Sydney Traindle

Inspiration

Sydney Traindle was a passion project started by Hemang, who loves trains. Unfortunately, none of the existing online games looked anything like the network he admired or tested his understanding of the Sydney railway network. He recruited Carrie, Sunny, William and Darcy, who put time aside in their days, to help bring this project to life. Today, Sydney Traindle is everyone’s baby, all routinely seeing the game change and finally grow to what it is today. We’re very happy with how the project turned out and would love it if Starlight could give us the opportunity to present Sydney Traindle to our fellow developers. It would give us a real opportunity to take on advice and immerse ourselves in the software development community.

What it does

Sydney Traindle is a Sydney train guessing game where you guess a station and receive feedback on your guess. This includes whether the correct station for the day shares any train lines with your guess, the direction of the correct station relative to your guess, and roughly how many stops away it is. This creates a fun gameplay loop that lets you test and recall your knowledge of the Sydney rail network.

How we built it

We built Sydney Traindle as a React + Vite web app hosted on GitHub Pages. It's powered by a station graph we built ourselves, where each station knows its lines, neighbours, and distance from Central, and this graph drives all the clues, including how many stops away your guess is, calculated via a breadth-first search across the network. The UI is split into React components for guessing, feedback, history, tutorials, and a zoomable map hint, with a date-based seed for the daily puzzle and local storage so progress and streaks carry over between visits.

Challenges we ran into

A key challenge that we ran into was managing the project while we all had jobs or our university studies. Originally, the next steps were unclear and hard to explain clearly. This led to low motivation across the team and our (rather nebulous) deadlines not being met.

Another challenge was responding to player feedback. We had a “Distance from Central” clue that many players during our tests found difficult to wrap their head around, and most just ignored. It took many meetings brainstorming possible replacements that balanced fun and intuitiveness while keeping the game challenging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Honestly, we are very proud of being able to work together and complete Sydney Traindle - as it started out as a little side project for fun. We are proud of how everyone had an incredibly vital part to play, and everyone was able to contribute and make Sydney Traindle as good as possible.

In terms of metrics, we are very proud that we have players that visit the website every single day to try and guess the station!

What we learned

These are heavily informed by the challenges we faced, but:

• Everyone should know what their role is and what they have to do as simply as possible. Otherwise, working is difficult and the energy isn’t there. Good project management is vital.
• Feedback. Feedback. Feedback! Having a new set of eyes on the product is the most important thing in the world. Everyone will see something new or a new problem that you could have never imagined in a million years.

What's next for Sydney Traindle

As we are very proud of Sydney Traindle, and we have gotten rave reviews from the people we have shown, we would like to advertise it to more Sydney-siders. With a larger playerbase and more feedback we can implement more features and continue to improve - maybe expanding to other networks too in the future.

Built With

• react
• vite