Update 007: First Impressions

Spoiler Disclaimer: If you’re like me – then you don’t want any spoilers about a game until you boot it up for the first time. In that case, I suggest to not read this blog! I promise to make important release information as separate posts.

Update 007: First Impressions

• Front End

• mini-Playtests

Update 007: First Impressions

For those on holidays – I hope you are safe and healthy! For those not on holidays, I hope you are safe and healthy! The two of us that make up Washbear plan to spend a little more time with family than we usually do (…) and recharge our train brains. In the meantime:

Front End 🚍

We had been using a level from our release trailer also as a temporary front end for the game. Turns out we really love the vibe so have decided (tentatively…) this will be the real Railborn front end. We are missing a few important mentions on the screen but that’s to come. You’ll also notice every build of the game comes with our perforce version number. That’s sorta fun!

mini-Playtests (spoilers below) 🎮

Nobody panic - results from the family & friends playtest (I mean, you're all my friends) came back as “not a complete tire fire”. Great news! A few notes for fun:

People picked up on our distance cues during exploration. In the distance you can see an important destination to visit. Exploration stops being fun when players can’t find interesting places to go visit, so we’re delighted we saw this work out in game. (below)

Graphics held up. We had implemented a fair amount of rail automation; for example the trestles. There was a concern a range of video cards would not play nicely but in fact the stability of the playtest was really great. (below)

One of my favorite bugs was a player stacking multiple O2 tanks. I mean, why wouldn’t you try to do this? We never thought of it. Quite a clever attempt at break the game. 😊 (below)

And of course another aspect we never thought of was to lock the camera when on the train. One of our first playtests immediately decided playing the game upside down on the train was a good idea. (below)

In the end we gathered a ton of feedback from just a few folks. We are implementing this feedback and hopefully getting a wider net of people to provide even more thoughts and insight.

See you all in the new year! 🎊

And as a reminder, please shoot out our game link to some friends for a Wishlist or two 😊 Or even better, chat about us.

Smashlore & Taky

Disclaimer: Any features we write about might change before and during Early Access.