Here Comes The Choo Choo
Here Comes The Choo Choo, my beloved. It is a super silly and chaotic indie game project and my first real experience with game design.
It was made with a team of six over the course of about two months. It is rough around the edges and closer to a tech demo than a fully fledged game. It was a ton of fun to make and I think it honestly has a lot of merit.
I lead our small team as Vision Holder and Lead Designer. I also had the opportunity to do a good chunk of the 3D modeling, and all of the music. It was a great lesson in scope, teamwork, and working under pressure.
The Beginning
I pitched the game to my classmates and was selected as one of the few games to be made that semester. Originally, the concept was a top down train driving game where the player would accomplish tasks each “day.” I had figured that seven days would be a reasonable amount to accomplish in the eight weeks we had in development. Boy was I wrong.
We only had one engineer on the team. The rest of us dumped pretty mercilessly all our hopes and dreams for Here Comes The Choo Choo upon his shoulders. I’m talking things like a magic eye level, or a level where you go to heaven to fight God in a Dark Souls inspired boss fight. We then proceeded to poke him with a stick and say “come on… make the game.” It was cruel and fraught with misunderstanding about how game dev worked (sorry Dylan).
I did about five Birds Eye designs of different levels we could do before it dawned on me just how complicated things were getting. I took a hard look at what we could do in the time frame, and made the decision to focus on two levels, and a hub. This was a good choice.
We also decided to switch from a top down game with a day system, to a second person experience. Our player would embody a train and complete tasks assigned by the Mayor. This was also a good choice.
To the left is a design I made for a level where the player had to transport three baby trains to the goal zone while avoiding an overhead bird of prey. This was not a good choice. It did not make the cut.
All Aboard the Choo Choo!
Although it came later than it should have, we managed to get a reasonable scope in place. Our first level would require the player to drive around a small course collecting “Rock Goblins” within a time limit. We made sure the train moved wildly fast, could jump to insane heights, and that there were lots of physics objects that could be sent flying every which way.
The team really leaned into my vision of making things wacky and unserious. We embraced a quirky narrative that included The Mayor binding our soul to the train (soul train anyone? lol right?). The tasks being completed were allowing the player to earn bits of their soul back. I thought juxtaposing a friendly low poly art style with a weirdly dark narrative was a ton of fun. You’ll notice we spelled “definitely” wrong in the bottom screenshot. Like I said, rough around the edges.
For our second level, I wanted to try and create a sort of Wild West shooting range feeling. Kind of like that Toy Story ride at Disneyland. Unlimited ammo, fast paced, and ridiculous.
We attached the player to a track within the level, and their goal was to collect all 33 cows that had been scattered. I debated what I wanted the shooting mechanism to look like. I ultimately decided that a good ol’ fashioned pistol would be best.
We didn’t want to shoot the cows with bullets so Dylan, our engineer, used the cow model I made as a place holder. This meant you were shooting smaller cows at bigger cows. Obviously, this was perfect. We instantly scrapped any notion of shooting anything else.
Lessons Learned
After all was said and done, we had completed a decently polished five minute experience. It wasn't perfect, but we felt that it was a lot of fun. I learned how to design for the game we could make, not the game I was dreaming of. I learned how important it is for the whole team to be in the engine implementing ideas. I also learned how essential it is to take care of our dear engineers.
I loved making this game. It was a frantic and exciting experience. It is really because of Here Comes The Choo Choo that I fell in love with game development.
To the right is a full gameplay video. Check it out and laugh with us at our silly little game. Or, you can also laugh at us, totally up to you.