Rail Transport Empire (Untitled Train Game Sequel)

MadManMoody

A sequel/remake of Untitled Train Game. While finishing up Untitled Train Game I felt disappointed and restricted by some of the design decisions I had made while developing the game. I decided it would be better to take lessons learned from the development and focus my efforts on building a Sequel/Revamp of the game. Development started roughly at the start of the new year.

What makes this better compared to the prototype?

A custom height system. This allows for bridges to be built across a valley or body of water. This also allows for trains to go up or down terrain. Trains can even follow track under bridges. This will allow for the creation of junctions and overpasses for more efficient railways.
A profile system for saving scores and setting your company president/vice president and company color.
An era's system. Most scenarios will have the era change overtime, which will change what trains/carriages/infrastructure are available, how much infrastructure costs to build, how much money you make from transporting things, appearance of town/city buildings, and background music. The eras are: 1800s, 1900s, Modern, and Future.
An advanced rail builder that allows for fine tuning and quick building of track.
A carriage system that allows you to carry multiple cargo types with the same train.
A town system. Instead of the town's production of passengers being increased overtime, now each town is composed of different buildings, each with their own building population. Once buildings are full, the town will build new buildings nearby, increasing the town's population. Special buildings will also be built such as Grocery Stores or Banks that will allow you to deliver the building's required cargo to the town, further increasing growth. You will also be able to buy or build buildings to make even more money by charging rent or by selling the products you deliver.

When can I play?
No release timeline as of yet but I would like to release the game before the end of this year.

Is this going to be a commercial release?
Yes. I plan on charging $6.99 for the full release of the game. I plan on releasing the game on Steam and Itch.io. I would like to offer a demo of the product alongside the release, so consumers would be able to try before they buy.

Will this be scenario based like the prototype?
Yes. I plan on having 40 scenarios total. Remakes of the 18 prototype scenarios, 20 new scenarios, and two bonus scenarios. Each scenario takes roughly 15-30 minutes to complete, which means roughly 20 hours of gameplay depending on how long it takes you to complete the scenarios.

See below for some development screenshots. I will be updating this with major milestones, and I plan on posting videos of gameplay and features to showoff some gameplay.

MadManMoody

Greetings,
It has been over a month, so I wanted to show off some progress and go further indepth regarding some game mechanics.

I am still working on getting the overall infrastructure and mechanics of the game just right. The goal is to have almost all core mechanics functional and in decent working order before building the scenarios. There will almost certainly be bugs and issues while working on the scenarios, but at that point I can focus on fixing the bugs instead of adding features that will almost certainly introduce more bugs.

Now for some features:

You can buy real estate (Town buildings) while playing the game. The main goal of the game is still about building and managing trains/routes. Buying real estate simply allows you to grow your money in the background while you manage your train routes and efficiency. They are meant to give you a steady income overtime, a worthwhile investment. That being said, they are still an investment. They are expensive to buy, and have high running costs. You can make money off real estate in two ways: charging rent (for housing) and getting profit share (for businesses). Rent is based off the amount of people occupying the building. Houses hold less occupants and thus you make less rent than you would if you had bought a apartment. Profit share is based off if you have a station servicing the town the business is in. The more cargo you deliver to stations, the more money you will make. However if you neglect to service the stations, you will lose money rapidly, as running costs are very high for businesses.

You can also refit trains with multiple carriages, each carriage can carry different types of cargo. Carriages effect the trains themselves, they add weight to the train, and if they are loaded with cargo, will further add weight to the train. This can cause the train to have much slower acceleration than normal, which may cause issues if you do not plan/account for it.

I should also take time to mention, stations can now serve two industries/towns at the same time. Dropping off cargo for one will effect both industries/towns equally. This means you can service two industries near each other by placing a station in between them, with only one station. I also plan on allowing you to expand stations by building them adjacent to each other, allowing two trains to be loaded/unloaded at the same time.

I hope to continue development and provide more screenshots and maybe a video soon.

