I made Cube Trains, a 3D puzzle game!

[DDR]

A small screenshot of Cube Trains. Nothing has been built yet.

Download free from cubetrains.com.

Cube Trains is a game where you have to figure out how to build train tracks around each other, in some rather tight 3D spaces. It has a bunch of nice features, like infinite undo/redo and make-work reduction, but the big thing is that you don't have to solve the levels the best way. The game keeps track of how efficiently you solved the level, but it doesn't force you to solve the level the most efficient way first. That would be hard. A old riddle:

Q: What do you call a medical student who graduated last in his class?
A: Doctor.

Even though our doctor did worse than every other graduate, he still graduated. That the main thing. Cube Trains lets you do worse than everyone else, as long as you can finish the level. Hilariously worse, in some cases!

You can find a rather rambling youtube video on the game over on youtube. (I will have to see about doing a trailer-ier one, one of these days.)

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Fun Fact: Cube Trains is a mod for the Frogatto engine, under the hood.

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By the way, a bit of an introduction is due for those of you wondering who in the world I am. I've not been around these parts for a while. Mostly, I'm found over on the Frogatto forums now, but I use to work with Wesnoth. I probably tested the devs' patience more than anything else, but it was good for me. It was the first online community I'd ever actually gave more than a passing glance.

About five years ago, I posted a game here. It is still over in this thread. I recommend downloading that game as well, it was pretty good too. You race down as ASCII river. … Come to think of it, I should probably download it myself. (That seems so long ago now. I had no clue what I was doing back then, as the first page rather painfully shows. )

[Heindal]

I downloaded and played it yesterday and I think you deserved some feedback.

Its a nice free to play game, with a cute graphic and seems to work fine. Its a great idea for a puzzle game.

I think the tutorial could be better and there should be some kind of overlay description, when you hover your mouse over tiles or buttons. The tutorial level became a trial and error experience, I hardly saw the messages in the upper screen. They should be placed in the middle with a bigger size. The whole interface seems to work a little slow in the first place, but I got used to that.

Imho my problem with this puzzle game is the high rise of difficulty. I could not solve the fifth level and stopped playing. Solving these levels is a trial and error as the tutorial should at least contain all features of the game. Your idea of level design is that the user will find out himself somehow and experience and discover techniques by himself and sees the high difficulty as a challenge and improves with each level. This can work, but it can also annoy players.

Finally something positive: you have designed and concepted an own, nice little game. Gratz.

Best regards

Heindal

[Crow_T]

I'm having an issue installing this on linux, terminal is coming up blank when I double click the install.sh from here: http://cubetrains.com/download%20linux.html

Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit (actually Lubuntu)

[Crendgrim]

So I just downloaded it, installed it and had about 45 minutes of fun. Thanks a lot for that, it was very entertaining.
I actually do not agree about the difficulty scaling. For me, it felt pretty good. Of course, a subsequent level has to be harder than the previous; but in this game, it feels that it comes down to having the idea with which it's quite easy.
The level which costed me most time and patience was the last one. It took me quite a while to figure out how to manage three rails with only two layers. But eventually, everything worked out.

There's only one thing I'm missing: The possibility to see all my trains driving along the awesome track I just created. After finishing a level, I had this feeling of ease and wanted to look at what I had created. With all those layers it's quite hard to get an overall look, though. So being able to see your trains arriving where they should (instead of blending to white) would be a very nice touch IMHO.