5 days left (2 for me)

I'll release on Friday so I don't have much time left. I implemented a basic main menu and a simple particle system for visual feedback on various actions and events - colored pixels with position, velocity and acceleration values in x, y, z spawned with some kind of randomness baked in depending on the action. Simple, looks great and gets the job done. 

Needed to add some necessary functionality to my train system which looked almost trivial but still took some time nonetheless: Coupling and decoupling waggons i.e. merging and splitting trains at the correct positions without blowing anything up. Individual waggons already worked fine but it didn't work for collections of waggons. For that I also had to implement a way for the players to choose where to decouple waggons from their trains: I went for a semi-transparent indicator "plane" sprite which gets Y-sorted and inserted between waggons to hopefully make clear what's going to happen (3 different plane sprites depending on waggon angle). That in turn involved getting the mouse working, translating real screen coordinates to world coordinates and finding out which waggon is hovered by the cursor. And while I was at it, I coded a button which slides out of the view but comes back in if you touch it with the mouse. Don't know if I really need additional buttons yet, but I'm sure I can find some uses for that. Originally I wanted my game to be playable only using a keyboard or gamepad but the learning curve of a jam game needs to be low, and using the mouse is really intuitive. Could probably think of something usable "keyboard only" but that's pretty low on my priority list now.

Added some sound effects and reworked the locomotive sound effect. I decided to just take a tiny sample out of a recording of a real locomotive and edit that slightly in Audacity. Seems much more fitting than trying to generate something suitable in BFXR. Started working on the background music but I think that I need to push that to the very final hours and decide from there if I want to make something myself or look for royalty free music. I could really use that time for some code or features instead, but also I take pride in doing everything myself...

Fortunately I got hit with a 0xc000007b error before releasing when I tried to launch my game's .exe on my secondary computer (laptop). Clearly there was some weird stuff going on, and I'm glad that the Raylib discord helped me out with that: A threading library was missing - I think the audio module of Raylib somehow depends on it. Anyway, adding that .dll to the game's folder or just adding  "-static -static-libgcc" to the GCC build flags resolved that problem so I don't have to worry about releasing faulty builds anymore. Always lovely to see those errors pop up before the deadline.

What's left now? Heads down and finishing the game including tying all the loose ends: Fleshing out the actual gameplay, adding music, new map, minimap, polishing. Lots of work to do in those two days.

Next up:

• Release