Gonna keep working on this one for a while I figure
Add parallax backgrounds, music, sfx, gonna add train customization and arranging, worldbuilding, re-make and polish the entire code and scenes aswell as assets, maybe even spells/magic integrated into the gameplay, add more points of interest between train stops, meaningful progress and save files, etc.
I'll probably make some whack I can't even imagine yet
2026.2 jam I made a game where you had the option and/or urgency to throw people into a train furnace as part of the main gameplay loop. Can't imagine what the next theme will unleash...
(Game's called "Frantic Express" lol; not perfect, but it's mine... and subject to heavy future revamps)
Edit: Excuse all the wording and grammar edits. It happens. Also, atleast I ranked top #350 or so in something (innovation category at #346)
Monster is always the same speed and the train slows down proportionally to how much fuel has. The furnace burns fuel relatively fast to keep things hectic.
Thanks! It's a 50% chance each round that they'll pick items up between stops. You'll get there eventually. Also yeah, I only had the time to fix game breaking bugs.
I've really been lacking in-depth feedback to work on! The game has basically only positive comments but one person complained about it being "fun but frustrating" and I haven't really gotten any more criticism that I can use other than that.
Frantic Express is the game's name, and it pretty much sums the game's vibe up. It has got a bunch of people giving it praise in the comments so far, which I'm really thankful for!
In mine you're a prisoner on death row serving a unique sentence, where your warden is a telepathic monster and you're forced to fuel a train to outpace your warden. But beware, as your passengers aren't immune to the warden's psychic influence. The game's current goals are to amass as much money and cargo as possible while not ending up dying in one of quite the few ways possible.
I 100% plan on adding more after the jam! I just ran out of time. I would've added hallucinogenic cargo, couch-co-op, parallax backgrounds, a score/high score, and character customization if I had time(aswell as a proper soundtrack).
And when the game jam is over I plan on adding multiple levels, a win state, and different tiers of purchasable cargo.
That is sort of intentional(the blast radius). There wouldn't be enough of a reason to avoid using the TNT if you survived it unscathed, and I planned on kind of having this be a sacrificial fuel option when I add co-op eventually after this jam.
I also plan on adding hallucinogenic smoke options by then, where there'll be certain hazardous fuel that doesn't exactly kill you.
But in your honest opinion, do you think it's too punishing? As in, would it be better to have a little leeway to throw it into the furnace without dying? And I also wonder if it's in accordance with the rules to chance it if it really is top punishing or frustrating
Your experience definitely shines through in your submission. I'll for sure play it more and rate it when I have the time and energy(just got out of being bedbound this month or so, so I'm taking things one step at a time)
Thanks! I really did my utmost to finish on time. Would've liked to add more but ran out of time to add couch co-op and an outline shader for items aswell as a color customizer for the player characters and a hat selection.
I think the chairs give somewhere around 25%, while the crates give ca. 40% and bags 15% fuel. The explosives(and passengers and players) give 100%, which will serve as a sort of sacrificial emergency fuel supply in co-op when I get around to adding that. Unfortunate that I didn't have the time to add couch co-op this game jam- would've significantly improved the experience. Had so much planned.
This was my second time using godot for a proper project and I had forgotten most of what I learnt the first time around. I've sort of been on hiatus from coding for over a year or three thanks to illness.
(Also in case you were wondering if this message was written by AI, it's not, I just use dashes in a 'mostly' grammatically correct way, and if it was an AI, it would've used an em dash(elongated dash). I don't know how an em dash is made using a keyboard, so I use a regular dash instead. It's not an accusation I've ever gotten, but I just remembered how people tend to associate dashes with AI nowadays.)
The web version has this bug where it'll only use like one random seed for generating all the items most of the time, and I'm at a loss because it wasn't like this earlier today, it doesn't get fixed when reverting to older versions, and it still works fine in exe and linux 86x64 format
I suspect it's high web traffic influencing the speed of the game and consequently how each random seed is generated, but even then it's lethal for a game jam game if it grows stale under web traffic.
Yeah, Ikr? We'll see if I'll have time for co-op before the voting period. Currently working on trajectory lines as I just enabled the mouse input for one player
I did it this way because I plan on adding couch co-op, but I always planned on making the mouse usable in singleplayer! Since you commented this, I think I know what I'll work on today if given the time. Thank you sincerely for the feedback.
You don't know just how bad the game looked before the bug was fixed ToT
There were gaps in the ground, sometimes wider than a train cart in the game; it was awful
Will try and work on the gauges tomorrow, aswell as more sound. Finished the necessities regarding a main menu and a play and quit button, aswell as some more things to just not make the game feel like a half baked prototype(like a shader that makes it so that the train disappears into the monster chasing it when it catches up, instead of the monster passing through it. Ohyeah, I actually finished the sprite for the monster today too, and didn't have time to re-draw it... it's so chopped 💀
I only need to add a few sounds and a menu Seems I might need to sacrifice making the music myself this game jam in favor of making a main menu and adding other QoL functionality
Presentation is another matter entirely, and it sort of has this visual bug plus the chopped monster plus the lack of a fuel and speed gauge(QoL, but still necessary for a good rating), and I also need a main menu and to make some music and SFX. It should take roughly the remainder of the time I have
I don't have time to re-draw the main enemy, so I'll have to post it this way 😭
I forgot I had an art style without visible outlines in my game too, so I messed up on that front with this sprite too-
The animated features of the sprite are barely visible most of the time because the enemy will be going a bit too fast past the player, and those were the sprite's only redeeming feature 💀
I like the aesthetic of the game and the soundtrack, and it's not a bad entry at all in my honest opinion. I did not picture a visual novel gacha-simulator style hybrid game when I first heard the theme!
If you're looking for advice(and hadn't thought of what I'm about to suggest already), I'd say that you didn't need 9 clickable boxes for the current gameplay, but if you wanted to have 9, you could add different kinds of boxes with different gimmicks, or you could have it so that the golden price is always in the same specific slot and either decrease the budget you have to buy boxes or increase the amount of boxes. This way there could be more variety in the gameplay. I also completely get it if you planned to add more variety but didn't have the time!
Also, the golden price exists!! There is reason enough to look for it as there is more unique dialogue tied to that win state, but I won't spoil the contents of that dialogue.
I've only had to cut two major corners, and if I don't have time to fix those when the time is almost up, that just proves that it was necessary.
First corner I cut was accidentally making the train sprite too big. That resulted in me just sizing it down instead of redrawing it smaller and doing all the animations from scratch, which led to a wonky look of that specific sprite
Second is that I just don't really have time to polish my particle effects yet, but it's a pixel art game, so square particles look enough at home
Got half of what I needed to do today done and then got stuck for hours fixing a game breaking bug that seems to have been caused by Godot sometimes renaming things when nodes are reparented
But hey, I got a shop mechanic working, added new items, added a new functional type of item class, added train stations that the train automatically stops at every x amount of units, and now I just gotta give the train stations their functional purpose, which includes NPCs, which means I can finally start adding in the theme and half of the main gameplay, at day 4...
