Loopomotive by Tamas Turi

About
Your main objective is to maintain the railroad for the train. During the game you can build railroads, get points by connecting the roads to each other in order to form a loop. The bigger the loop is, the more points you get for it. Try to achieve the biggest loop.
Be careful as rail lines can break down randomly, provide a connected railway to the train. If you’re not fast enough and run out of rail under the train, the game is over.
Controls
- Camera: Use the WASD/Arrows for camera movement and mouse wheels for camera zoom
- Build: At the top of the screen you can find the buildable items, drag one item down to the play area then the possible connections are displayed, drag to one of them until they snap then release




Credits
Zsuzsi Sarkany- Art (https://www.instagram.com/sarkany.zsuzsa.91/)
Tamas Turi - Programming
| Youtube | https://ikturi.itch.io/loopomotive |
| Youtube | https://ikturi.itch.io/loopomotive |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/loopomotive-1 |
Ratings
| Overall | 238th | 3.95⭐ | 62🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 457th | 3.629⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 418th | 3.68⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 48th | 4.377⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 145th | 4.331⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 238th | 3.856⭐ | 61🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 758th | 2.764⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 631th | 3.559⭐ | 61🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 36🗳️ | 18🗨️ |
I'll queue to play it afterwork and rate it!
Great system in place. Really makes me want having levels, specific objectives and challenges (more than just a scoring system). Maybe achievements ?
Good job, very well executed.
Sometimes I was confronted with obstacles that felt too easy, when I had to "just replace the disappearing track". To me this felt more like downtime. Maybe the AI could choose to vanish tracks that cannot be simply replaced more often? This lead to me actively choose what felt like a semi-optimal way to play (choose a piece that is not fitting in order to craete more challenge) to keep myself enganged.
Great work nonetheless :slight_smile:
it's a nice, simple premise that you've polished almost to perfection. Great job! I particularly love the effort you've put in to the UI, it's something that people often miss out during jams.
I can't find anything to complain about :grimacing:
Nice game, looks good, plays well. My train eventually lost all its carts... no clue if that was intended or a bug, but it's a thing. XD
Excellent fit for the theme, of course.
It would have been cool to have a stronger incentive to build a bigger railroad, maybe even just a gold nugget or something that you get (of course just points) when you build around. That way it wouldn't have been just about building bigger, but actually trying to get somewhere.
For the actual game. What has been presented is a nicely polished mvp for the level of time available. It is a solid base on which to build in the future, should you decide to do a post-ludum-dare. I'm sure you have lots of ideas on where you could go with this one.
I can see my young niece being happily invested in this game. For a while at least.
Very nice!

The visuals are neat and the music works perfectly.
Nice entry!
EDIT: Nevermind i just saw that you can expand your track. Wow! That is amazing!!
My only wish was a way to zoom in/out without a mouse wheel; I don't have one!
- Fantastic art style! Really bring me back to the popcap games era where game could be pleasing to the eye without having to buy a RTX2090
- Choo-choo music
- Very interesting idea. (But I think it hasn't reached its full potential, more below)
What I think could be improved:
- The railway could be more... realistic. For example in the image below, the train is turning in a very illogical way, which make no sense. It'd be much better if the railways order their z-index constantly to reflect correctly how the train will turn when it reaches that intersection.

- Currently it is possible to just leave the number of railway to a manageable scope and wait to gain points via railway repair, then I could have infinite score (even though it's slow). One can immediately see that issue at the start of the game, and thus make the aim of the game unclear.
^ My approach to understand the game is: first, understand how the train move, then see what I must do to get point, then try to get better. But as it turn out after making 4 full circles (to understand the train movement) I immediately realized I already "mastered" the game. Which is definitely not good.
Minor issues / nitpicking:
- WebGL initial window size is too small on itch.io, which force me to play in full screen. Maybe adjust it to be a bit bigger?
- The railway snap could be more intuitive, as in image below, this is where I think the railway should snap into position, but in game it snap only when I move it... I'm not sure, somewhere above where it should be?

All in all I think the idea is quite promising, but require reimplementation for the "endgame goal". I'd love to play a game like this on mobile, not as a panic attack hyper-casual but some kind of mediative/relaxing game.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/763143712
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDxga2LIpCM
Congratulations.
Great entry overall! :thumbsup:
On my first try I did not realise you could add tracks and just waited to fix things, which was a little boring. Maybe that could have been better indicated, but luckily I then figured out you can lay more tracks and had lots of fun.
Other little issues I found was that some times the trucks bunch up a bit and get stuck in each other, also it is difficult to see where the train is going next as the tracks don't really overlay each other in a logical way.