SLAUGHTERTRAIN: Game Jolt Adventurejam
Kent, Rosstin and I collaborated again on another game jam game– this time for the two-week-long Game Jolt-hosted Adventurejam. You can find our submission here. If you like it and have a Game Jolt account, consider voting for it.
(ED NOTE: Gamejolt no longer hosts jams at that link! This link no longer exists! I can't find it but you can find the final version of Slaughtertrain here.)
Slaughtertrain is a Snowpiercer parody made in Twine. We wrote over fifty different train cars with different bizarre, trainbound inhabitants, and gave the player an extremely limited, violence-oriented number of verbs. In each car, the player can either kill everyone present, steal the “bombdrugs” this society uses as currency (and bombs, and drugs), or pay 10 bombdrugs to avoid a confrontation and move to the next train.
The player has two major stats: health and bombdrugs. They also carry a weapon, which has its own stats: power and durability. Health, power, and durability are never stated directly, but the player can learn to judge these stats by closely reading the game’s repeated text. Gameplay involves juggling weapons to maximize your chances of slaughter-success, and risking injury to acquire as many bombdrugs as possible.
You may be thinking to yourself, “gee, this doesn’t sound much like what I think of as an adventure game,” but the jam had extremely lax rules (that Slaughtertrain definitely fits) and we wanted a structured deadline to help us hack out this game as fast as possible. We were planning for 100 train cars but didn’t get that far; a second version will probably have all 100. Kent will also do a balance pass on the entire game to make it more challenging and interesting to play. We may also get some art in here? We haven’t thought closely about that part of the game yet.
Slaughtertrain is also notable for containing the most original code I have ever written for a game project. All of the stats, randomization effects, and weapon handling processes are carried out with javascript macros.
Anyway, expect to see a fuller, polished version of this game in the future. We’ll release the .tws sourcefiles at that time too, most likely.