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...

Now that setting up a train is a really lovely experience, we sat down and had a few games of multiplayer so that we could identify the next major pain point when playing Trains & Things . Surprisingly, it boiled down to fighting with the user interface - we were always moving windows around and they would always end up in crazy positions. Especially when playing in a window and resizing the window. They would even vanish into the ether and we could not rescue them! Our initial UI design philosophy was to have dialogs as we knew from the get go there would be a lot of information the user could dig into. We figured that allowing the user to lay this out as they liked would be great! But here we see the ideal depart from reality. The theory is great, the practicality is vastly different. We again talked about what different games do thing well, and why they are done well and those games that do them bad and came up with a new solution to the problem: Let the game pop panels i...