The Magnificent Train Journey

Our first game for 2021 is this fun transport puzzle game, working with Transport for Wales as part of a new national campaign. Read more about the game below and also…

PLAY HERE (recommended on desktop browsers!)

Tackle puzzling routes to guide your train to its destination.

In January we were asked by TfW to design and develop a game to encourage school kids engagement with their new campaign. We settled on a browser platform distribution to best reach the target audience and went to work creating a Web GL game that best met their needs.

TfW want to inspire children and young people to travel in a greener way, and as part of this mission they have set up a competition asking them to name the new fleet of trains coming to the Welsh rail network. There are 148 new trains, the winning names will be displayed on the side of each.

We came to this project having worked on a number of games for the target demo and also having worked on educational content for this audience.

For the gameplay we wanted something that felt intuitive, responsive and had a puzzle element to be a good fit, creating an impression on the player with a meaningful challenge and reward that celebrates what that player has achieved. The game is about connections, the player customises their train avatar, a nod to the ownership ideals of the competition, and then takes that through the stages. Working out the puzzles of connecting rail (and road), they must find the most efficient way to make links. How many moves they use, meeting secondary objectives and the time it takes all contributes to their end score and position on an arcade style global leaderboard.

Design

We aimed to create a clear, bold style in the game’s 3D art to align with the campaign’s 2D print and web assets; here there was collaboration with agency Golley Slater who were working parallel to our development. When creating the assets for this project there were a few things to consider to make sure they would run as efficiently as possible across the variety of online browsers and platforms.

We leant into these limitations to style a set of assets that were low poly, had clean materials and silhouettes that were easy to light, bringing variety and identity to the stages.

To ensure models were efficient the approach was to build with simple base shapes and block out details, like windows/doors, with geometry in Maya; this allowed adjustments to be made more quickly. Once happy with the compositions they were baked down, with any detail other than overall shape being interpreted as a texture map.

Packing groups of similar assets to use one texture map and material creates less draw calls in the game engine making it run more efficiently than if each 3D asset had one individually. This is more important than ever when developing for Web GL as a few draw calls can make the difference between playable or stuttering frame rates. We packed it down to just two maps, one for all buildings and one for all track and road pieces.

Each tile is a square, 3×3 unit in Unity; meaning the tracks and tiles are modular sets which join together to make a variety of combinations. In this case the player can rotate each piece to connect them up. When considering building the track/road pieces we needed to ensure the connections were seamless visually in modelling and texturing. Creating the straight pieces first allowed us to confirm a visual style, from there it was a process to make the various pieces in alignment, always working with a straight piece either side.