Trailmakers Pioneers: from Sandbox to survive

Trailmaker Since his conception, it has been aimed at being the ultimate Sandbox -Builder game for adventurers since the goal. For almost a decade we have built a successful game with a strong community of enthusiastic and talented builders. Our players devote themselves to the structure and share cool vehicles, without restrictions or anyone to tell them what to do – but we wanted to make sure that more people could play our game! This presented us the opportunity to bring that Trailmaker Experience for people who usually don't play sandbox games.

Our ambition with Trailmaker 2.0 – pioneersShould reach a wider audience of players and put our beloved vehicle manufacturer into the hands of Mainstream players – players who would normally play games like MinecraftPresent Legend of Zelda And Valheim. Pioneers is a brand new, completely free campaign, in which players have to save the helpless froggits from an invasion of the evil Botnak robot power, which will take advantage of their precious planet Gregory.

The great overhaul has a resource collection, blocking and improved PVE fight. The players will experience a more epic story than ever in Trailmaker Previously with a 20-hour campaign.

In order to achieve the ambition to reach the mainstream audience, we needed more gameplay and an even more committed world. That is why we decided to consider the survival genre for inspiration. merger Trailmaker With tropics from the survival genre there was no small performance, and we had to spend a year in the prototyping phase to get a rough overview of what we wanted to do.

The most obvious thing we wanted was to collect and block resources. We knew that it would enable the type of open gameplay that we had really hoped for Trailmaker to the next stage. This implementation now seems relatively easy, but review was a long and winding journey. We experimented with players to lose blocks from vehicles when they were destroyed and let the player spend blocks for individual vehicles instead of sharing their block between all creations. The final implementation now seems easy, but we had to experiment a lot to get there.

We wanted to restrict the scope of the player for the survival aspects of the game and experiment with simple landscaping mechanics. One of the first experiments was that you had to build electricity zones that could supply your vehicles with electricity. Outside of these zones, you can only drive with your limited battery current until you have expired and had to return.

This concept finally turned into the fuel mechanic who made it into the published version of the game.

Another challenge was to create the resources that the player collects for the production of blocks. Trailmaker Already has a large catalog of blocks, so the resources that are necessary to make sense with the materials seemed to make these blocks seemed. We also had no idea how many different types of resources would be good for the gameplay and at the same time fit the blocks. The resource types that you now see in the game are the result of many design literations and many back and forth artists and designers to do it right.

In order to play the game more like a survival game, we experimented with various mechanics. We tried an elaborate land grave mechanic early on, in which the player had to build power pylons in the world, the zones that the player could exist freely inside. At outside the zones, the player had to rely on a limited battery to drive around. This function has developed into the basic fuel system that players can experience in the new update. The power zones also exist, but only for the NPC settlements.

From our experience with the In the air DLC we knew that Pioneers had to have a convincing world and history. We originally wanted the planet to be populated by three different species. The froggits on the floor, chirpos in the Skytrees and Muldozer underground in caves. It was even intended that the player could rise to space late in the game and enter the next DLCs in this way. We had to deal with a lot to concentrate on more important elements.

In the In the air DLC We had also touched a little to make missions. We knew that we had to expand this to make an even better campaign. We have decided to create a more advanced mission system that supported the chained history and gameplay events that we could bring in a sequence to create countless unique missions. In the Pioneers Update We have only scratched the surface of what we can do with missions, and hope to offer convincing and rich missions and stories in the future.

As a result of more than two years of experimentation and development, we are of the opinion Trailmaker – pioneers is a shining example of how a live game can maintain a flourishing community and at the same time remains relevant for new players.