#train misconductor

[msasterisk]

artfight attack on @whirligig-girl - the engineer and conductor from Train Misconductor (the game we're making together)

[whirligig-girl]

We now have a loco-following camera mode, toggleable with the "L" key. It's real great uhh except I specified in my instructions to the programmer, @msasterisk, that the loco-following camera mode should snap to the pixel grid like the normal movable camera does, because i thought it would look good. WOW was I wrong. I had no idea Gymnome was this tectonically active! Accelerating in this thing feels like that one mythbusters episode with the square wheels. If you go fast enough it almost smooths out.

Ms. Asterisk knew my pixel grid requirement was bad already by the time I tested it, so now the camera follows the loco smoothly and it looks a lot nicer than you see in the video above.

[whirligig-girl]

as i have said on artfight: OMG!!!

I love all the details you put into the humanized/gymnomi-slime-ified design, how it looks similar to both of their crew members and i love the way the object head style looks with a slime face. The MU cables hanging down from their pants, the cool pose, it's very good. The engine also looks great, lots of good attention to detail there too! This got me happy-stimming autism-style and it's been a while since i've done that!

Artfight revenge for @whirligig-girl !! With Slym !!! I love the design of the locomotive and of course couldnt help myself with a humanoid/smellanoid slime design teehee!!

[whirligig-girl]

We're still pretty far away from being able to scenic most levels, but here's some trees i made a while back.

[whirligig-girl]

Train Misconductor levels can get pretty complicated! This one took a long time in the conceptualization stage. It's inspired by the classic Inglenook that started this whole project, but with three connected by a wye, such that each headshunt is also the storage track of two other inglenooks and that each inglenook has two storage tracks. Some of the siding capacities have had to be changed to make it work.

[whirligig-girl]

The last games I played were

-Train Misconductor, the puzzle game I'm developing which presently lacks a main character actually implemented. --The slimegirl loco crew therein wouldn't be very good therapists. -Derail Valley, a train sim game with no characters at all. -Kerbal Space Program, which, well, I'll let the prev tags speak for themself.

[whirligig-girl]

im not gonna make like a full announcement post but I think I may have been a little premature in the naming post. I'm changing it from Railway Misconductor to Train Misconductor. I think shorter is sweeter.

Plus "Railway (mis)Conductor" is a weird mix of UK and US terminology. Like getting on the elevator with my fish and chips.

[whirligig-girl]

reintroducing... Railway Misconductor

I made a big list of names for the project formerly called Train Puzzle dot exe (title pending) including various proposals from myself and some of the people who responded to my call soliciting names for the game. Thanks to all those on tumblr and various discord servers who contributed names. Then me and @msasterisk (and @wisdomsavingthrow too since you can't vote with a small even number of participants) ran through a double elimination tournament bracket, discussing each of the options.

The winning name is Railway Misconductor. (For the record, the runners-up were Shunt Everything!, Go Shunt Yourself, and Train Puzzle dot exe (title pending)).

For those just joining us, Railway Misconductor is a game under development by myself and @msasterisk, based on several model railroad switching layouts, including Inglenook Sidings and Timesaver, as well as various other inspirations and original puzzles. It takes place on Gymnome, an alien planet inhabited by amorphous agender bipeds, the Gymnomi Slimes, and more specifically, on the South Lymer Railroad (the SLYM). You operate SLYM No.11513, a modern Advanced Steam tank engine on various yard switching duties of increasing complexity.

There will be minimal story, but the characters--the orange Conductor, who relays the orders from dispatch or the yard manager to the player and has to go throw the switches, and the blue Engineer, who runs the locomotive itself--will have dialogue tying into the player's progression.

There is no release timeline.

[whirligig-girl]

when is train puzzle dot exe (title pending) coming out?

Well, the crew of the locomotive in the game exist in a genderless society, so it won't be until not only the first alien contact introduces binary gender around the time the game takes place, but decades after that when gender as a concept becomes more normalized by contact with the wider galactic community that the crew would even consider coming out and transitioning. So maybe 2380s or 2390s? They'd be like, 70 or 80 earth years old at that point, middle-aged for a Gymonomi slime. But I do think they'd figure it out.

Anyway it depends on a lot of things, like whether the scope I originally intended for the game is acheivable, and how effectively we can hold our motivation to work on the game in the long run. Basically, don't get too excited. If I had to guess, if the game comes out this year it's probably because something went wrong. But honestly, I can't begin to give an accurate guess. This is my first gamedev project and it's MsAsterisk who went to school for programming and game dev.

[whirligig-girl]

this is from an attempted change to how couplers behave which has since been reverted. The cars are not supposed to make gmod sounds. :P

We now have a loco-following camera mode, toggleable with the "L" key. It's real great uhh except I specified in my instructions to the programmer, @msasterisk, that the loco-following camera mode should snap to the pixel grid like the normal movable camera does, because i thought it would look good. WOW was I wrong. I had no idea Gymnome was this tectonically active! Accelerating in this thing feels like that one mythbusters episode with the square wheels. If you go fast enough it almost smooths out.

Ms. Asterisk knew my pixel grid requirement was bad already by the time I tested it, so now the camera follows the loco smoothly and it looks a lot nicer than you see in the video above.

[whirligig-girl]

this is fantastic! I love the way the shading indicates subsurface scattering in the engineer's goo, i love their poses and expressions, i love the conductor's arms, the engineer's hands, really good work!

artfight attack on @whirligig-girl - the engineer and conductor from Train Misconductor (the game we're making together)