Bus Crawl by Valid
Where to Play?
Note: you may be greeted with a white screen for a second or two.. Its loading the map which takes a bit!
Bus Crawl
Inspired by games like OpenTTD, Factorio, MiniMetro and more, I wanted to build a game about expansion.
Goals
Your primary goal is to expand your bus empire deeper and deeper into the city. These poor citizens have no public transit and you are their last hope.
Not pictured: all of the crying citizens with no buses to ride!
How to Play
You begin your empire by placing a new route initially. This allows you to start anywhere on the map, but be aware routes after this will cost more the further they are from your first route. Pretend this is your bus depot and headquarters.
Two stops cannot be right next to each other, but routes may be close or overlap with each other.
The cost of creating a route is based on a few factors like distance to original stop at the beginning of the game and the ending distance of the second stop compared to the first stop you have picked. This allows you to start local and get more cash before trying to expand deeper.
Repairing
Your buses are not magical. They will require maintenance every so often and can be repaired by simply clicking the wrench icon.
While they are broken down they will not make any money. It is in your best interests to repair quickly!
Upgrades
You can upgrade the speed and reliability of your buses, but it costs a good bit and scales aggressively.
Tips
If you are tired of repairing a lot, consider building less routes temporarily and upgrading your buses.
Technical specifics
This is one big weighted (all positive based on Euclidian distance of nodes) undirected acyclic graph under the hood. A visualization of it looks like:
There is a map editor built in, but all of the keybinds are undocumented. If you're interested in playing with the editor, leave a comment and I can give you the rundown.
For pathing and shortest paths by weight, I opted for the Floyd Warshall algorithm. This gives a weight matrix and with minor modifications can rebuild paths from any node to any node.
No Audio?
Nope, sorry! Turns out the algorithmic stuff takes a little longer than I wanted.
| Link | https://ld48.valid.sh/ |
| Link | https://github.com/ColbyLeiske/LD48/ |
| itch.io mirror | https://valid4lifegames.itch.io/bus-crawl |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/bus-crawl |
Ratings
| Overall | 464th | 3.439⭐ | 68🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 528th | 3.22⭐ | 68🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 311th | 3.462⭐ | 68🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 873th | 2.269⭐ | 67🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 628th | 3.121⭐ | 68🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 558th | 2.138⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 679th | 2.844⭐ | 66🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 45🗳️ | 64🗨️ |
Edit - btw I do love MiniMetro!
So yeah, this is
- Original
- Amazingly complicated for a Compo game
- Has nice minimalist graphics
- Very easy but not boring gameplay
Also, I like making the longest roads in the game. 😄 Here's my first interstate-level road:
Really good game tough !
For 48hrs, though, amazing job!
Technically impressive, Nice and performant and a clean look. Good job.
My critique: clicking the wrench to repair the buses felt a little bit finicky. Intuitively, I wanted to click the bus to perform the repair instead of the wrench. Expanding the clickbox to encompass both the wrench and the bus would feel much better. Making the waymarkers and buses expand slightly when you mouse over them would also make a world of difference. It would be nice if the bus made money on both ends of the route (even if you halve the amount of money made) for consistency, and so that it's a little easier to evaluate the value of the route. A small animation when the bus makes money might be nice.
I think you've got a really good base to keep building on, and I very much enjoyed what I played. This is well-done.
You should really consider expanding this, maybe with something like flows to model residential and business areas and requested routes. Or you could allow for the expansion of routes, etc.
A solid submission.
Gameplay wise bit boring though
This game immediately catch my attention as I'm a big fan of tycoon games and public transportation.
I really liked the map view, it's all we need for a game like this !
The gameplay mechanics are simple and is nearly a clicker, I guess you had plenty of ideas you didn't had time to implement because the core development has been probably long to develop !
Tips for the next Ludum, I found that making a main menu, even a quick one (one color screen, the game title and a button to play) is cheap to do and enhance the player experience as you don't feel like catapulted in the game.
Congratulations for your entry !
Part 1: https://www.youtube.be/watch?v=hhHv4dLfMoE&t=391s
Part 2: https://www.youtube.be/watch?v=KLwrzc7DkDo&t=0s
(Sorry we lost internet in the middle of your game)
Thanks for being part of the stream, yesterday was amazing! :smile:
This is a very relaxing and cute game, the balance is a bit off as it's too easy to make sooo much money but that's easy to fix.
Very good entry!
Not sure if that's a bug, but busses never took this path (red circle on screenshot)
Also not sure why would anybody want to take :bus: , which will mostly likely break during trip :smiley:, but it was actually good addition to game and pretty realistic from my experience :sweat_smile:
* the roadway network seems off and the buses takes sometimes strange roads. There should be some road hiearchy ( arterial, collector, local roads ) You have a lot of cul-de-sac right now, and express buses that link area are using local road instead of going on the highway. Balancing maps that are challenging and realistic will be a road for development of the game in the future.
Some ideas I'd extend this game
* multistop bus lane
* Some kind of mechanism of limiting the number of bus lane on a specific edge could creates game mechanic when competing against an AI ( like taking the bridges as crucial choke points )
* different kind of lane, local bus loop with multiple stop. Or express buses from neighbourhood to neighbourhood.
I think I did find 2 bug though. every time I build a new bus route it deducts $200 from my balance. I need to have enough cahs to reach the points further away, but then it still only costs 200.
And I never managed to make any bus use the northern bridge. The always go way around and use the bridge on the south.
But that didn't make me enjoy the game any less