Welcome back conductors; today’s update is a massive one, enough to cover an entire landscape and then some! Feast your eyes on a mix of changes mechanical, aesthetic, and quality-of-life long awaited!
Some Highlights:
MAC VERSION:
For those of you who have been eying Crystal Rail but lacked a PC to play it on, worry no longer, as Crystal Rail now has a mac version of its demo playable!
LANDSCAPES:
After almost a year of preparation, we have now implemented landscape animations which play when you move between stations, replacing an earlier screen that simply showed, in abstract terms, what opponents did. It was always the intention to do this, but it required an incredible amount of new assets both for each of the 9 stations and every single train car in the game, which needed to be redrawn and animated in a new angle. We hope you’ll enjoy the scenery, and know that very soon, this scene will be more than a pretty view but also host new mechanics!
SAVE AND CONTINUE
After literally years of having it on our to-do list, Crystal Rail now has an automatic-save and continue system! The game now saves at the start of every day in every mode; if you have to go in the middle of a run, you can rest assured you’ll be able to start it up again when you return!
TRAIN BUYING UI OVERHAUL
Train Buying UI Overhaul: the user-interface for our train-buys section of the game was created in summer of 2023 and remained untouched visually until now; we have redrawn all car-slot assets and added new UI which indicates the effects and capacities of each train car in real time!
DEMO NOTICE:
After much consideration, we have elected to disable unlocks for demo players as it was taking too much time to manage a separate set of unlocks. The demo will still offer hours of free gameplay, and will continue to receive new content in the coming months. We thank you for your patience and understanding, and we will continue updating the demo with new features and art.
Full patchnotes available on our discord!
Thank you as always for your continued support of Crystal Rail! More updates are expected so look forward to our next stop!