Devlog 3: Bumpy Ride

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!