We’re proud to announce that Train Conductor 2: USA is finally available for android phones! Launched in early december, the new Android version is double the size with twice the content of the iOS version. We’ve spent many months creating cool new unique content for this release. It’s the biggest update to the Train Conductor series that we’ve ever attempted. So what’s new?

Challenge Mode

Stopped Train Timer

The existing survival mode feels like you’re running a marathon compared to the fast paced, action packed new Challenge Mode. In Challenge you’ve got to deliver as many trains as you can in about 2 minutes. One thing we noticed about the old survival mode is that you can draw out the experience by stopping lots of trains and dealing with one a time. This is fine, and we’re leaving survival mode as it is so you can continue to play that way, but in Challenge Mode if you leave a train waiting for too long, it will signal to the train network that there’s a delay and all new trains will stop from entering the screen. This keeps it fast paced and rewards players who can “Enter the Matrix” of Train Conducting with finest of crash-avoidance skills.

If challenge mode sounds stressful to you – don’t panic! You can toy around and make mistakes without stress as you’ve now got three lives up your sleeve in Challenge Mode. We all love the new three-lives feature, and in the later challenge levels, you’ll need it!

Three Strikes

Updated Game Icon

If you look at all the best icons, they feature just one element and look very clear when miniaturised. Finally I think we have a very distinctive and clear icon to represent the game, also it looks HAWT

Updated Game Icon - worthy of your home screen

New location: Chicago – the six track demon

Like Challenge Mode, Chicago is not for the fainted hearted. Players have always asked for six tracks, and here it is – it’s a demon!

During the course of a typical day on a busy city train network, there will be peaks and troughs in the flow of trains as commuters pour into the city in the morning and out again in the evening. Agent Henrik and I were trying to recreate these peak times of the train network in this new design.

We found that six tracks is at the EXTREME limit of human train conducting abilities Seven was out of control, to the point where it’s hard to target the right track because they were so close together, whilst also being hard to find the right track instinctively without having to count down from the top every time. So this is it, the maximum number of tracks we’ll ever put in a level.

Control trains across 6 tracks in Chicago

Android Exclusive: New Train Droid gives extra points

This Android character is one cute little robot. We couldn’t resist putting her into the game. You’ll find Train Droid in Challenge Mode levels, but she can’t be everywhere at once – so keep an eye out for which level she’s in each day.

Droid Train appears in a different challenge mode each day.

Deliver Gold Trains to unlock Challenge Mode

The new Gold Train

Existing players of TC2 are thinking, “Gold Trains? They already exist!”, but what I mean is Double Awesome Super Special Gold Train, it’s just a bit long of a name. In this update there’s a new “golder” train, maybe its 24 carats? In all levels except Miami, you can deliver Gold Trains (or Gold Ghosts at night) to collect Gold Tracks, and with enough Gold Tracks you’ll unlock Challenge Mode of that level.

The Gold Trains are rare, and boy when one appears, you do not want to stuff that up!

New Nashville level art and special FX

Previously we redid the Miami art because it just wasn’t up to standard, now Nashville has also had a make over too!

We’ve also updated the colours on the ghosts. Previously, the ghosts and demons were similarly coloured (i.e. white), and users were smart to complain. It most adversely affected the Nashville level, and you can see the results of Agent Tian’s touches.

The new nashville is much brighter.

Improved score screen

We always felt that the score screen didn’t really reflect your excitement each time you beat your high score – it didn’t erupt with awesome like a cream filled awesome cake. Hopefully now when you break that high score, you’ll feel like a king. We’ve also added some great feedback in-game for when you deliver that trains that puts you in the record books. But you’ll just have to play it for your-self to experience it.

New High Score!

Keen conductors will notice that we’ve also brought the score screen over the level. This means it takes less time for you to hit the ‘retry’ button. Some players are playing levels hundreds of times over in one session and we don’t want to waste their time jumping between screens.

Improved “Level Unlocked” Screen

Unlock a new level and be showered in awesome

Just unlocked Challenge Mode!

New Level Select Screen

The previous level select screen was entirely superfluous once you’d played the introduction. It really didn’t do much for you. Although I don’t think the new design is without it’s own flaws, you now have access to both modes (an unavoidable decision making step) and the introduction button is appropriately de-emphasised. Also, you don’t have to jump into a level to see the leaderboards anymore, it’s right there on the next screen.

Shiny new Level Select screen

Lite Version

Not to be forgotten. we created a whole new Lite Version that will bring the game to a wider audience. If you’re not sure if you will like connecting trains, test out the Lite Version and see what you think. It’s got the first three locations there and will keep you busy for hours. Almost all of the changes above are in there, with the exception of Challenge Mode.

Get Train Conductor 2 Lite Today

And more!

