Devlog 2: Take Off

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!