13 RIDES! New record??? (Managed to get 2 Hype Trains in this run)
I came back after playing To the Heights last year, and boy, I was not disappointed! I don't know what it is that makes this game so incredibly addicting, but it is, fabulous job! I've got lots of feedback, but only because you did such a great job of this.
- First things first, Hype Train, waaaaaaaay too overpowered. This upgrade was just too overpowered, completely overshadowing anything that any other upgrade could do. While I like the concept of increasing the amount of passengers farther along the track, this definitely needs some tweaking to get right.
- Secondly, as others have mentioned, the scaling and map randomness definitely needs some tweaking, there were quite a few layouts that I got where ride 3/4 was just simply impossible no matter what I had done, and while that isn't necessarily bad for a rogue-lite, I don't think it should be quite as early as the third ride.
- Some clarification on how passenger multipliers work would be really nice, as although I'm pretty sure they only apply to the train stations you go to after you get the multiplier and not how many passengers you currently have, I never felt quite certain about this (8 could possibly help with this though).
- Similarly to 3, I never did figure out what the difference between the passenger multiplier that Nice Views gives and the "base station multiplier" that Popular Destination gives (can't remember if that's the right name). Some kind of clarification between the two would be very helpful (8 could also help with this though).
- I saw Varii mention that Railroad Workers wasn't very useful, and although later on it isn't important, I actually found that early on it could be helpful if you got train stations that spawned super far away. Additionally, I think that if the mountain, lake, and town bonuses were buffed a little Railroad Workers would actually become super important by extension.
- As Varii also pointed out, the mountain, town, and lake bonuses were really interesting and should totally be expanded on.
- Some way to view the current upgrades that you have would be very nice, as there were a couple times where I couldn't remember everything that I had, or where I wanted to check the exact wording of an upgrade.
- Similarly to 7, some way to view the active passenger bonuses during a run so that you could see exactly what is helping you the most, or if you just got a new upgrade, the impact that that upgrade is having on your passengers. I've got a proof of concept of what this could look like below.
- I encountered a weird issue where as you get into later rides, when you try to build or destroy tracks near the left and upper borders the tracks would actually be placed either to right of where your cursor was or below it (seems like a floating point issue, not 100% sure though).
- Finally, just more stuff! As I said earlier, this game was quite addicting, and I think just more upgrades or features could totally make it more exciting. I've got a couple ideas down below:
- A different train station that instead of giving you passengers, multiplies the existing passengers on your train by a certain amount. This would add a lot of strategy as ideally you'd like to go to this station as late as possible, but you can't always do that with the tracks you have.
- An upgrade that gives you a 2 portals to place down which link to each other, allowing the train to go in one and come out the other. On paper this seems really powerful, but I don't think it'd be too overpowered, as most of the time when you want to go from one end of the map to the other you pass lots of train stations along the way, and you wouldn't be able to that with this.
- An upgrade that, in exchange for some other benefit, separates the straight and curved tracks that you have, adding more strategy to the track layout that you do.
- An upgrade which reduces the bonuses from mountains, towns, and lakes, but allows you to claim the bonus multiple times if you pass it multiple times. This would add more strategy to track design, as ideally you'd like to pass the same points of interest multiple times.
Proof of concept for 8:
Overall fantastic job, it was highly addicting and I cannot wait to see what you come up with next year!