Thank you so much! I do plan to work at least a bit more on it beyond the base post-jam polish, we'll see how far it goes. Those are all great suggestions. I definitely need to play with quality and want to incorporate that into the settings, the shadows bug me too. I hadn't thought of rivers, but that's an interesting idea that I think I'll explore, I could even put boats on them that act like the trains but more curvy.
I've already begun work on a collectible system. Currently I've only prototyped out 2 collectibles, 1 gives you an extra car and 1 gives you more time, but I'm definitely going to explore more game-changing ones like speed increases or invulnerability. I'm thinking that if nothing else, I want to have an alternative game mode that works similarly to what you suggested where you start with 0 cars and the player has to go out of their way to get cars on their road. From there I've got a few potential ideas:
- Each car has it's own destination and delivering that car will give you points or extra time. The timer is shared
- Each car has it's own destination and it's own timer - you get more points for delivering a car quickly to it's destination and have to avoid any car getting "stale". Would need a way for the player to switch the GPS between targets (probably want to display distance to target as well)
- There is still only 1 destination, and you get more points/time for delivering a lot of cars at once to incentivize picking up and traveling with a large convoy
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts :)