Developmet Report #4 & Patch #1 Notes

Hello Everyone!

THANK YOU FOR PLAYING!

For those who do not know me, my name is Daniel and I am the lead programmer. Over the weekend we’ve been collecting feedback and ideas from across reviews, forums, and our discord. We want everyone to be able to enjoy this game. We crafted it with care, and now we want to be earnest in listening to feedback.

This weekend has been an incredible rush. So many players! And so many requests for improvements.

Which is good! I am thankful players care to ask for improvements. As an indie dev the worst thing would be players ignoring our game. Instead players are hungry to see more of our gameplay and even infinite gameplay! That is the highest honour a developer can ask for :)

SANDBOX MODE PRIORTY RAISED

The elephant in the room is Sandbox Mode. Let me address that straight away: we will push up our development plans for the Sandbox Mode. We will still ship the updates as promised on our roadmap, including mod support. But we will start work on Sandbox Mode concurrent to those efforts.

I do think Railgrade’s campaign is something special, and I hope to see more players get deeper in the campaign over the coming week. Still, I want to acknowledge mistakes I made in the design. Not least of which is the overly long and smooth learning curve. Even today, 4 days in, we are seeing players get to levels which in our play testing we assumed everyone would get to in a single sitting.

Which is to say: oops. Please be patient as we improve the early game experience, reduce tutorial length, and allow short cutting deeper into the campaign.

ACTION PLAN

Now onto the concrete steps.

Our emergency goals are to fix three critical bugs. The highest priority of which was a graphical glitch causing terrain to flicker for players on certain Mac M1 Pro GPUs.

Yesterday we pushed a build which includes a workaround for the Mac M1 graphical glitches.

Our next two critical bugs are a crash reported on Windows 11 Pro machines if they were upgraded from Windows 10. Plus a crash on some Intel Macs.

Emergency Tasks: Priority #1: M1 Pro Terrain Flicker [Status: WorkAround Mac Build is Now Live] Priority #2: Intel Mac Crash [Status: Asking friends to borrow an old Intel Mac] Priority #3: Win11 Pro Crash [Status: Windows 11 Pro has been ordered]

After all the emergencies have been fixed we’ll work on the feedback tickets.

FUTURE PLANNED TASKS

Note: Tickets are in order of creation and not sorted by priority.

• Stop Tooltip from overlaying tutorial window

• Add animation for adding engines/freight cars

• Improve contrast of mouse cursor on Arctic maps

• Fix terrain stutter on M1 mac

• Add camera control hotkeys for keyboard only players

• Fix DPI handling on windows during windowed or windowed fullscreen modes

• Add welcome screen to explain modifiers and choices

• Fix crash on Intel Macs

• Fix crash on Win11 Pro

• Looped trains becoming incorporeal

• Remove hold & press requirement for tutorial dialog skipping

• Make loaded trains take priority over empty trains

• Make train engine details screen open by default with obvious close choice

• Remove camera take over from bank, accountancy, and voucher exchange

• Make sure hold-to-pan can be bound to middle mouse butotn

• Make it possible to pan while industry or train are selected

• Fix M1 color corruption influenced by train count

• Remove hotkey input guide from settings screen

• Animate train wheel rolling

• Make Overworld panning go faster when moving over longer periods

• Fix typo in loading screen jokes

• Remove Emoji from short description

• Fix default windows cursor getting used instead of custom game mouse cursor

• Fix DPI scaling mouse cursors under sized for the scale

• Investigate M1 hydrolic erosion error in terrain generation

• Add option to disable screen edge scrolling

• Reset designed height to height of existing rail when building off said rail

• Remove WASD or basic inputs tutorial sections

• Make industry build menu evaluate buildability upon menu open not level load

• Improve roundness of water bodies

• Make warning for missing stations more direct

• Prevent track builder from suggesting loop-d-loops for minor height changes

• Make city level up cutscene wait until player has not performed actions for several seconds

• Add deadzone to analog stick inputs before switching to controller mode

• Add titlebar to window during windowed graphic mode

Plus 8 idea tickets which require deeper discussion before we can commit to implementing.

Daniel Dressler Lead Programmer on Railgrade

PS: For reference I am including our Major Update Roadmap below.