Tren Track P&E Walkthrough

Building tracks is fun, but ultimately you want to wrap them up as a game, right? This P&E focuses on just that.

First take your Tren#

First off stamp Tren as guided.

Grabbin' a wagon#

You don’t have to have cargo and deliveries in your tracks but we’re going to for these lessons. Stamp one in as guided.

Under starters orders...#

We can’t have a proper Tren Track without a Start Gate. This communicates with the Track Logic wirelessly using transmitters and receivers. Stamp one in as guided.

Train check#

Depending what wagons and cargo you’re using you might want to set up an emitter with your checkpoint to make sure the player has the expected wagon/cargo for that point in the challenge. That’s what we’ve done here.

Connect Just Spawned to Destroy Emitted Object and then Emit New to Emitter Power.

Put an end to it#

Finally, we need the Finish Gate. Again, this communicates with the Track Logic wirelessly using transmitters and receivers. Stamp one in as guided.

Give it a go!#

The thing we can’t stress enough about creating Tren Tracks (or any game at all) is the need to playtest, playtest, playtest. You can’t properly set target times, deliveries and so on without trying it out. Now all the elements are in, let’s do our first playtest. Turn on the switch and then go to Play Mode.

Follow the instructions to get to the end as fast as possible and ignore any cargo for now.

How'd you do?#

We want to make sure that the 1 Pip (bronze) time is always achievable by all skill levels. We also want the 3 Pip (gold) to be achievable but not necessarily by any player. So we need to know what the quickest time possible is. We’ve already figured this out, so set the sliders as indicated.

Bonus fact - we thought “just over 4 seconds” was reasonable when we did this. But one of our awesome testers did it in 3.9 and has probably beaten that by now, so we made it 3.

Review and reflect#

Now that we have the times for doing it without cargo, we need to set it up for collection and delivery of cargo. We don’t want the player to manage to get gold if they ignore or lose the cargo. Let’s playtest again and see how long it takes if we collect and deliver the cargo. Careful with your speed on the seesaw and the bends.

How much is it worth?#

It takes a bit of time to collect that cargo so we need to account for that in the Cargo Value. Collecting it takes around 7 seconds, and we found that the fastest time with collecting it is just over 12. So that time minus delivery awards gold we need to set the Cargo Value to 9.

End on a positive note#

Maybe you don’t want to make a timed track. You might just want to make a puzzle track the player can take their time with. That’s easy-peasy - we just need to set the Timed Challenge switch to off. If success in your track is defined by cargo deliveries then use the Cargo Success Number slider to set that. If it’s not, just set it to 0. Here we’ve got a piece of cargo so set it to 1.

And you’re done! Hopefully this P&E along with the layout P&Es have given you the basics to start building your own tracks. Have fun!