A reason to play multiplayer

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A reason to play multiplayer

Coop is great! You can play at what ever pace you like and the game ends when you achieve a certain company value, although you can continue if you want.

Now for versus multiplayer this doesn't cut the mustard! We need something compelling to drive the player forwards. So we have finally done this!

As with every good railroad game, you can now invest in the shares of your competitors, and eventually to buy them out - if you can do that before they buy you out.

The challenge is making this some what self balancing to a degree. How do you restrict those players who are the bee's knees from stomping the newbs? Especially a problem if your a newb and your friend wants to have a game with you just to stomp you in 5 minutes flat *cough* Railroads *cough*. We have some ideas we are experimenting with here, no doubt these are not final and we will not tell you what these are. If anyone has some good ideas feel free to let us know. Fortunately, being bought out doesn't mean you are kicked from the game, instead you and the rest of your board are merged into the new mega corporation.

While we have not extensively played with this new feature much yet, we have had a few games and it has been quite fun! It feels a bit like a competitive puzzle game at the moment as bridges are not in the game, so requires some creative magic to work around and through your opponents tracks.

Build pipeline

I have also been improving the build pipeline. Trying to get all platforms (Linux and Windows) as well as all versions (The full version and the demo) automated. It has taken some time but it is now functional.

As a result, I've found a pile of bugs in the release builds and some demo specific crashes. The demo uses packaged data to make it difficult for people to try to tamper with. But when you buy the full version it uses open and unpackaged data. You've paid for the privilege right? This simplifies the mod and map making process and eliminates barriers to getting in there to start modding and mapping.

From bit-shift.io to bitshift.io

bit-shift.io is now bitshift.io! That darn dash has been very annoying to type in. We got in contact with the owner of this domain and he kindly agreed to give it to us providing we put it to good use. A special thank you to him, who will remain anonymous. That is an answer to prayer. So now comes the work of updating all URLs to point to the new domain name.



Finally we have something amazing to share, our first video developer diary.
NOTE: I've invested in a new microphone so expect better quality next time!







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