April DevPa

Every once in a while, we get together in person for a few days to focus entirely on development. We call these little sprints “DevPa” (short for Development Party). We're basically having some fun while working on a game to push it forward.

During our latest DevPa a couple of weeks ago, we spent about five days improving two big parts of the Railroad Scheduler:

1. Better Early Missions

We've been putting a lot of effort into making the early missions self-explanatory. Afterall, it won't help if you feel run over by a train when you start playing. So, we split up the first missions into small chunks introducing the mechanics step by step:

• Accelerating, braking, and stopping at the right spots
• Switching tracks (left, right, straight ahead)
• Reversing the train and adjusting the camera
• Fast-forwarding and rewinding time
• Pulling off more advanced maneuvers

We also added some textual hints as a guidance, but we tried to keep them minimal since we all know: Nobody likes walls of text.

2. More Functional Menus

What's that? Every game needs a settings menu? Well, I guess we have to obey at some point. So, we finally started working on a settings menu for Railroad Scheduler. This came with quite a big change — we adopted a Rust UI library called egui. egui is not made for games primarily, but it's quite flexible and allowed us to use things like scrollable containers and sliders for e.g. graphics settings. This would've been a headache to implement from scratch. We do love building things from the ground up, but getting UI right is a tedious endeavor.

So, here you go — a first draft of a fully working settings menu (and a nicer looking main menu to go with it):