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.