Level builder

[J410]

Played through the entire mobile game and decided to pick up the desktop version for the editor and some extra levels.

I tried the level builder and it's quite difficult to get what I want. Trains are ignoring switches, turning around on a switch, take the other track when I always want to go on the same track, and I'm generally just missing some features. A list:

• When trains come a a merge, they sometimes turn around and continue on the other track
  
• When building a split without a switch, there's no way to tell which track the trains will take
  
• Trains sometimes just ignore switches
  
• There are far less switches available in the editor than in the game
  
• Can't reverse trains, and sometimes I can't place them at all.
  
• There's no way to move items, other than removing and rebuilding them
  
• It's hard to tell the bulldozer which items to remove, due to oversized hitboxes
  
• Hills are placed too low, visible when building them near the edge
  
• There are tunnels, but no hills that can cover the mountain-end of it
  
• I don't see an option to raise terrain
  
• Nor can I build elevated track

In general, I can't easily rebuild levels that I've played, which is what I'd expect from a decent level editor (as editors are often used by developers to build the premade levels). The last two items bother me most, and the first issues were probably caused by overlapping straigth pieces (if there's no visual difference, there should be no difference).
Suggestion to improve the switches: don't have seperate switch-pieces. Instead allow a window to popup when two tracks merge/split, with options if the player may switch it and, if not, which rail the train should take.

Keep up the good work!

[greywing]

Hey there,

First of all, thank you for the extensive feedback, there's a lot of stuff for us to to go through here, which is really appreciated.

For some of the issues that you bring up, these are not intentional. They have come to our attention over the last month, and they most certainly need to be fixed. This includes problems such as trains acting weird around switches, and placing straight tracks on top of eachother makes it hard for trains to run properly. Now that the holiday break has passed, we'll resume work on ironing out these issues.

Some of the points you raise, however, requires more than just bug-fixes to solve. We want to improve the usability of the editor, and hearing from the community on what features that the players are missing helps us prioritise our work. That is why posts like these are really appreciated, highlighting issues and bringing suggestions.

Functionality for moving pieces, or how to decide which tracks trains choose at non-switch splits are going to be great quality-of-life upgrades for the builders out there. But when it comes very advanced funcitonality like building levels at multiple elevations, we struggle to find a way to make it happen without introducting too many new controls. We want to allow as much expresiveness when building levels, but we have to think about it twice if it gets in the way of ease-of-use.

As a side note, there is one issue I haven't heard of before. You mention that at merges, trains sometimes turn around and continue on the other track. I haven't experienced this behavior before. If you have a saved level at hand where this problem occurs, I would love to take a look at it. In any case, this issue has been noted.

Once again, thanks for your feedback and kind words. If you think up of anything else, don't hesitate to let us know!