The World
Last time we touched on one part of the gameplay. Now I wanted to talk about where that gameplay will be. Sweet Transit's main game mode will be a sandbox. It will be up to you to create and expand your colony. Random map generation will help to make it more interesting and challenging. Let us look at the tile-based world a bit.
This is the map mode. Going in and out of the map is seamless just by zooming in or out. Something like this will be playable in the demo which is coming in the near future. A tiny 256x256 map with one biome. Biomes will be used to limit resources and what you can build there. On top of that, each tile has resources, fertility and height values. This will impact greatly where you will want your villages and cities placed.
The world consists of three layers. Land, water and mountains. The land is where everything is built. It is limited by water, which is used mostly for crossing and some structures. And there are mountains that are meant to block your building and transportation options. Think of it as a puzzle.
Sweet Transit engine can support up to 4096x4096 maps. I doubt that anyone will have the time to play on such a big map. In case people get bored of the default generation then modding should help. Map generation is done using a nodes system. Similar to how photoshop manages layers. For example, creating maps based on real world is quite easy.
Here is a coal mine that was recently made. I feel proud of this shack. Next time I am planning to talk either about trains more or about the modding system. Write a comment if you want to hear about something specific!