Signals and Points by squimmy
You are the new owner of a burgeoning rail network!

Build a railway empire! Use points and signals to direct your trains and prevent catastrophic crashes.
The "Inspect" tool is your key to victory: Inspect your train depot to build new locomotives, inspect locomotives to add wagons to them, inspect stations to see what they do, and inspect rivers and mountains to build spanning bridges or blast them to smithereens...
"Interact" mode allows you to toggle points and signals. (A signal pointing up means "stop" and a signal pointing down means "go".)
Deliver raw goods to processing stations to gather resources, and deliver gold nuggets to the bank to become fabulously wealthy and win the game!
Scroll around with right-mouse or wasd.
Most buttons have tooltips; If you're confused, try mousing-over things to see what they do.
The embedded version on ldjam.com doesn't seem to fit!! Please use the itch.io version instead!
The web version doesn't work very well. I recommend playing the Windows executable from itch.io if possible.
This game uses the font m5x7 by Daniel Linssen.
Godot was used to create the game. Art was drawn in Aseprite and music was composed in Bosca Ceoil.
| Link | https://squimmy.itch.io/signals-and-points |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/signals-and-points |
Ratings
| Overall | 516th | 3.456⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 385th | 3.441⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 526th | 3.227⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 279th | 3.985⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 624th | 3.265⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 439th | 3.235⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 614th | 2.148⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 606th | 3.309⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 32🗳️ | 44🗨️ |
Really good. Took a while to get the hang of it, but once you do it's a lot of fun! :)
@mtwhateverest I'm glad to see someone finishing this. I was half worried it would be to slow and tedious to be fun......
@geraldfingburke Thanks for your kind words. I feel like there's a lot more work that could have been done in tutorialising the way everything works, and the economy could definitely be developed to be more complex and engaging. I'll give some serious thought to continuing work on this once voting is over.
@tweekus: Sure. Start by placing a rail directly alongside a station that makes a raw material (e.g. iron ore, at the iron mine station) and then continue that railway until it runs directly alongside a station that _consumes_ that same raw material (so, for iron ore, that would be the iron refinery station). Once you do this, send a train along the tracks and it will stop at the raw material station to collect the materials, then deliver them to the consuming station, at which point you will be awarded the appropriate resource.
I was expecting the signals to be more complicated but it was also fun with simple "train stops when it's near an off signal" mechanics.
I had an issue a few times when adding a wagon spent my money but didn't seem to do anything.
I think theres a lot more potential in this idea. If I were you, I would definitely consider developing it further. Very well done!
I couldn't make a train appear and also I couldn't connect the railway to the engine depot like in the screenshot? When I bought a locomotive, nothing happened, no visual feedback. Maybe a bug just me encountered.
The music was a bit unmotivated and too quick to repeat. At this point, it would have been better with no music at all as I turned it off after 30 seconds.
Right now it feels like claude-code + 30mins of ms paint. If you invested some time in artwork and polishing, it could make a decent game though!