Yet again, I’m talking about the prototype – because it’s out! I actually already posted the link on Discord (LINK HERE), but now I’m sharing this a bit more broadly. It still isn’t indexed on ItchIo though, think of this as an extra early access. There’s lots of outstanding work, bugs, and other issues (which I’ll go over in a bit), but the idea is to get general early feedback: how does the concept work? Is it fun? Could it be fun? Does it need to pivot to something else?
So the overview is on the ItchIo page above, but here’s a rundown of what is left to add and be fixed. First up, the menu. Like in a lot of games, there’s a menu you can pull up by clicking a button on the top right, letting you save the game, load another one, quit, etc. some of those buttons are currently disabled though:
- New Game: You have to close and restart the game to do this.
- Settings: There are no user adjustable settings yet. The resolution is set to 1280×720 windowed; the window is resizable but be prepared for odd behavior if you do.
Also, there is only one save game slot – pressing “save game” will overwrite that. The file is stored in AppData on Windows.
Next, the art. Most of it is pieced together from Minifantasy assets, but the trains were done by me. A few things that are definitely planned:
- Crops growing over time, instead of just existing.
- Train cars showing goods inside of them, rather than just being empty.
- General train car improvements – showing depth is pretty tricky, and at the very least I think the roofs need to be lit differently.
- Finally give the pops some clothes.
Two other big things to note: Roads do not currently function (i.e. they don’t make pops walk faster), and the train car UX (the way you trade resources) doesn’t feel great to me. Like, it doesn’t come across as particularly intuitive IMO, which might be due to my avoiding the use of text.
Anyway, please take a look and give some feedback, it’s really important! (Don’t worry, I won’t be sending spam calls asking for survey responses saying “your feedback is important to us”.)
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