Most of first week after jam was just returning to normal life and work, but there were a couple things I wanted to continue developing, to even get the small scene working as I wanted. I was quite sure, I was gonna leave this broken prototype to pile of inspiring ideas, but failed execution, but something kept this project feeling like this could actually be doable in reasonable span of time. And so I took first steps to bring this project to life, despite feeling disappointed at the state of game as the rating period went forward, I got couple of nice comments, encouraging me. (I was quite busy with life and tired to my bones after the jam, so I feel bad that I couldn’t bring myself to open itch.io page to answer them as I would have liked to try their games too... Maybe I’ll try and thank them if I get my prototype actually polished and working like I wanted to.)

Fixing passengers waiting at station and actually making them leave the train.

At the time gamejam ended, I had created function that when bool leaving was checked true, NPCs left the train and were destroyed at door, but I didn’t have time to create working system for game to activate this function at the right time for all NPC that were inside traincart. Also destroying NPC as it was leaving went against my vision of them actually going somewhere from the train and giving city feeling of life. So lets fix it.

Passengers are now children of station object and their movement script is disabled, until train stops at station (or Station prefab stops moving to be precise) and then their parent is set null and script activates their movement script to follow waypoints to take their place in cart.

When they reach last one to end up in their place at cart, they wait until next station comes. To handle passengers I add them to global array when they enter train. When train stops again, I go through array, checking is it their end stations, or how many station they have left and activate movements script, now waypoint order reversed and again changing parent to current station. I chose to use Array, as later I can go through all the passengers if there is unexpected stop, destroyer robots enter train etc. and they need to react as group inside and count how many passengers are in total, if need comes.

Added screen ingame that shows what station is next

This is simple UI element that has glow effect, for I saw no need to have actual light effect at this time. Later I want to add metrostyle map that draws lines between active stations, as in the future, I want to add more stations that can be added to trains loop as part of game progression. Also need to see if I can add journey progression bar to the map, as it would be nice way to track in gameworld how long before next station.

Fixing layering

Created sorting layers that sort characters and traincart by their pivot y-coordinate and placed pivot to bottom of the sprite.

Added 2d lights

I loaded Universal Rending Pipeline (URP) and created new material for lightable objects. tI like how this brings new sides to sprites to differentiate them from their normal use and make games world more cold and neon lighted going forward. I also really like how red spotlight looks on total darkness, which brings idea of tunnels or blackouts for later development. I would have liked to create shadow effect that only sides of characters would light up, to create illusion when light is behind characters, but shadow casters didn’t bring what I was after and looking more to this, also 2d sprite normal mapping seemed to be bit too much for this time. Also layering with light brings the problem that I have train cart and passengers in the same sorting group, which is how my light set up works, so light affects train cart sprite even though it is supposed to be behind it. Need to return to this at later time if I want to use lights on passenger objects as they move in front and behind the cart sprite.

Notes and ideas for later development

• Create pathfinding system
• Create modular map for train
• Tinker with lighting by seeing if sorting can be done on the fly and normal mapping/shadow casting for sprites.

Goal for next week:

• Hacking minigame