Hello trAIn-programmers,
The newest version (4) has been online for a while, and I took the opportunity to write a summary of the year that went into developing trAInsported. I'll cover some of the ups and downs here, but be sure to read the full story over on yellloh.
The new version features a lot of bug fixes, but also something that I hadn't expected at first: languages.
Towards the end of the development cycle, it occurred to me that not all players would be fluent in English. Surprisingly, players soon started approaching me and asked if they could translate the game into their own languages. The result is that the new version can now be played in Turkish, Russian, English, German, Finnish and Spanish! Thanks so much to the people who helped translating!
Windows exe:
When I first went to the press, very few people wrote back. It might've been because of the lame video I made or because the game fills a relatively small niche. Or because of the images with bad gradients, or because of the fact that I suck at webdesign, and it was the first website I really made from scratch.
Even so, when no one wrote back, I was pretty disappointed. Then, suddenly, the writers from indiegames.com replied, telling me I had written while the GDC was on, a really bad time of the year. Shortly afterwards, they featured the game on their site. Views and downloads started to explode. A few weeks later, I noticed that my server (still running on a raspberry pi) had gone down. Looking at apache's access logs, I noticed many people were coming from heise.de - the publisher of a major computer magazine from Germany! A few days later, I heard they had actually published a short note about the game in the printed version as well.
Needless to say - I was happy.
Shortly afterwards, I got message that people were using the game for a project in a computer programming class at university, among other cool programming games like CoreWar, AntMe and RoboCode.
In the meantime, over 6000 players have played the game - a number I never dreamt of when starting development. Thank you to everyone who gave the game a spin!
Also get the full story over on yellloh.
Looks brilliant. Glad to hear things are working out. Was looking for something new to try out. Glad you posted this update otherwise I would never have known about this project.
I guess a feature that would let members claim 'Guest' comments like the one I've made about would be neat.
I made this thread in Site Forums > Suggestions Moddb.com for discussion.
Hi, welcome to indieDB :)
I'm glad you like it - thanks for the comment!
They probably want new people to register, so that's why they don't allow names. Or they're afraid a guest might pose as another user. But if the comment is drawn in another colour or something, and clearly marked as "Guest", I think you're right - it has annoyed me before that I can't really know who the "Guests" were.
Edit: Ah, never mind, you meant claiming them, instead of adding a name. I think both would be good, though...