Herman
My concept game is a game which relies mainly on swiping and gestures, so a tablet device would be recommended.
In the game you'll see a top down view of the city's (simplified) light rail map. This map contains:
- the tracks
- the normal lines (line 1, 2, 3, etc.)
- the stops where people get in/out
- depot's where trains are stored at night and where drivers needs to go when their shift is over.
When you first start you see the city and the light rail trains are moving along a path (eg. circular: station A, B, C, A or bidirectional: station A B C B A). There are some possible interactions:
- Tapping a train selects it and shows the path the train follows by highlighting it.
- Touch down + drag on a running train allows to change it's path by dragging your finger along the stations it should visit.
When a 'calamity' occurs some train stops and a message appears next to it containing why it stopped. A train can be stopped for several reasons:
- it's broken
- the driver left because shift was over
- the train can't proceed since something is directly in front of it (eg. another train)
When a train is broken you can perform several actions:
- repair it (requires to wait [a] seconds on a maintenance guy + a variable [b] amount of time to fix)
- tow it away (requires [c] seconds for towing truck to arrive, then train disappears)
- leave it
- re-route other trains around it using a different track
To prevent angry customers you need to make sure the any re-route does contain the same stops. When a stop is not connected people will get angry waiting. To 'connect' a stop near a blockage it is possible to connect it to another stop by assigning a walking/bus route by dragging a stop to another stop as shown in the picture.
There are several (optional) mechanics that can be implemented:
- random repair times: this adds random chance to the game. Only when the maintenance guy arrives you know how long the repair will take, so sometimes towing is faster than repair.
- the drivers are on shifts: you need each train to be at the depot once every [x] minutes, for the driver to change otherwise the driver will leave the train at the end of his shift and you'll have to get another driver to the train standing still, annoying the people in it and waiting on it.
- fitting to a schedule: the initial routes can be the normal schedule. When a calamity happens you have [y] minutes to fix that the original schedule is restored.