I've started working on a new game called Trains, Trucks & Tractors.
The basic idea is to take the idea of transportation/road-building games and wrap it inside something closer to a roguelike/incremental game.
You build roads by drawing them directly on a map, connecting the places that need to be connected. Maps are randomly generated each run and instead of trying to build a permament city you have to achieve certain goals on each one of them.
Setup
A run has 8 different contracts.
Before each contract you get a preview of the next map and you can prepare a loadout of upgrades. In this same screen you can see the goals for the map you are about to play and your statistics (W.I.P)
Once you are ready, you enter the map, start connecting routes and working towards achieving the goals.
The game has three transportation types:
- Trains
- Trucks
- Tractors
I'm still working on the design for these, what each one does, etc. For now each of these have their own road type (trains use rail tracks, trucks roads and tractors dirt roads)
Runs
My main focus for this game will be on the game loop, what can I achieve with the road-building mechanic and how far I can go by mixing it with other genres such as roguelike, those are my main questions.
I'm looking at games like Balatro, Isaac, Freeways where you can understand the loop pretty but that doesn't mean the game itself is simple, short or bad. The rules around the main mechanic is what makes these games so good.
Upgrades
I am also still thinking about how upgrades affect the game.
At the moment you have to choose which upgrades you want to use on the next map because they occupy a physical space in the loadout. Better upgrades occupy more space.
This is another big part of the game, replayability. In my honest opinion a good roguelike is about how many times I can play the same map differently (I'm not sure that makes sense)
Art
The art style is inspired by Lucas Pope's games. He is so good at keeping things simple but still looking great. I am sticking to just 3 colours for the entire palette with a 1-bit style.
I'm not an artist and I don't want to focus on it too much for this game. I feel like everytime I want to start a new project I worry too much about how it will look, how to make it attractive and I forget that the game has to be fun to play.
Stack
I spent some time messing around with different frameworks for this game and I landed on Haxe with HaxeFlixel.
I wrote DUMMS! entirely in Odin with Sokol and I think this is the best choice if you enjoy making games, but I wanted something different. I also tried JAI for the 100th time and again it reminded too much to Odin, which isn't bad at all but as I said above, I wanted something different. I spent some time with LOVE2D and I really enjoyed how easy it is to take what I have in my head and put it into a game. I didn't stick with it because I stumbled across Haxe.
Haxe solves a few problems (and introduces a few new ones) that I didn't want to put up with. Mostly building for different platforms.
I spent some time refactoring code for DUMMS! to build it for web, linux, windows, mac, etc. I created a script for LOVE2D to build games for the web.
In Haxe I just run a different command and that's it, it just works.
Conclussion
Most of the basic mechanics are working, drawing roads, upgrades, procedural generation.
There is no playable version at the moment but my goal is to have a working version soon and hopefully get some feedback on it.
I wanted to do this devlog to see how my idea sounds to other people. Any kind of feedback or comments is welcome.
