All Aboard! The Train Defense Express goes into Early Access today! The goal is to allow people who want to play the full game to start playing now while continuing to add important features, maintenance, and fixes to the game. The planned release date is the Steam summer sale, June 26, 2025.
There will be a content patch every 3 weeks with the following planned additions (not in any order):
- Relic system: Relics are permanent artifacts which can affect the battle in minor or major ways. They will drop from bosses. First, the system needs to be created; then, I need to create all of the relics. I plan to have a minimum of 50 relics at release and possibly more post-version 1.0.
- More enemies: At 1,000% scaling, a new enemy type will appear, replacing the old enemy types.
- Endless Survival - Hard mode: Enemy scaling will increase more quickly and bosses will receive bonus health to make them harder to kill. This mode will really test you; I wonder if anyone will be able to go past 1 hour?
- Collections Menu - A new main menu item where you can view your best time, best score, and highest number of enemies destroyed, as well as achievements collected.
- New achievements
- New carriages
- New bosses
- New power-ups
- Of course, bug fixes and feedback
With a new patch every 3 weeks until the June 26 release date, that means there will be a total of 5 new major patches (including the release day patch) after this one. There will no doubt be some post-release content, too, so look forward to that!
Anyway, with that out of the way, let's discuss some of the new things in this patch.
New content
-
New "Gravity Gun" carriage (Very Rare) - Suck enemies into the center of a gravity well and slow them down, making them juicy Area of Effect targets. Probably the strongest crowd control tower yet!
-
New "Boomerang" carriage (Uncommon) - Launches a boomerang which penetrates targets and then returns back to its sender. If it hits 3 targets, it explodes!
- The game now tracks your score. You get score from destroying enemies, from upgrading carriages, from collecting power-ups, and collecting gems. Your score is increased by how high the current enemy scaling value is, and it's increased way more by every carriage that you have above 30. NOTE: The game tracks your best time, best score, and highest number of kills, but it does not show it yet.
- The "Number of Carriages" label now shows how much stronger enemies get with your current number of carriages. Be careful about going above 35 carriages!
-
New upgrade - Attack Speed - Increase the attack speed of all towers.
-
New upgrade - Power-up Frequency - Increase how often power-ups drop.
-
New upgrade - Power-up Duration - Increase how long power-ups last.
-
New upgrade - Stealth - Enemies have a % chance to miss their attacks on the Infinite Power Generator.
-
New upgrade - Pity - Adds a chance of guaranteed progression towards a carriage upgrade.
Maintenance
- Werebear - Slightly reduced the attack speed and movement speed.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug that caused debuffs to not last as long as they should, and also caused enemies to become immune to debuffs too early.
- Fixed bug where the boss text pop-up sometimes didn't display correctly.