you zoom.

Thing was, I'd spent the whole of development, testing and playtesting before launch not ever zooming out because it felt really cumbersome and annoying. Consequently, all the UIs were designed with being at the default starting zoom level, or maybe a little bit more zoomed out.

Soon as the game released, the first thing people complained about was overlapping UIs when you zoom out. They looked awful and made the game difficult to play.

I originally had it that the on-map UI only showed for districts the player is hovering over, but changed this to show level up and upgrade buttons when they were available so players would easily see when a district was ready for levelling up / upgrading.

I quickly changed this back, as it was causing a lot of players issues, not only when zoomed out, but also with accidentally clicking on those upgrade buttons, with no way to undo, when they were trying to click on trains.

I also added an option to minimise the district-hover UI so that it got in the way of clicking even less, and that hid the upgrade buttons, so the worst thing a misclick would do would be to open the district information screen, or if you were really unlucky, level up the district.



Lastly, I added particle effects as a replacement to show when a district is ready to upgrade or level up. I'm not 100% convinced about them aesthetically but they do the job okay.

[h2]It's a Feature not a Bug[/h2]

One of the unusual things about Train Metropolis compared to other idle clicker games is that there is not infinite production. Stations only produce a limited amount of goods and passengers per x second cycle.

That means trains can find there is a shortage when they arrive at a station, not transport anything, and so make zero money at the other end. As well, clicking to overload them at the start station will do nothing if there's nothing for them to pick up in the first place.

It effectively acts as a dampener on snowballing a single train route, and forces the player to either expand to new districts, level up districts or upgrade trains to make more off the existing route.

This was not communicated in the game at all. Some players ran into this extremely fast, and assumed the game was broken since they were doing what was being asked of them (upgrade trains, buy more trains), yet were getting no money for doing it past a point.

I quickly added in some notifications that popped up when a station had a shortage. As well I added "shortage" messages on the player clicking the empty trains and stations. It's not the most elegant solution but at least it does the job.

The painful part being that I had thought something like this might be needed during development, but didn't note it down and so it slipped off the back of my mind.



Having made an interim patch to fix the most immediate bugs and UI issues, I got a lot of feedback about the difficulty in managing trains and district. For example, figuring out what goods and passengers were needed for which districts to level up and upgrade. Or for example, if there was a shortage, how great was the shortage or how close to being a shortage is any particular station.

Clearly the district upgrade guide was not enough, so I went about adding in more data to the existing screens. You can now see all the farmland districts when you click on farmland button in the district guide. You can then click on a specific district to get to the info screen about it, which now also lists all the trains that go to or from it. Which you can click on, and so on.



I also added new on-map lines to show either the route of a currently selected train, or all the train routes in and out of a district. Hopefully this makes it easier to see which trains you are actually interacting with.

[h2]On Board Menu[/h2]

I also added a few small things to the settings menu. Sound settings now autosave when you exit the settings menu, meaning if you muted the music (or turned it up to ear-shattering 11 out of 10) then that'll be how it is when you reopen the game next time.

I also added in graphics settings. These are a little bit work in progress. I disabled resolution changing for example because it was causing some glitches. Hopefully I'll be able to add this back in soon.



There was also some feedback about the game being too easy. The usual idle game formula is to have player progress plateau, forcing them to grind or idle (or in f2p games, spend real money and watch ads) until reaching a point where they can unlock some new thing and suddenly progress rockets again, only to plateau once more after time.

I purposely softened that approach in Train Metropolis because I personally find it tedious. The game does still have steps and inflection points, but I felt the need to rejig your train routes and make a fresh new plan each time you upgrade to a new district was more fun.

However, for players who really like optimising, or are maybe used to acquiring huge piles of cash money as being the main or only goal, the game can feel a little too quick to snowball, and a bit slow to put the breaks on that.

I had it in the back of my head that I wanted to add achievements to the game, but in light of the above, I realised that they were perhaps necessary to give people that extra level of difficulty.

They're wrapped up in the form of "Challenges" in the game. Each challenge corresponds to a Steam Achievement and some of them are mutually exclusive, while others force you to do play the game slightly wrong: The "Uneducated" challenge for example requires you win without a University, but you still need a High Tech district, which in turn you can therefore never level up for lack of scientists, and remains only ever at level 1.

