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Project: Toy Trains Date: 05/2023 Context: Shown below in the original document.

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Context

First time in the development process of the game, we have all the features in place: mechanics, levels, flow, art. It’s the first time we can look at the game as a whole and see if it plays nice.

At the same time, we want to have the first release candidate until end of June. So, we are rather pressed for time.

Major Problems

Seeing the game in its entirety uncovered several design flaws:

1. The Game Is Tightly Packed With Content

Description

There is no place to play with mechanics (both as a players and as a designer). You’ve just introduced something to the game and you need to move on to introducing the next thing a few minutes later. There is no time to truly explore the boundaries of the given mechanic.

Possible Solutions

• Add pre-level tiny tutorials - one minute tutorial to understand the new mechanic before the actual level. Then, we are not forced to make embedded tutorials inside a level, we can play with it more and we don’t need to force using freshly introduced mechanics. Also, we don’t need to communicate the unlocking of the track mid-level, which will probably require a lot of work to get right. And it’s not even touched right now.
• ~~Remove the least interesting mechanics - we could remove train rules, hangars, hot wheels, tunnels. But many of them are good, fun and mostly done.~~
• ~~Increase the number of levels - But it’s now tightly connected with visuals and story. Also requires a lot of story/art effort. And level design work.~~

2. The Amount Of Rules Suppresses Creativity

Description

Players need to stick to the rules and it discourages them from playing or thinking “outside of the box”.

Possible Solutions

• Remove Train Rules from the game - having different types of locomotives, wagons and cargo-passenger resources adds a lot complexity to the rules but not so much of a depth to the game. It makes constructing trains hard to explain, it makes validating loop hard to explain, and also - the distinction of Production Sites on the map suggests the “right” way to solve levels. A lot of explaining that we don’t cover right now for a feature that doesn’t add that much to the game.
• One locomotive, auto wagons, universal production sites - without train rules we don’t need to construct trains and we don’t need to validate if a Production Site is right or wrong. The flow could look like this:
  • a player constructs the loop from tracks,
  • a player takes a locomotive only and puts it on the loop,
  • a validation process starts, when the validation line reaches a Production Site a wagon is added to the locomotive,
  • when validation is a success, the train starts automatically.
• Restriction-free Butterfly Mode - there is no validation, all trains can move without restrictions. Players add wagons manually.