Trains 4k

[ulfjack]

I'm back with another game, yiihaaa. I admit it's a clone of an existing iPhone/iPod game. Find it here:
http://users.conquer-space.net/~ulfjack/trains.html

I'm doing my development on my MacBook, and I hope it works well on other machines. Let me know if it doesn't work for you. The other games basically don't work here.

This is still work in progress (I know I don't have a lot of time left), so feedback is welcome.

[ra4king]

Any instructions on how to play?

[philfrei]

Nice! It was a bit of a discovery process for me to figure out how to play and what the goal might be, having never seen this game before. I was running IE8 on Windows XP-Home. How "expensive" for some instructions?

One suggestion: make a small central section of each square a "neutral area". When I try to drag the tracks across a square, they inevitably jump visually to one side or another before settling on the side I want, which is annoying when my intention is to go across.

What do folks with no right click on their mouse do to erase the tracks in a square?

I finally got all the puzzles. I would say the leap in difficulty from 19 to 20 is too steep. And the puzzles after that were much, much easier than 20. It took me over an hour to get it, and I think I got lucky, as I don't know exactly how I did it. (Dang, should have taken a screen shot before I left!) Very fun, though.

So, maybe there is a way to fine tune the difficulty progression, so the last is definitely the hardest. Maybe you are planning on adding more levels?

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[ra4king]

Ohh right click to clear? Should have figured it out.

How does the whole overlapping system work? I tried figuring it out but I gave up after 20 levels

[me]

Nice Game!

An instruction on dragging the mouse and right-click to clear
would indeed be helpful.
Maybe stop the play action when clicking the mouse on the
canvas? An undo is maybe too hard to get in?!

Ran fine on Windows 7 , Chrome, Java 1.6.0_24
and SUSE Linux Enterprise 10,FireFox 2.0.0.14,Java 1.6.0_19

Best regards from

M.E.

[ra4king]

I gotta hand it to you, it is quite fun when you progress.
But the way you overlap two tubes matters and I still don't understand when it chooses one way over another.

[ulfjack]

There are two parts to the overlapping. First, when you draw over an existing track, it will remove the inactive one (grayed out a bit). Second, whenever a train leaves a square, the tracks switch (the active one becomes inactive and vice versa), even if the train didn't take the active track, i.e. when it enteres the inactive track from the other side. Note that it can happen that two trains leave a square at the same time, in which case it will look like the tracks didn't switch, because they switch twice.

Congrats to everyone who figured out all the levels. I've got some levels that are even more difficult. ;-)

Yeah, level 20 is hard. I'll probably move it further back to the 'really hard' section for the final version.

The middle of each square is now neutral, which hopefully avoids some of the jumping.

When it's playing, a click anywhere will now stop it.

I've still got a bit over 500 bytes; I could fit undo or instructions in there, but i've also got some other ideas that I'd like to do... and I want to add more levels of course.

[Aeroren]

I don't know the original, but i really like this

I do think that the orange should be a bit more reddish, right now it's hard to see the difference between orange and yellow.

EDIT: btw, I really like the way you introduce new concepts in the game. (simple level to try it out, and then harder levels to master)

[ulfjack]

Thanks.

The orange is now a bit more reddish. I was hoping to avoid that, because it's so costly, but I agree that it was difficult to distinguish. :-/ I also fixed a bug related to the start/stop button. After my last change, it would restart the simulation rather than stop it.

[Alan_W]

Nice game, I got the hang of it after some random clicking.  The 'points' are a bit braintaxing to get the switching order right 

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[philfrei]

Nice fixes! The middle neutral area works for me, now.

[ulfjack]

New version up. This could be the final version. I think it will be available here:
http://java4k.com/index.php?action=games&method=view&gid=347

[Localhorst]

Hi,

is it possible to get the source for the game?

Cheers

[namrog84]

I like it

p.s. you should replace the dead 404 link in the original post with a working link