7 days left

Started working on gameplay and polishing things up. Time is getting short because I'll upload on Friday so only a few days left. Train siege combat will be some kind of "stretch goal" depending on how things work out. But most importantly: The camera is finally done. It centers on the leading waggon and then offsets to look ahead along the tangent of the waggon's rail. Pretty basic but I think it's working great that way.

I implemented a basic quest system where you pick up waggons which need to be delivered to specific locations.  For that I still need to make dedicated waggon sprites and some kind of hint where that waggon needs to go to. Some NPC waggons are roaming around which don't have any functionality, yet (besides blocking your way), so I'll need to figure out what to do with those if I can't make a combat system.

Changed the rails' colors to reduce their contrast. Some more tiles got pixeled which can overlap the waggons so those had to be Y-sorted, too. But because my train outlining worked on that specific texture where those sorted tiles were rendered to I had to resort to a bit more basic mechanism so all the big tile props don't get outlined, too. On the start of the game (loading textures) I copy the texture data of all the waggons and outline those instead. When drawing the Y-sorted elements I draw those black waggon silhouettes before the actual train sprites (so a lower Y coordinate), but after the corresponding tiles so the outline doesn't disappear behind these tiles. For that I needed to play around with some offset magic constants but got it working just the way I wanted to.

The game already has a few sound effects to go with specific events. However, the trains should play that kind of "locomotive puffing sound" (you know what I mean) but it's really hard to find or make something which isn't too aggressive and also doesn't get annyoing after a while. That still needs some work. I already spent a bit of time playing around with BFXR and moved the parameter sliders around when I got a sound I liked and reset them when it started to sound worse. I 100% don't know what any of the parameters do so that's a magic black box to me.

Next up:

• Background music (hopefully self made if I have time left)
• Quest system fleshed out (sprites, visual cues, ...)
• Stretch goal: train combat
• More and better sound effects
• Making the big final map
• Particle effects for different things