• Sparkles and Fireworks - New celebration for players who beat their high-score
• When you beat your high score, you want to know about that in-game, not just at the end. Break a high score and you’ll see it, hear it, and feel it.
• Menu backgrounds and buttons are more pretty
• Simply, we let Agent Tian loose on the graphics, and she worked her magic.
• Added a screen to let you know that “You finished the game!”
• It just seemed odd that you spent so long unlocking levels, and then suddenly there were no more to unlock. At least you can feel good now that you’ve unlocked every location! (and now go collect Challenge Mode levels )
• We made the sound effect and music mute buttons bigger.
• Tutorials are shorter and more to the point.
• All buttons are now blue.
• This helps show what you can click, and what you can’t. There are a few minor exceptions, but the major pathways through the game are cleaned up.
• Twitter and Facebook integration have been rewritten to improve the login and posting processes.
• The pacing of the trains appearing in Miami has been made more interesting, less repetitive and more friendly to new users.
• The fonts in-game throughout the HUD, menus and in-game are more consistent.
• Numerous graphical elements were upgraded to HD.
• Improved the induction process of welcoming the player to the game.
• Bug fixes galore.

And this is just the latest in a long history of improvements…

This is the sixth major update to TC2. Here’s what’s been added in the past:

• v1.5 – Massive “high definition” update, prepared the game for iPad’s big display.
• v2.0 – Added world and friend leaderboards
• v2.1 – Added a new level: Roswell
• v2.2 – Added a new level: Seattle
• v2.6 – Update for Retina Display, including the new Miami art.
• v3.0 – Everything mentioned above!

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So this is an awesome prototype that I worked on earlier in the year. It’s been sitting on the shelf gathering dust. Dust is boring – Players are fun! So now I’m setting it free.

Hit the image below to start playing, or skip ahead for the long story.

THE GAME

Play the Fire Game in it’s own window

Play the Fire Game

THE MAKING:

The fire game started long long ago. Regular readers will remember last year when we competed in the 48hr Game Making Competition 2010.. The three keywords were Dinosaur, Revenge, and Bar. So we came up with a game, where you drop raptors into a bar, and try to kill as many people as possible.

PLAY: Raptors in a bar

The bar from "Raptor in a cocktail bar"

We eventually dropped the ‘Raptors in a Bar’ idea, and ended up making a game we called Egg Basher, but the idea of setting things up in a room, and then trying to kill as many people as possible stuck with me. However, there was one major problem with the idea.

Problem: If a player is going to invest their time setting up the scenario, then the outcomes needs to be predictable, and 100% repeatable.
Solution: Replace unpredictable dinosaurs with Scientific Fire.

It has to work. It’s Science!

I remember an episode of C.S.I. (or some similar show) where a house burned down. The police expected arson, because of the strong burn pattern up the front stairs. But some clever investigation showed that the fire actually started upstairs, but when a neighbour came to help, they opened the front door. The sudden gust of fresh oxygen caused the fire to rush down the stairs, and blast out the front door.

I was envisioning a series of traps and tricks that The Player could set up in order to make the fire spread faster. A game with complex timing mechanisms, technical oxygen measurements, and scientific fire!

What we ended up with was an interesting prototype. A very fun toy to play with, but ultimately, not a game.

Play the Fire Game in it’s own window. I hope you enjoy playing it as much as we did making it.

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Scary 'demon trains'!

Everyone knows when you release stuff into the wild that players will leave some pretty interesting reviews. But we have a story that I think puts the icing on the cake….

When we launched TC2 on the marketplace our first few reviews were coming in, and it looked like everyone was loving the game.
“Great variety of levels.“, “Awesome visuals“, etc…

But then we got a couple of odd reviews saying the second level of the game was too scary for children.

Now, if you’ve seen the ghosts in our game, you will know they are quite cute and relatively harmless. Ghost trains provide a fun and fast paced twist on the usual ‘avoid-the-crash’ gameplay. We quickly called an emergency meeting at The Voxel Agents to think about how we could respond to this issue, and save our star rating! Meanwhile… Fans of Train Conductor were coming to our rescue.

“I see nothing wrong with demon trains” – 5 Stars
“I bought it for the demon trains!” – 5 Stars!
“‘Demon trains’ hahaha! (…) GREAT GAME!”

And finally Katie chimed in with the Gem:
“I have a large preference towards games with demon trains in them. In fact they are the only type of games I will purchase. 5 out of 5 demon trains”

Thank you Katie! We love demon trains too!

Check out the game for yourself and let us know what you think about the Demon Trains.
Get Train Conductor 2: USA on the Android Market

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Last weekend, we competed in the #fab48hr game making competition in Brisbane, Australia… and what a wild weekend! We won! That was great, but more importantly I was absolutely blown away by the quality of games made by the other teams. I was particularly impressed with the level of quality and polish that was developed in “indie” / student room. There is an enormous amount of talent in Australia and I’m sure we’re going to see more from those awesome young developers.

