Sol Train Inc.

Created for Godot Wild Jam 59

An incremental/idler foundation, SolTrain has you take the role of the Conductor, operating the titular SolTrain on a world that has fallen to ruin. Your job? Keep the train moving, clean up trash, and build robots (to help you clean up trash).

This is our first game as a team, so there was a lot of learning happening.

Known Issues:

• Some flickering/tearing between background sprites. It's something to do with the renderer and precise locations. There's a better way to do this, I just couldn't run it down.
• Background sprites also switch between 'tiers' when they're onscreen. This is just last-minute math coming to bite me. Will be fixed soon. 

Ran Out Of Time

Things we wanted to do but couldn't get to in one week:

• More train cars! More train cars, each with their own variation on the core mechanic, allowing for better drone buddies and (potentially) faster train speeds
• Better balance. Right now the numbers are all extremely made up and need some significant playtesting so we can dial in the playtime
• More interesting background stuff - at the top of this list is 'weather effects' and 'seeing civilization return'
• Better diegetic UI - we've got art assets for in-world 'progress bars' on the train cars themselves, but figuring out shaders to actually do this is hard, and the 3d space wouldn't let us just use a TextureProgress node, lol. 
• Animated train car interiors! - right now the 'in close' zoom level doesn't really offer anything, but we wanted to have a place to show off some of the inner workings of our SolTrain. 
• More upgrades! - build a second tier 1 drone from the first car, don't have to slow down to a complete stop to drop off a tier 2 drone, that kind of thing! More stuff to further improve the planet-healing process. 
• More regions! - We've got a lovely trash-covered forest, but we also want to be able to turn oil-slick swamps into lovely lakes, recycle glass silicate back into deserts, all that good stuff! - more planets! - why clean just one planet? Moving to a new planet with your improved SolTrain intact is a great Soft Reset point.