bit-shift.io is now ours!

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We have decided to rename our company from Black Carbon to Bit-Shift! We have also scored a new domain bit-shift.io and website. This should be up and running in a few weeks as we fit around study and work.

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Open-sourcing Trains & Things (and our other projects)

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Today we have some exciting news! We are open-sourcing Trains & Things, as well as all our other projects. As many of you may have noticed, development of Trains & Things has crawled to a halt. A few things have contributed to this. Firstly, me and my brother (that is the whole bitshift team infact) have both recently got married so our free time to work on hobbies has been reduced significantly. Then we have been stuck waiting for Godot 4.0 (in particular GDScript 2.0) to become stable enough to use. As a result, we have decided to open up all our repositories to the public so that they might be able to finish what we likely cannot. Although we will possibly tinker on our projects from time to time we simply do not have the time we once had. The easiest way to find the repositories is to head to our website: http://bitshift.rf.gd/ Down in the footer you will see a link to GitHub and GitLab which will take you to view all the bitshift repositories. Our bigger repos are stored...
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August, 2017

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Welcome to August... in case you haven't realised it is now August! This last month we have been working on a social media frenzy! This means setting them up to actually look nice! I've also spent some time trying to get the word out about our game, but definitely have more work to do here! We have taken a step back from development to plan and think about some of our ideas and trying to flesh things out more. For example: should train tracks be allowed to cross over each other? Do we let the trains stop for each other, or do we do a collision system where you can allow tracks to cross but it will risk trains colliding, unless you do it properly and build a bridge. How should the actual bridge laying mechanics work? How do we automatically handle them raising over obstacles (other tracks) vs just going from the start point to the end point. Another example: the research and development system. We want to do this but how should it be implemented? A standard tech tree we...
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Pain point iteration

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Leveling System  We have been continuing our "pain point iteration," that is, playing the game, finding pain points - things that are painful to endure when playing, fixing them and repeating the process. Again we sat down as a team on the weekend and had a multiplayer game of T&T . Once the game was over we discussed what is the biggest thing that needs to be improved? Surprisingly we came away feeling that the game was really fun and well balanced. It caused us to have to think about where and when we built, to watch the wallet and to ensure we were encountering profit before we proceeded to attempt to expand. The biggest pain point was that the only way to expand was to expand to other cities and develop resources all over the map (lets call this "horizontal" gameplay). The cost of horizontal expansion is significant which leads to a mid game economic slump. The early game we have the bank to give us enough of a loan to get up our first resource chain t...
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