Type Train
A chaotic comedy typing game about keeping your train on the tracks
Built in 72 hours for Ludum Dare 51
Chaotic Task Completion
The core of the game is completing various ‘tasks’ on the train by keying the correct letter sequences. We designed the tasks to provide a constant stress, but to be achievable. Our other main goal in a jam game is to avoid over-punishing players since we don’t expect to be able to hold their attention for too long. Each car has a separate health bar for task failures, and when it runs out we just play an funny failure animation and there are no further consequences. This helps us to keep a light feeling despite constant task stress.
Each rail car has a difficultly level and a health stat.
Players can then define their own challenge level and reward by building longer trains that require more tasks to be completed.
The real core of this game is in the outer loop. The frantic stress of managing the chaos on the train in the rail segments is balanced by the calm station time. This is where the player gets the time and space to unwind, consider how the last segment went, then decide how to proceed.
Each time the train arrives at the station, they can add one or more cards to their deck. This is how we let players decide on their level of challenge and reward to enable keeping high stakes despite low consequences. High score chasers and timid rookies alike should have interesting decisions to make here.
The deck is implemented as a fixed object, there is always the same set of shuffled cards to be drawn from like a real card game - and discarded cards are gone. Implementing these mechanics based on tangible objects that we all understood made discussing design elements much simpler. It’s also a nice common language to share with the player, putting them in a more strategic mindset in this screen because that’s how they think about card-based games.