Print Page - The Great Train Unrobbery

Hello Everyone! This is the development log for The Great Train Unrobbery (working title). We're 2 coders who have been working on it for some time and still have a long way to go. Unfortunately, we're no artists, so please forgive the placeholder art for now. We have an idea for the art direction and design we're looking for, but we're better with code than pixels, so it will take some time to get that done...

In The Great Train Unrobbery, each player selects a team of 2 very skilled passengers who must defend the money train from invaders. Up to 6 players working together will need all the collaboration, strategy, and luck they can muster to survive the invasion and advance to the vault carriage of the train. Well, that's the plan, we are still working on the single player version. The Great Train Unrobbery is a tactical multiplayer turn-based game that needs a fair bit of luck, a whole lot of strategy, and as much teamwork and collaboration as possible! In short, it's very difficult.

The Great Train Unrobbery plays like a card game where each game round goes as follows:
   1- Each player selects his actions for the coming game round.
   2- The actions are resolved in order depending on what they are [for example, move actions get resolved before attack actions.]
   3- The enemies spawn, move, and attack the players.

Passengers have their own unique abilities, but each ability falls under one action heading: A move action, a supporting action, and an attack action. Each team can only perform one action each turn, and it must be different from the team's action of the last turn. This means if every player attacks this round, then nobody can attack in the next round!

Every round, there is also a chance of a random event occurring. The effects of these events on your passengers vary according to the following scale: Evil, terrible, acceptable sacrifice. On occasion, the game hates you a little bit less and pities you with a reward or two, but in general it is important to remember that the robbers have promised us poor coders some very handsome bribes.

So what do we have so far and what is still missing?
- The basic engine is done.
- Placeholder art & basic UI.
- Basic actions.
- Game rounds.
- Most events are already in game.

The big steps remaining are:
- Unique and special passenger & team abilities. [We know what we want to implement, but have to get to it!]
- Multiplayer.
- Art, Sound, Animations.
- Improved UI with Help, Statistics, etc.
- Statistics! Lots and lots of statistics. We want to track everything! How many bullets were found in your corpse? How long did it take before you were overwhelmed? Who was responsible for blowing a carriage with passengers still on it? Hint: It was probably the Blood Priest. You bastard.
- Saving/Loading/etc..
- We want to rework and fine tune some ideas that we have implemented already, but I'll keep them for another time.
- I'm sure we're missing something, but we'll update with it when we have it...

Here's a quick screenshot showing 3 teams facing off against a few enemies. We'll be posting more screenshots and updates over the coming weeks as we add and modify features, but all art you see is just what we're using to visualize and test things for now and will later be replaced with assets that match the game theme and our vision for it.

(http://www.ctrlanddev.com/tgtu/devlog/screenshots/TGTU_screenshot_001.png)

We are using Unity and our early build runs on PC for now. We are planning PC/Linux/Mac builds, but see this being very entertaining on tablets so expect iOS/android builds in time..
All placeholder art is either from the DaikonForge GUI (http://www.daikonforge.com/dfgui/) examles or from this kind gentleman, saint11 (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?action=profile;u=6635).(http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=9080.0 and http://deadinsane.deviantart.com/art/Game-Design-Sketch-Pack-140273336). It will all be replaced with art that matches what we're looking for.

Feel free to ask any questions or leave comments! Feedback keeps coders motivated!

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Feedback => DevLogs => Topic started by: ctrl_elie on May 21, 2014, 10:38:37 AM