Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Old stuff related to Trainyard

I shouldn't need to bring up by now that I'm a huge follower of Matt Rix's Trainyard. Released in 2010 this was a really unique puzzle game with a concept that I adore to death (I'm a huge color nut).

Before the editor for the game was made, I came up with an idea that I had since abandoned; adding support for territory colors alongside the primary and secondary colors already found in the core game. Normally when you try to mix a primary-colored train with a secondary-colored train, you get a brown-colored "Garbage" train, which doesn't see much use outside of the plethora of user-made levels.

The original idea behind this concept: Instead of making a brown train when both a primary and a secondary were mixed, a territory color would be made instead. However not every primary +secondary combo would result in a tertiary color; if you were to try and mix red + green, yellow + blue, or yellow + purple, it would make brown instead of a territory color. Below is a diagram I made long ago that shows how the tertiary colors would function in-game:



I also did a few example levels that use tertiary colors as the main focus.




As you can probably tell the idea didn't really take off, since I was the only one interested in it and it would've made the game even more of a brain-wreck since according to Matt, most players didn't get the color-mixing concept, even having trouble with creating the secondary colors form the primaries.

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