Roadmap

It's been almost three months since we have written the first lines for this game. Wow. I must say, time moves fast. Anyways, we are able to get in some more features for yall this month.  And with a release finally, insight, we are excited to announce our roadmap! (keep in mind this is just a roadmap and is subject to change)

• Mid-February - Bugfixes for current features
  • finish and polish current features
• End-February - Levels 1-5 done
  • level design for the first 5 levels should be finished by then
  • Everything in the first 5 levels and their features (eg trains, planes) should work
• Mid-March - Debugged and finalize. 
  • Whatever doesn't get done by this point is SCRAPPED or for post 1.0 release
  • debug whatever we did get working to make it a bugless release 
• End-March - Get ready for release on PC platforms
  • finish up all the loose ends and get the game ready to release asap
• Early-March to Mid-April - Buffer time
  • I will have some of my friends test the game at this time
  • if we discover a bug or anything in this time, the rest of the time is to debug and polish
• Mid or End April - Release For PC

What I Got Done

This week, I was able to get MOBILE SUPPORT working on a remote test play. Here's a demo of that

As you can see. It works! And I was quite excited about that, until I realized that the details tab won't work, which threw a wrench in my plans.

I was able to fix that with a hold code that I made which checks if the train has been held down for more than 0.25 seconds. If that's the case, then the train will go into drag mode, otherwise, if it is a simple tap, it'll go into details mode. It's genius!

So yea! Now mobile works! Just gotta release it on appl- on wait...

So being a spoiled rich kid, I begged my parents. And no surprise, they said

Yes! 

ha jk, I wish. But this quickly turned things around...

So yea. Here I am. 

Feeling like Mr.Moneyman rn. Gotta make it rain and party... oop I don't do that. I meant to say stay a virgin and code for the remainder of the year.

Aight sorry... Got a little carried away. Back to the other stuff I did.

"Times Square" modeling

It's no longer called Times Square, all the levels have been rebranded and refitted with new names. It's now called "Junction Conjunction", and oh boy it's chaotic!

4 Lanes on all 4 sides, you ain't ready for this Fuego!

Also introducing a new mechanism. Siding.

This new piece of track is a saving grace! Trains on this track will slow their speeds by 50%, however, don't forget about your trains when you leave them on here! Because if they run into the end, they'll derail.

This is a much-needed feature in Junction Conjunction. As the trains are approaching from all four sides, and if you don't have an emergency break handy... Then you're kinda screwed, but this thing is gonna save your butt.

Making the Map Selection More Mobile-Friendly!

Let's face it, the current map selection is pretty sucky. It was cool for the first two days, then it became incredibly hard to use. Think about an elevator, with buttons the size of half your cursor, and your mouse is trying to click it. It's very limited when it comes to resolutions, and even worse on mobile.

The first five seconds of this show the old map selection. Yucky!

With mobile devices in mind, this overhaul is without a doubt, more good-looking.

Site Overhaul

The website for the game has been overhauled! And now it is 10x more DZNR. The new menu and images are more vibrant and just better. The website has always been a neglected part of the game. So I'm glad I finally stopped procrastinating and did what needed to be done!

This is what it looks like now!

Trying To Deploy For IOS

Why Does this have to be so difficult? I followed a 30 minute tutorial the whole way through TWICE and finally got it to work on the third time. I also couldn't launch my project for IOS for some unknown codesigning reason. It was frustrating enough that I just didn't want to release it for ios. But then again... "I" paid good bucks for the license. Without getting into too much detail, the codesiging and deploying to test flight and the AppStore was just a mess. My app crashes on launch on IOS, so I had to test everything using UnRemotev2 To this day, I still have not figured out why it crashes, and that's what is holding me back from releasing for ios at the same time as the PCs. If anyone can help me with this. That'd be so appreciated! 

But for now I guess I can live with this...

Conclusion

Anyways, that was all I managed to get done in the past 1-2 week span. It may seem that I was slacking a lot, and I was, but also the multidirectional trains took forever to get right. They were only designed for going left to right and right to left, not up to down and down to up. I didn't include that or any other debugging parts in the devlog because I think that'd be boring. But just like last time, here's a list of the GitHub project right now if you are interested.

If you are wondering what the discord status is about. I also experimented with DiscordRPC before finally giving up on it, as the dead library wouldn't fix any of the issues that happened with MacOs Big Sur. And I wasn't gonna sack the Mac release for discordrpc. The lesson of the day? Don't have a dependency that hasn't been updated in 2 years.

Anyways, that's all from me for this week. Happy coding

"Code"-Signing off,

Mootbing