In the #fab48hr competition, each team must concept, design, and create a game based on three keywords that are provided at the beginning of the competition. This year, those words were “suit”, “key”, and “badger”, provided by Yug, Hex, and Jinx.

We made this:

Download the game we made here [WINDOWS] or if you use a Mac, try this link [MAC].

The Badgers of Fury 161

How to Play: Without giving too much away, if you have a couple of XBox controllers, plug them in for the best experience, using “A” as your action button. If you have to use a keyboard, you can use the arrow keys for player 1 and WASD for player 2, with “shift” as the action button. Also be aware the the glowing yellow floor (which totally looks like lava) will kill player 1 and the swirling blue circles (evidently poisonous gas…) will kill player 2. That’s all you really need to know… oh yeah one more thing: the badgers aren’t nice and they will eat your face.

The Badgers of Fury 161 was developed by the Alliance of Indie. This team was composed of developers from a number of Australia’s top Indie studios including yours truly Agent Tom (The Voxel Agents), Liam Hill (Defiant Development, 3 Blokes Studios), Cratesmith (Cratesmith,Defiant, Strange Loop), Matt Ditton (Queensland College of Art, Defiant), and the incredibly talented Milenko (Strange Loop,Defiant).

Matt Ditton, Agent Tom, Liam Hill, Cratesmith, Milenko

But really, kudos where kudos is due:
As proud as we are of the game we managed to make in 48 Hours, the real winners of the competition were the indie team Rockin Moses (read about them here: http://making-games.net/48/?p=2916) who made a really fun game called The Fifth Suit. 

This game was great fun to play. For me, their game evoked “Smash Brothers Brawl”. While playing, I was less concerned about winning and more concerned about trying to make life difficult for my opponents. It was a strong social experience and quite a polished product for just 48 hours of work! You can grab a PC version of their game here [WIN] but it’s best played with XBox controllers. If you’re lucky enough to have some XBox controllers then I strongly suggest you get this version [WIN - XBox Controllers].

Congratulations Rockin Moses!

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Last years winners, Cratewerks, which included Matt Ditton and Cratesmith, are combining forces with one of 2007 and 2008 winners, Agent Tom Killen, of the teams sif90 (2007, 2008) and The Voxel Agents (2010). They will be joined by the exceptionally talented Liam Hill, Mark Filippelli, and Milenko.

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We’ve prototyped a lot of games over the last few months, some of them were made and discarded within 2-3 days, others had a much longer development process and Slingshot was one of those games. Since I previously posted a concept video of the game here on our blog I thought I do a Postmortem on the project.

(more…)

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We like to use paper prototypes to test our ideas. We find it helps to test ideas really quick, and playing board games is a pretty super job to have We like it so much, our next game came from a board game prototype.

It’s the weekend, and maybe you don’t have much to do… Or maybe you’re attending the Freeplay Festival like us and get all inspired to make some games. To help you, we put together a generic set of board game pieces that you can use to develop your own board game! Download the pdfs below, print them on A4 and get started prototyping new boardgames! The set contains a total of eighteen unique pieces for you to play with

Three “good” characters
Three “bad” characters
A house
A treasure chest and a coin
Three environment pieces
A life
Five generic symbols
An 10×10 board to play your game on…
And all of these icons in easy to print PDF’s are available here and here.

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Agent Henrik is cutting paper boards for our next game! Guess what kind of game it is!

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PLAY

This prototype is one in a series of time mechanic puzzles we’ve been exploring recently. Tian and I created this prototype and with some additional coding help from the other Voxels. It progressed from concept to prototype in just three days. While this concept as it stands will probably not be something we develop further, it has spawned some very interesting derivative ideas and creations.

I particularly believe in the navigation controls and we’ve been developing some quite special with them. Hopefully we’ll be able to show you this in the near future.

Time-Travel Treasure Hunt is a an observation-puzzle game where the players goal is to locate stars which are hidden in a scene. The scene changes over time, playing back a simple story, and the player can follow the events from start to finish or can reverse and scrub time however they please. As the scene unfolds, objects and patterns will collide and overlay each other to form a star-shape. The player must observe these shapes, and click them at the right moment to identify where they are hidden.

Here’s an example of 3 animated shapes dancing and having an absolute blast in the snow. Can you see when they align to form a star?

Click the link below to play the game! Rules:

• Locate the stars in the animation and click on them when you spot them. We don’t mean the obvious stars in the night sky, but the hidden stars formed by shapes and patterns, as well as pink stars.
• Use the scrubber to scrub time backwards and forwards, and use the arrow keys to jump a single frame at a time.
• Pink stars will briefly appear for just a split second and it’s only possible to click them when they are visible.
• Other stars have been cleverly hidden in the environment and take shape when objects align.

There a total of 10 stars. See if you can find them all. Click here to play:  Time-Travel Treasure Hunt [35 MB]

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