Well – I’m going to come right out and say it – the last month has been fantastic for the future of Railborn. Since we announced just a little while ago we have had a huge amount of interest from players like you – which means others share our vision! This is 1) motivating 2) exciting 3) tells us people want the type of game we want. Reception outside of Steam has also been mega positive!
If you are new with Washbear – every official update I choose a select few topics to discuss. We have been working on so much – but for the sake of all our time, I pick just a couple of thoughts.
Wishlists
VRAM
Rooftop Running
How is this even a topic? Well it is! I’d provide you with an actual Wishlist update but the Steam backend seems to be having a hiccup, so I’ll save that for later this week. Needless to say you all have been AMAZING. I can’t stress enough how Wishlists contribute to the success of Railborn. So if you have a moment, please pass on the Railborn store page to your friend groups for a Wishlist. Alright, enough begging for Wishlists. 😊
As a Steam user, I mostly enjoy updates that feature cool graphics or new mechanics. Truthfully though from the dev side – we often have a lot of “difficult to show off” work to do that is REALLY important. Our target for Railborn is to run smoothly at a High graphic setting with 4 GB video RAM. We decided on this target by looking at the Steam survey
This means going deep into how we texture the world of Railborn to find efficiencies. Is there a lot of whiteboard madness tracking where every precious VRAM GB goes? Yes – there is. We come from a console background of game development so we like to statically allocate all of our textures and stream in only what we have to. This makes the game much smoother and minimize hitches.
In Railborn you can expand your home by unlocking and building additional train cars. Each train car can have a different style (dictated by you) and purpose (again, decided by you). Moving between train cars can be done via doors – or – my favorite – running across the roofs. When we had started making Railborn I knew this was a feature we had to have! To be clear, this was difficult from a technical point of view (I’ll save this for another post). Here is an extended version of running rooftops.
The key is ensuring you build parts of your train cart roofs that are flat, and have a little point to enable you land on the next train car. I can’t wait to see all the ideas you folks come up with!
That’s it for now. Be safe our there friends! (and remember to grab us some Wishlists 😊)
xoxo Smashlore & Taky