MadManMoody

Greetings again, I just wanted to quickly show some progress and what gameplay will look like. Can you guess where the scenario in the above screenshots takes place? 😃 Shown in the screenshots is a passenger service between two towns, a freight service carrying gold ore to the processing center, and a freight service carrying gold bars to the town, which has a central bank. (If the town didn't have a central bank, it wouldn't accept the gold bars!) Please note that the buildings on the mountains were all built while playing the game by the town growing, they weren't there at the start of the scenario! Also, the processing center will display an animation when it is producing gold bars, but it wasn't processing the gold ore at the moment I took the screenshot.

MadManMoody

Hey all, updating this to talk about further progress on the game.

Signals are mostly complete now, they may require further bug testing but all functionality is present and they seem to work as intended. The signals have different appearances depending on what time period the game is currently in. There are several signal types to help you manage/automate your rail lines:

Stop/Go: Any train that comes across this signal while it is signaling to stop will automatically halt and wait until it is told to go again. Useful for automatically halting trains while you perform construction.

Timed: When a train passes this signal, it will signal all incoming trains to halt until a user specified amount of seconds has passed. Any further trains that are halted will start-up again once the signal tells them to go, which will also immediately trigger the signal again.

Forward: When a train comes across this signal, it will check up to 10 connected rail tiles ahead for any other trains on those tiles. If there is a train present on the track ahead, the train will wait until the track is clear before starting again. It will check straight rails, turns, 4Way Junctions, and stations. It will also check a junction rail but will not check any further rail after that, so multiple forward signals may be required. It will also check the rail tile a signal is on but will not check any further rail beyond that signal.

Switch: Will signal between two different directions on a junction automatically, when a trains passes, it will switch to the other direction.

Cargo Switch: Similar to the switch signal, but it will signal different directions based off the cargo the train is carrying. If the train is not carrying either of the selected cargos, it will go in the direction the junction is already facing.

Carriage Switch: Similar to the cargo switch signal, but checks for which carriage type the train has instead of the cargo it is carrying.

There are 40 trains in the game, 10 for each time period. (1800s, 1900s, Modern, Future). There is a good mix of Steam and Diesel Engines, but one major upgrade from the previous game is the addition of Electric, Monorail, and Maglev Engines, along with different track types to support them.

Alot of behind the scenes stuff has been done, such as a cash floating system that will show how much you money you used to purchase something, or how much money you made from selling something/delivering something. I hope this removes some ambiguity from how much you may have spent on a select item, or how much money you made from deliveries, considering that deliveries now account for how long it took you to deliver the item(s), alongside the base price of the delivery. (Each cargo type has a base delivery income, as well as a standard delivery time. You make more money by delivering before the standard delivery time, but make less money (or no money!) if you make a late delivery (about double the standard delivery time).

Last thing I wanted to talk about is the bridge types. There are 5 different bridge types (Wood, Beam, Arch, Suspension, Tubular), each with their own base cost, support costs, max height from the ground, and max speed that trains can cross it at.

I am very proud of the game progress so far and I believe I can safely say that almost all core game mechanics are complete. I hope to start making the scenarios soon so I can release a demo/test build to gather feedback. I am very excited about the scenarios, I believe they will provide a healthy challenge while also being unique and creative enough to encourage beating a scenario to see what the next one will be like.

Person

How did you MAKE A BUILDING SYSTEM??????

MadManMoody

Greetings,
There are two building systems I made, the first was done by checking the tile the player is currently on for any conflicts, then moving the player forward and placing the selected object behind them. (Left Rail and Right Rail will move them left or right for faster building)
The second is more complicated. The player selects a piece of rail by clicking the advanced rail button while on a piece of rail. That rail is then put in a group and has it's texture changed to be red. Pressing any of the build buttons will then find the rail in the group and use the x/y coordinates to find the next tile, add the selected rail, then remove the previous rail from the group.

I hope this gives you inspiration or a good starting point if you were thinking about making a building system for your own game.

MadManMoody

Hello everyone,

I've still been working on the game on and off since the last update.

Below are some screenshots of the decorations and landscaping system in use. I hope these features add a new layer of gameplay and creativity for players. I believe the decorations help to separate my game from other transport games as most of them don't seem to give player freedom to create a "model railway" appearance.

You can see that some scenarios will start with decorations already in them, forcing you to work around them. (You can remove them at a cost if they were in the scenario at the start.)