The Idea behind a WW2 Disaster/ People/ Resource Management Sim Game WTF!!
The Last Train Dev Blog 1
Hey guys, I am the Design Lead on our company Smash Game Studio’s brand new game “The Last Train”. The game has been in development for a little under 5 months, it has been an insane learning experience so far, hopefully after reading this you will get an insight into how to go about with the conceptualization and the planning process for your own project.
Basic Concept
First off, like all things in life the game started off as a random idea I had while I was eating my lunch (If you are wondering what I had, it was an awesome Chicken Teriyaki sub! Always go extra with the chicken. There is no such thing as too much meat :p). I looked out of the window as I was eating and saw a few taxis picking up passengers and a few dropping them off. I’ve always wondered what it would be like if they had the power and the ability to choose who the drivers want to give a ride to. The power dynamic really fascinated me, watching how at the end of the day everyone waiting for a cab, was at the cab driver’s mercy. I then pulled my phone out and started writing away. The pressing question I asked myself was, What would I do if I was the only taxi driver? How would I choose who I take on board? That was the basic premise. I then started adding in numerous rules and conditions (Rewards/ Limited Seating/Health/Fuel) to the existing idea of passenger management. As you can see below I started jotting down everything that came rushing down my tiny little brain.

Once I got done with my lunch, I went back to my seat and tried to figure out what set this game apart from the 50 other notes I had made earlier. It was quite simple, none of the previous 50 game notes I had written, made me come back to it after I wrote it. This game felt different from anything else we as a company had ever done before. The player didn’t have any super powers, you were not part of an alien master race, you were just another boring f@#$%^& human being trying to make it through the day. This is what really resonated with me.
Developing the Idea
The same evening I set out to make a small presentation so I could pitch it to the rest of the team. Before the presentation, the fundamental pillars of the game had to be figured out. That is when the idea of the game being a disaster management sim was set because having a game where you drive a taxi around a neighbourhood picking up and dropping people didn’t sound as dramatic or cool (Unless its Crazy Taxi). The story I had in mind was that you’re a subway train pilot who has to help passengers move from one destination to another, you have a limited number of seats, each passenger comes with grievances and rewards, you still need to go through the moral dilemma of figuring out who you want to help… Will you only help the poor or only the rich? Will you discriminate? etc.
Presentation Time
Once I pitched the idea to the rest of the team, they absolutely loved the idea of the game. However we had a lot of work to do with the story. We wanted the game to tell you a story during a time of disaster however in order to create more hard hitting emotional stories we wanted to set the game during the time when there was a greater conflict happening around the entire world. That is the moment when we all unanimously agreed that the game should be set during the events of World War 2, since it is a time period we were all interested in.
Time to get to Work
Now that the idea was set we had to figure out how we were going to go about with the development of the game. As a 3 person team it was important to prioritise and make sure that the development of this game would not affect the rest of the mobile games we have in development. Before starting work on the game full time we wanted create a basic prototype using simple shapes and place holder art to just see if the game was fun to play.
Prototype
When we began work on the prototype only the developer was required to work on the game. We wanted to create a basic playable version of the game with just the core gameplay elements which were trip planning and passenger management. We took more time than we had initially anticipated because we wanted the prototype to function flawlessly without an bugs or issues.
Showing it to people for the first time!!
Once the prototype was made we started letting a few people check out our game. We got a positive response for all the mechanics we had in the game. However people found the game very shallow and too simple. So that was the moment we had to get back to work to add more depth and complexity to our game.
We will discuss how we started adding complexity and depth to our game in the next blog post. This blog was written to show you how to get a game from basic conceptualisation to prototyping. In the next blog post we will be discussing how we added complexity to the existing game and some of the major challenges we came across.
Thanks a lot for checking out our blog post we really appreciate it, I just wanted to write the blog so that people who are interested in the process of making a game would get a lot of insight. We will be continuing this series everyday leading up to release. If you are interested don’t forget to check out our website to know more about our game The Last Train. To keep up with the development check out my Twitter Feed or Smash Game Studios.
