Above: In 2007, the Tweetsie “Kids Zone” wanted a couple of flash games; one of which turned out to be more complicated than anticipated.

Tweetsie Railroad Games

This Flash-based children's game for a regional amusement park required a path-finding algorithm.

Home / Projects / Tweetsie Railroad Games

One of my very first projects at NewCity was the implementation of a couple of Flash-based games for Tweetsie Railroad. These flash files are thirteen years old, but – for the moment – they still work if you have Flash installed.

Be The Locomotive Engineer

Not the best train simulator, I admit.

This is a simple whack-a-mole game. You choose from one of two Tweetsie characters and hit buttons as they pop up. (Just to be clear, this is not how real trains work.) Difficulty gradually increases. For the most part, this is simple event-driven ActionScript code. It was built in AS3 in the Flash editor.

The order you get the track pieces is randomized; in fact, I think the number of each is randomized as well. This play-through was a bit of a challenge.

Connect the Tracks Game

Here, you are fed a series of tracks and you have to drag them onto a grid to make a path from the start to the finish. This same mechanic was used as the “hacking” mini-game in Bioshock (also released in 2007), but I do not know if that’s where Jeff got the inspiration.

This was also coded in AS3 in the Flash editor, but I had to implement an A* Search algorithm with a binary heap to tell whether or not the train actually had a clear path to the exit. Not bad for a computer science drop-out who failed data structures.

Sound up, by the way.

Contents © their respective publication dates or 2019. This John Williams did not write the theme to Star Wars. “Elfin John” was originally a Tim Conway character.