It’s not really an update, just wanna recap here before I forgot the whole thing…

The starting point of this game
I started develop this game mainly because I wanted to make a game that represents my home town which is in Hong Kong. Only my local area has this unique locomotive running in my surrounding neighbourhood. It’s a great opportunity to introduce it worldwide and it is also a great chance of making an unique game and gameplay style that stands out from the crowd instead of making some generic games with a generic theme.

Gameplay experience
1 to 2 hours of laying tracks and making train routes. If you have more than one train, you need to manage their speed, otherwise they will crash, I found out this is not fun at all, or it’s only fun when they crash! laying down tracks is time consuming and not very convenient. The city should expand automatically every 3 days but I stopped it because it also cost performance problems…

Performance problem
I create the map by adding 3d tiles connected together and almost everything are built in the same way. Some of them like trains or people has their own listeners and buildings control the amount of the people. If your stations are not in the efficient positions, it takes longer time to calculate. 200 people has 200 calculations whenever they change their desired locations. The lags burst from time to time.

The structure of the game needs to be changed completely. Use a single mesh and divert it into smaller tiles, the data tier and object tier needs to be separated otherwise the game will be crashed due to loss of data. Too many game objects such as buildings in a single scene may also cost slower fps.

Final words
Making a game is an true adventure. Solving programming puzzles, building 3d models, endless debugging, it not fun after all, the only fun moment is when you settled those painstaking problems and move on to a new phase. And it starts all over again. The reality strikes when your friends told you they just wanna play some hack and slash games or I am here just for debugging, not playing for real. My parents aren’t really supportive for any game - related activities, they just want me to work like 24/7 or go out and social. Maybe in the end the true enemy is only yourself, not programming or what so ever. I made this game for about 1 year in my free time all by myself, it’s hard to complete a game like this scale with only 1 person. Development of this game sort of ends here but the journey of making games never ends. I moved on making other games and nothing will stop me!!!