For over a year now I've been doing a lot of game dev on a whole lot of projects, with none quite reaching a stage where it felt proper to start talking about them. Unsurprisingly that's finally making me go a bit insane, so how about I stop making up what's proper and chatter on about my most recent stupidly self-indulgent WIP behind the cut
That's a visualisation of my first week of coding efforts to make virtual trains run on schedule between some placeholder place names. If the project gets past its baby stage, this code will need to support a whole big network of public transit, so it's been a huge learning effort for me to program something sturdy enough to support that.
Week 2, enough with the abstract data structures, here's some awful little trains you can embark to travel between all these awful little stations:
After many, many hours of troubleshooting invisible trains, trains that eject you off screen, trains that contain another smaller train, and trains that flicker in and out of existence quantum-style, I'm beyond chuffed that this ended up functional somehow.
Entering week 3, I'm sick of looking at the awful trains & awful stations, so it's finally time to explore a potential art style (ft. one of the prettiest tube stations, in my humble opinion):
Ignoring the fact that I haphazardly tiled a bunch of non-tiling sketches and slapped a default font on top, I'm actually pretty jazzed about further developing this sort of rough lineart style. I was inspired by some sketches I made in FFXIV and the ink pen drawings in my travel sketchbooks overall. Thematically the travelogue connection is kinda adorably appropriate, but mainly it checks my three big requirements:
Enough personality to make locations feel organic & alive despite the amount of straight lines and boxy shapes that inevitably arises from drawing modern transit stations in flat 2D. I cannot draw a clean straight line and I want to revel in that.
Able to convey a ton of atmosphere. I like a game with a distinct vibe, plus I want to portray a variety of moods between the locations.
Fast drawing speed. One of the major issues that makes this game project one of my stupider ideas is the sheer number of unique stations and transit types I want the player to be able to visit. The less intricate rendering each asset requires to look passable, the better.
What's the game about though? I'll leave that for a future blog post. This whole public transit system is like half of it, and I haven't even touched the other half beyond the idea phase. Yea it's a game with a pretty big scope and working on something more reasonable would be much better for my financial prospects, but alas I'm having fun
