Ready to Rumlble

What a awesome game ! ... ;)

I really liked the art, the panic-inducing music, and the overall polish to the experience :smile: But I gotta be honest... I don't understand what I'm supposed to be doing! How do I make the trains loop?

Cool! Reminds a lot of the very old pipes puzzle arcade game (It was for the Amiga I think) where you have pipes instead of tracks and water flowing instead of trains but you had to choose from limited pieces there connecting things.
It plays nicely, I however was confused on how to build a loop since they just smash in the box then.

I'm confused, is it actually possible to create a loop?

The visuals are nice and the music is fun (I think you only forgot to check the "loop" box - it just stopped after a while).

Nice entry!

Thanks all for your feedbacks! I recognize it's not clear that you can in fact destroy a previously constructed rail.
When you position the cursor back on a rail, it should allow you to destroy it by left or right-clicking it.

It could require a bit more than one destruction to be able make a loop though.

I didn't understand how to create a loop. After reading your comment @thunderkerrigan, I finally understand.

Unfortunately the box keeps on spawning "Choo Choos", so even if I get a loop, the game would be over somewhere else.

@mrmaico Yeah it is quite difficult I agree. We struggled to find a good way to balance the difficulty. One thing I think we are lacking is an insentive to make loop.
Right now there is no reward as to lock a train in a loop.
I'm still scratching my head on this one :smile:

I really really wanted to make a loop! 😅
it seems to be impossible as the interval of the trains being spawned is just too short for me to AND destroy two tiles AND put different direction rails in this short timespan.

great idea though, I had fun losing the game! it seems to fit the theme very nicely!

nice job on the game overall!

We fixed the most annoying bugs we so far. Sorry for the inconvenience :sweat_smile:

Nice work. It would be nice if we can do loops !!! Great job anyway. Music is fun for this game too.

the game doesn't load on itch.io and ldjam.thunderkerrigan.fr for me :(

Great idea, very nearly there I think. With the addition of a junction piece to allow tracks to merge (and therefore actually create loops) I think this would be a great game. Reminds me of a mobile game ai played a while back called trainyards. Great soundtrack too!

Really cool gameplay idea. Who doesn't love trains? It is hard to play, but it has a lot of potential. I would love to play it again after some more balancing and polish!

Really fun idea, I just wish the game-play was more coherent! Right now there's not a clear goal or instructions on how to accomplish it, I mostly found myself trying and failing a lot until I caught onto how to play. Even then, I had to look in the comments to understand the goal of the game, which considering the spawn-rate of the trains seem a bit too challenging. But with some optimization this could be great. :)

Very difficult but I really love the concept! Great Game :D

I got into this game the second the music started playing, really sets the mood, I love it! :smile:

I did struggle a bit with what to do though. At first I connected the two boxes, which caused me to lose. Next I tried forming a loop back to the starting box, which caused me to lose. I guess the goal is to just survive as long as possible by doing spirals? Or snaking back and forwards?

@axeltherabbit I'm looking into it. My guess is we used heavy Assets which make the game looks like a Call Of duty Patch. I'll try to make it go on a diet for you I promise ;).

A unique and challenging game. I like that the theme is incorporated into the actual objective. It could do with a more robust set of building tools. Like, it would be nice if I could place track on spaces that have more than two lines of track incoming. It was also annoying that if I switched the selected tile, the selected track piece would revert to straight. Also, the music just stopped looping after a while. Still a good entry, though, nice job.

i like gameplay...

I wanted so, so badly to make a loop! I don't think it's possible outside of the bugfixed version that spawns trains from both boxes. After spilling some blood, sweat, and tears on the bugfixed version... I made a motherf\*ck\*ng loop! :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:
It was kind of a hollow victory however, as nothing happened and I died about 5 seconds later, lol.

This game has some serious potential. The music is good, the graphics are cute, and the gameplay is novel. I think it's only downfall was the same fate met by many jam games: the creators underestimated the difficulty for people who haven't been playing it for three days straight! But I see what you were going for, and I like it. :smile:

As you said, your game and mine are similar in that they both involve trains and editing tracks. XD This is the second game I've seen which involves similar mechanics (path manipulation). The game is hard as nails though right out of the gate - managing two trains is quite stressful! The random nature of track also meant that I once ended up with a map with two terminals so close that their tracks touched. No win situation! Other than that everything else was quite smooth and the game became fun once you got the hang of quickly switching between tracks and looping them. Nice job!

@codertrevor thank you for your feedback! :smiley: It is definitely very difficult but it is intended and I think it contributes to the challenge it represents. But I agree entirely : we need to tune it a bit and give more insentive to create loop. We wanted to add train collision at first but you can imagine how difficult and rage inducing it would have been :laughing: .

Imagine that we intended to drop 3 train spawns at a given time :sweat_smile: .

I think I'll look into polishing this game and find a better use of the loop. We all have a blast making it and I really want to make the players enjoy it. We definitely need to give a reward for making loops.

@reallyqbert thank you! Indeed, tracks & trains have their shares of games in this jam :laughing: . I think your game made the difficulty smoothier evolving throughough the game where ours just smash the player's face right off the bat :laughing: .

I like the game idea and I was able to find out fast what I've to do. But I've also struggled with the loops. So I tried to build a very long track instead.

So the overall game idea is quite nice. If you keep on working on it I think you can create a nice casual game out of it :-)

Game idea was interesting, very nice casual game

Nice game and concept but i find it a little too hard to play. The Itch.io version takes too much time to load. The visuals are good and the music is good too. I lasted two and a half minutes in the Windows version. 30 trains was the max i could mantain.

Took ages to load the web version, but it got there eventually!

I like the idea of the game a lot though, it's fun managing multiple trains on the game board.

ok we reuploaded the webGL versions. It should be less heavy :laughing:

Clever idea, but very frustrating to play as the controls are a bit wonky (e.g. after destroying rails one has to first select some other tile before one can build a new tile at the destroyed position).

@smbe19 thank you for your feedback.
Indeed, the rails construction palette is determined by all available paths on the targetted tile. Right now, it's too much restrictive as it filters on the exclusive opened paths. We planned to continue this game developmment as we had a lot of fun with it and we think it has potential. Stay tuned! :wink:

Fun time killer.. I don't know if trains are supposed to spawn from both boxes but when the trains are far apart this makes it really hard to get a loop going before a train derails itself.

I love the music but I totally agree with everyone else, the game is too difficult to play and understand.
It's just unintuitive

It kind of doesn't make sense. You're supposed to create tracks for the trains that spawn and then close off the track so they loop together, but you never know when a train will spawn, or how many will spawn. So I found myself struggling to keep the first train going by building tracks and waiting for them to stop spawning because if I destroyed earlier tracks to make a loop, I would lose immediately because of the new trains that spawn.

To make this work I think you should add a counter to the starting block so you know how many trains are left and maybe also like a countdown or progress bar so you know when the next one will spawn. This will allow you to plan out the track and decide whether you want to make a lot of small loops or one large loop for all the trains at once, and it lets you know when you can destroy earlier pieces of track

Also I think just getting rid of the 2nd starting block will make the game a lot more playable right now since it would at least eliminate the guessing game of where the trains will spawn