Rail Route

I joined this project around August of 2021. At this time the game had been in early access for a few years already and the original developers where ready to get some more hands on deck to get the game ready for 1.0
So for the next 3 years i worked on this game touching nearly every part of it, from discussing with the community, to bugfixing, to making entire new features and even a DLC after full release on February 22 2024.

The concept
Rail Route is a 2D train dispatcher simulator game. You design, build and expand your train network in a wide selection of premade maps based on real work locations. But you can also build your own maps from scratch, or download one of the many maps in the Steam Workshop.

My tasks
When i joined the project i started by doing bug fixes to get to know the codebase. Over time i expanded my tasks to implementing new features, designing a complete new UI from scratch and implementing full controller support. For this project i also got to design new game features that would fit the existing game yet provide good new value for new and existing players. During the project i also interacted with the community for things like gathering feedback or investigating bugs. Other tasks i did where documenting and improving some conventions for the team that help streamline development. An example of this is a document that tracks every sorting layer of all the elements in the game as UI can get pretty hard to sort when the game is 2D with many layer of overlapping elements.

The following is a list of some game features i was mostly responsible for:
- UI redesign focussing on mobile, touch and controller support.
- Controller support including dynamic keybinds
- Graph representations
- System Upgrades menu
- Main Menu
- Train Info Panels
- ChatGPT integration for game localisation