🚂 Toy Trains

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Project: Toy Trains

Date: 02/2022

Context: A document made at the end of preproduction summarising the design of the game for new teammates that were joining the project in the production phase.

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<aside> 💡 Toy Trains is a playful strategy game about playing with trains, designing railways and constructing magic dioramas.

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<aside> 💡 A modeler building trails on a magic diorama.

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📖 Design Pillars

  1. Trail Architect - the gameplay focuses on constructing, designing, redesigning and optimizing trails from fixed Tetris-like track elements.
  2. Time to Breathe - players have all the time in the world to find the best solution and enjoy being in their own world.
  3. Seventh Day Celebration - as God rested on the seventh day of creating the world, so can the player. He can step back, look at his creation and feel a sense of pride and accomplishment.
  4. Invite a Friend - players can share their creation with others, take them for a ride and design trails especially with visitors in mind.
  5. Open-ended Puzzles - in a sense, every map is a set of logical puzzles to solve. But due to the game’s inner emergence, every map has many possible solutions. Players should never be stucked in the game, because they cannot find the one and only, correct answer to the problem imagined by the designer.
  6. Natural Interactions - as far as it’s possible, gameplay interactions are based on real-world natural and intuitive interactions and movement, not abstract gamified controls that requires prior knowledge of non-VR games.
  7. Optionally Deep - game mechanics are deep enough to allow for rich strategic, min-maxing experience, but casual players are able to have fun and finish the game without being aware of the inner depth. The game allows non-optimal solutions in favor of expression, if players wants to. The game provides players with tools for self-expression.

📝 Story ****

<aside> ✒️ You've come into an old basement full of packages and abandoned train modeler table. Tidy up the space by constructing train dioramas and discover mysteries hidden inside the room. More… (removed for clarity)

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⚙️ Gameplay Loops ****

<aside> 📊 Connect the City with Production Sites on the map using Tracks & Trains to develop the City to the highest level. More… (removed for clarity)

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