About

Bring public rail transport to the remote Cévennes mountains in France. Fulfill the needs of the population, but also keep an eye out for costs and efficency, since the bureaucrats are never satisfied.
A hex-based puzzle game made for the Honest Jam 6. It was inspired by the random encounter of the fact that 320000 people over 5529 km² in the Cévennes mountains do not have access to public (regional) passenger rail transport since the closing of the last station in 1973 (initial source: A (trustworthy?) Wikipedia article, referencing: Richard Deiss: Flügelradkathedrale und Zuckerrübenbahnhof, Bonn 2010, S. 55; crosschecks with the proposals of the french authorities to reinstate it.).

Controls

Move Camera: WASD
Zoom in/out: Mouse Wheel
Tile to Select: Mouse Cursor
Rotate Tile Clockwise: Right Click
Place Tile: Left Click
In-game Menu: ESC or BACKSPACE (especially in Browser the latter!)

How to Play

The tiles can be placed freely on the entire grid. All nature tiles (except river tiles) can be freely mixed, but tiles containing human made objects (like roads, train tracks, villages etc.) do not mix well. Watch the edges and rotate a tile accordingly or move it to an entirely different place on the grid.

Right now, the tiles can only be placed; there are no points or any other gameplay. The order of the tiles is also not random and will repeat over and over again.

Details about the Tile Types (information added 2023-12-13)

The blank tiles are currently a bit confusing due to the lack of artwork. The green tile represents a meadow, the brown tile a forest and the yellow tile a farm field (unfortunately in web version, the colors get washed out, which does not help either). These nature tiles are basically fillers, which can be placed in areas, where no track (or hopefully roads, settlements etc. in future releases) can be placed. Any nature tile is compatible with any other nature tile, so it is very easy to fill gaps. But just like in real life, a nature tile cannot end infrastructure, so placing it where a railroad track has an open end does not work.
The total opposite of that is the gray tile: It represents a settlement, which only tiles with itself. In this rough version of the game, this tile can only be placed at the outside of your building area, since it cannot interact with the rest of the tiles (yet; will change in future releases). During testing, we realized that for some (browser and monitor) configurations, the brown and gray tile seem to have the identical color.

KNOWN ISSUES

It is strongly recommended to NOT PLAY THIS GAME IN A BROWSER, since every browser nowadays is so different and also the performance is not great.

Testing revealed the following problems:

• Firefox under Linux does not allow the usage of ESC for entering the In-game Menu; it only resizes from fullscreen. Firefox under Windows resizes from fullscreen, but than allows to access the in-game Menu. For entering the In-game Menu, please use BACKSPACE instead.
• Opera under Windows likes to crash when the player tries to rotate and move the tile.
• Chromium under Linux does not load the game at all. It crashes with a "WebGL context lost" warning. This also a known issue in the Godot Community.
• The Brave Browser under Linux shows the same error message as Chromium
• Edge seems to work fine.

IMPORTANT NOTE

THIS GAME IS IN A VERY UNFINISHED STATE. From the beginning, it was more intended to be a Tech Demo to explore the possibilities of C++ GDNative Support in Godot 3.x. There is not much information about this topic available, and even less concerning Web Builds and Cross-Platform Compilation. From the preliminary tests before deciding to go for this project, we thought a very limited MVP with a few tiles and simple rules should be doable within a seven day Game Jam. Like always with Game Jams, everything went relatively smoothly (of course there were the usual hiccups and setbacks along the way; otherwise it would not be a Game Jam...) until submission day. Twelve hours before submission, it was noticed that the Web Build does no longer work, but the cryptic, undocumented error message was no help. In the end, it turned out that the compilation did produce a faulty library on one build system, but worked with identical settings on another build system and nobody knows why... These minor issues combined together consumed much more time than we anticipated, which unfortunately did no leave us with enough time to include the functionality we wanted.

Credits

Milatur:

• Concept
• Core Game Play Mechanics
• C++ Architecture and Project Management Lead
• CMake and Visual Studio Code Build Pipelines
• Unit Testing
• Windows Testing (native, Firefox, Opera, Edge)

dsacre:

• Concept
• Core Game Play Mechanics
• Godot Architecture Lead
• Python Build Tools
• UI/UX Design
• Asset Creation: (LaTeX/TikZ, Blender, GIMP, Krita, Imagemagick, Audacity)
• Linux Testing (native, Firefox, Chromium, Brave)

For detailed information about the assets which were used, see "the-cevennes-express_honest-jam-6_credits.txt" in the Downloads Section or "Credits" in the Main Menu.