I also added in the ability to enforce Challenges. I.e. prevent you from accidentally failing them, via the Challenge screen in the main menu. This is something I personally find very annoying in gaming in general; when I'm in the flow of the game and end up failing an achievement because I am so used to doing something I forget I need to not do it in this case. Hopefully this extra little feature will mean someone else out there doesn't suffer the same fate.

[h2]Next Station[/h2]

There's still a few things I want to add to the game, such as moving ships/rockets/planes. I also got a suggestion from one player for in-game graphs to track things like how much produce is needed to level up a district. I might still get round to these but probably not this month, since I'm now really quite close to burning out from the crunch to launch and post-launch updates. Same goes for browser version or porting to other platforms.

I will though be prioritising bugs, so if you find any, please report them here in the Bugs Thread:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/955220/discussions/0/523083364935145233/

And as always, it's useful to get feedback, which you can put here in the Feedback Thread: https://steamcommunity.com/app/955220/discussions/0/523083364935144975/

Hope the improvements in this patch make the game even better and have fun playing!

Train Metropolis comes out today. Thanks for all the people who gave feedback on the demo! In this blog I'll detail what improvements I've made, what else made the cut, and what's still to come post-launch.

[h2]All Aboard[/h2]

The game now has save and load, both for the full game and the demo. I also more than doubled the number of different districts. Both Spaceport and Arcology districts allow you to "win" the game, and there's a variety of ways to unlock and then level them up for victory.

I added a "tech tree" style guide showing how all the districts upgrade to/from and what they make and need. Hopefully this will make planning a route to success easier.



As well, the game now has an "aims" UI to give suggestions on which districts to focus on next. They're totally optional, but should help anyone who is a bit lost coming off the end of the on-rails tutorial.

With playing the game repeatedly to balance the new districts, I also found numerous small UX and UI frustrations, which I've fixed or improved. As well, I also added in the following suggestions from your feedback:

• Ability to sell trains.
  
• Auto-level up ability for players who prefer idle play.
  
• Boosted income-type upgrades, again to aid idle style players.
  

The demo and main game also have random maps, and a bit more variety with the terrain. It's not the semi-infinite map mode I originally had in mind, but the islands generated are more than big enough to win the game and then some.

[h2]Waiting Room[/h2]

Another player suggestion was for some physical change of appearance for the trains to indicate which have upgrades. This makes a lot of sense. For speed upgrades, you can already see trains go faster. I am hoping to add in more carriages/wagons for trains that have capacity upgrades (just didn't quite have enough time to make this so). However for income upgrades, I haven't yet quite found a good solution for showing them on the train itself.



Longer term, there's a few things that I aim to do but either aren't straightforward or will need a bit more work to get into the game:

I am still keen to make a browser based version of the game. The sticking point here is a). save and load, and b). offline progress. I'm looking into using a backend-service provider to host save game files but although not technically hard, it still takes a fair bit of time and effort to implement. I may make a browser based version of the demo that simply has save and load disabled in the short term, again depending on time.

Many people pointed out it's a bit weird to see trains ghosting through each other. While I decided long ago that crashes don't really add anything to the game aside from some novelty the first time it happens, it would be really nice to at least have double-tracks, so that trains pass through each other less often. I already know how to implement this in theory, but I kind of dug a hole for myself with the way the grid on which all the game's buildings and track is placed. Simply, the grid squares are too small, and making them bigger to allow double tracks would mean redoing all the building placement for the whole game. I will though do some experiments with squeezing two track lines into each grid square to see if it doesn't look too awful.

[h2]Missed Connection[/h2]

Also on the point of trains ghosting through each other, I looked at adding in some kind of traffic management to the game. However this was going to be very difficult to retrofit into the game code/programming wise. As well, each of the possible ways of doing it that I looked into were loaded with UX issues, weird edge cases, counter-intuitive behaviour, or would be very fiddly to make UIs and controls for.

Therefore I've decided it's now beyond the scope for Train Metropolis, though one of my other games, Mars Rapid Transit, I have designed from the beginning to have (train) traffic management.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2824250/Mars_Rapid_Transit/

At one point I also had a happiness system in the game. The original plan was that some districts could level up and upgrade based on a happiness score. However it wasn't clear where happiness should come from. Basing it on neighbouring districts made the game into a puzzle and a bit of a frustrating one at that, since there's no way to undo a mistake (no way to demolish or downgrade a district). The only other way of making districts happy was to give them a constant supply of goods or passengers. But this felt too similar to the existing way to level up. Plus it was never clear how long a district needed to stay above a happiness threshold to be allowed to level up. So I scrapped the idea.

