Carter Marshall

When designing the player’s experience for Choo Choo Boom Boom, one of the first hurdles I had to tackle was making sure the gameplay reflected the vision the studio had before my onboarding. This not only involved extensive research into documentation and previous work, but also figuring out the best way to incorporate my work on top of it without the two pieces juxtaposing one another.

The game itself was designed to be a play on the question, “What makes an on-rail shooter?” Instead of going the traditional route, however, In-Scope Studios created a physical on rails on-rail shooter. You play as the gunner aboard an old metro train equipped with three guns: The two cannons, both heavy and light, and the signature BFRG. Your goal is to save the city from the creature invading and causing mayhem.

One of my first major changes to the progression of the player was the inclusion of an overheat mechanic. Previously, the player could effectively spam both guns, which allowed for infinite point gain and a lack of depth in the player’s resource management. Through numerous Q/A testing sessions, we found that players would simply choose the heavy gun over the light gun without limits being applied. The overheat mechanic effectively eliminated spamming the guns to achieve a goal, especially when certain rings (i.e., heavy and light rings) had their own needed weaponry to destroy them.

Alongside this was the introduction of screen-space crosshairs with a slight amount of lag. This idea was taken through inspiration from games like No Man’s Sky and Star Citizen, though lag-pips have seen multiple iterations over time.