Chris Sawyer's Locomotion (often abbreviated to Locomotion) is a video game designed and programmed by independent game developer Chris Sawyer, and published by Atari in September 2004. The game is a simulation game in which the player takes on the role of a transportation company manager, building transportation networks and managing the flow of goods and passengers in order to compete against rival companies. Sawyer independently developed the game over nine years from the 1990s as a "spiritual successor to Transport Tycoon", with the game featuring "fundamentally the same" gameplay but with "differences in detail, scale and presentation" to update and refine the features that Sawyer "wanted to get right" in its predecessor.
Locomotion was released to mixed reviews, with critics observing the game had a dated presentation for the time and was less user-friendly than its predecessors. Following an extended hiatus from the video game industry, the game was re-released by Sawyer in 2013 as a mobile iteration of Transport Tycoon for Android and iOS. Locomotion has also since been the subject of open-source redevelopment by third parties.
Gameplay
Locomotion is an isometric transport simulation game using a refined version of the Transport Tycoon engine first used for RollerCoaster Tycoon 2. The game involves the management of a transport company to construct a network of trains, trams, trucks, buses, airplanes, and ships to co-ordinate a supply chain of resources, including minerals, goods, and passengers across industries to towns and cities. Players start with a bank loan and must build profitable networks to facilitate the supply and demand of resources to earn money and expand their company. To transport resources, players build networks between stations using road, rail, ports, and airports, and purchase vehicles of varying cost, speed, and reliability to travel between them. Players create profitable networks by transporting goods and passengers in efficient networks across greater distances, whilst minimizing transport costs.
Locomotion contains over 40 scenarios in which players compete with rival companies to create successful networks and meet various objectives, such as finishing in a certain ranking in the list of companies, or transporting a specific amount of cargo of a resource. Scenarios are based on five difficulty levels: Beginner, Easy, Medium, Challenging and Expert, and are based on fictional and real-world locations, including the United States, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The game also contains a scenario editor to allow players to create and modify the game's scenarios and create custom maps. Scenarios in Locomotion also supports online multiplayer for two players, which plays identically to single player scenarios except with minor restrictions to speed controls. The game also features a hidden train driving mode in which players can perform a keyboard command to assume control over the trains in the game.
Development and release
Locomotion was developed by game developer Chris Sawyer, who had previously developed the simulation game Transport Tycoon". Sawyer intended Locomotion to be a "spiritual successor" to Transport Tycoon, and had worked to complete such a game as early as 1996, but did not make a serious effort to create a successor until the release of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 in 2002. Sawyer also cited the desire to modernise Transport Tycoon to harness the increased technical capabilities of computers at the time, including greater processing power and memory, that allowed a game that "could handle many more more transport vehicles, larger maps, and multiple-level bridges and tunnels instead of just land-based construction," and "more detailed and smoother animation as well as the multi-level three-dimensional transport routes I wanted to include in previous games." Sawyer created the game independently, responsible for the "design, programming, project management and research" himself, with assistance from a graphic artist and musician. Sawyer reflected that Locomotion was created using "large parts of the programming" for RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, which was developed during the same time.