It'd be nice to expand the city building side of the game but I concluded that the more fine-detailed aspects of city building I couldn't simply borrow from other city builders. They just didn't fit. It's something I will need to think about for the future, both for Train Metropolis and my other games.

I mentioned in a previous blog about some ideas for a storyline as well. However, my initial concept for this was quite weak. I couldn't weave a narrative that felt more than just tacked on. While I enjoy giving my games a bit of a story, for Train Metropolis it was ultimately extra ingredient that didn't add to the overall flavour.

[h2]Next Station[/h2]

I have a few more UX fixes I'd like to make in the coming weeks:

• More ways to order/sort lists.
  
• Ability to zoom to selected districts/trains/stations on the map.
  
• Better handling of unassigned trains in the Train Overview list
  

As well, I'd like to do some visual improvements. Have ships, planes and rockets all moving about when a district levels up, and generally more vim and sparkles to celebrate. Probably the game has a few further graphical glitches or places where I can improve the building models (such as no fences on piers). These though are low priority for now.

If there's something you think is higher priority that I've missed, I am still looking for feedback. Use the Feedback Thread here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/955220/discussions/0/523083364935144975/

And if you find any bugs, please let me know in the Bug Thread here:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/955220/discussions/0/523083364935145233/

In the meantime, hope you all enjoy the game!

Train Metropolis has arrived at its first station. There is now a demo available on Steam. As well in this devlog I'll go into some of the plans for the full game.

[h2]Branch Line[/h2]

What you can expect from the demo:

The demo is set on an island and as such has a limited number of new districts that can be founded. As well it only has a subsection of the different district types that'll be available in the full game. As with the main game, the demo can be "won" by reaching an end goal, but it's possible to continue after that.

[h2]First Passengers[/h2]

The demo is now on Steam. I was thinking to do a playtest first, but due to the imminent arrival of the Steam NextFest (less than two weeks at time of writing), I figured might as well launch the demo now and get some feedback on it directly.

If you have any comments on the game difficulty or pacing, I would be super grateful to hear them. As well any thoughts on the train upgrades and how effective they are, whether there are any that are too powerful or weak, that'd be really helpful also. Plus if you find anything irritating or frustrating with the UI or gameplay, that will help me refine the game.

Use the Feedback Thread here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/955220/discussions/0/523083364935144975/

Or pop into the Crystalline Green Ltd. discord here: https://discord.gg/hYSbQwFQZQ

And if you find any bugs, please let me know in the Bug Thread here:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/955220/discussions/0/523083364935145233/



Train Metropolis will eventually feature far more districts than the demo has. I've yet to decide how many exactly, since they are quite time consuming to make. The aim is to have enough variety that players can feel like they're making a unique city and reaching the eventual goal in their own way.

Equally, the chain of which districts can be upgraded to which other ones will probably change between the demo and full release version. Right now, the demo is a bit too linear, and some of the upgrades, such as Farmland to Industrial aren't intuitive, since players need to simultaneously found a forest district and later a mining district. Equally these districts are kinda useless without an industrial district, so probably there'll be some extra logic for locking district founding and upgrading based on more than just district level.

[h2]Clickety Clack[/h2]

For those that are into the clicker part of Idle Clickers the plan is to add an upgrade chain that will make clicking more powerful. I have some ideas about how to theme this, probably something around either the "stations" being upgraded, or the train company itself.

[h2]Storied Journey[/h2]

I also have some ideas for how the story of Train Metropolis will develop, beyond just being fluff for the tutorial lady Jess to say. I'll need to see if what I have in mind meshes well with the rest of the game, but I'm a fan of adding just a bit of narrative to a game to give it some flavour and hoping to do that with Train Metropolis also.

[h2]Expanding To The Horizons[/h2]

Lastly, I want to implement a map that can be expanded indefinitely, adding further new land every time a district is founded, as well as occasional obstacles such as lakes and mountains that can't be built on.

[h2]Schedule[/h2]

Plan is to release Train Metropolis in March, though it depends somewhat on a). how long it takes to take on board feedback, b). how long the rest of the content, especially the additional districts, take to make, and c). how work goes on the other projects I have.

In the meantime, hope you enjoy the demo and please do get in contact if you have feedback!