I think this is incredible, and I am so happy for him, he deserves all the praise he gets (and maybe more).
I will sin and make this about me, briefly, but just to say that when I was a kid/teenager with a really slow computer, a) I enjoyed coding much more, b) I think I was a way better programmer. Constraints make you better, you have to be smarter. I miss those times.
Well, nothing is easier then adding constraints. Removing them is what's difficult - so why don't you add them back if it makes you a better programmer and you enjoy doing it more?
Personally, I think the reason you enjoyed it more as a teenager is just down to the fact you were fully in control of what to do and had no external pressure to earn money etc, so if anything you had less constraints - at least from my point of view
> Well, nothing is easier then adding constraints.
Which is why dieting and quitting smoking are famously easy things to do! ;)
There's something to be said for the "scrappyness" of resource limitations inflicted upon you when solving some problem. A sense of Triumph against the Universe itself is a nice pay-off
Because the software industry doesn't pay anymore for constraints or doing things "the hard way". Everything is high-level language and by tomorrow. The day after it doesn't exist anymore anyway.
I'd wish to get a project that's low-level, multi-year and high quality of engineering and longevity. Make the best you can – something to be proud of.
Which is often the case in music too actually. So many famous artists and bands created their best work early in their careers. You would think touring and several albums make them perfect the craft of making songs, but I think involving money and external pressure actually kill the creative spark if you’re not mindful about it.
Those early albums often consist of material that was basically battle-hardened by the time it reached the studio. Bands early in their career often spend lots of time all in the same room, writing songs together then do lots of playing for small crowds, where they get a very up close feel for the audience response. Material that doesn’t go over well with band mates and audiences gets dropped.
With the industry’s album release cycle, bands are often under time pressure to cut a new album, so they end up writing in the studio, each person laying down tracks individually, and missing out on all the feedback of earlier iterations.
tl;dr: When given the easy option, people always take it, even when they know the hard route would be better in the long term. But the full story is interesting and not that long, it's worth reading.
Adding contraints makes it take longer to deliver a result. I probably cannot install today's engines SDKs and related tooling for example. I'd have to write my own. Doable, and would make me a better programmer, but you won't see results for a long time.
As it happens, I do this. I have various projects burning for years and yet to be published because in my hobby time I value good engineering over results.
What's easier is removing the constraints you just added artificially. Constraints you can remove with a flick of a finger are not constraints.
> so why don't you add them back
The reason the proverb says "necessity is the mother of invention" is because "desire" is usually not enough to drive it. It's easy to take the hard road when you're forced onto it, but very hard to choose it when there's an easy alternative.
> Constraints you can remove with a flick of a finger are not constraints.
Why not? Who cares how/why they're there, as long as you follow the constraints, regardless of how easy they are to remove, they're still there.
I frequently use this when stuck creatively in music production. "Ok, now I can only use this filter for any sound shaping", or "Make a song using only instruments outputting mono", or "Maximum 10 cables to make a new sound on the modular synth" or whatever. Really easy for me to skip these artificial constraints at any time, they still help a lot.
The people who face them. The constraints are making the goal harder to reach. The goal is on the other side of the constraints and it takes power of will to refuse to remove them and keep pushing. This forces a different, slower, more difficult to reach solution.
> when stuck creatively in music production
So you're not introducing constraints, you're creatively trying out things to fix your problem. They're not a wall preventing you from reaching your goal, they're the bridge. Your constraint is the temporary lack of creativity, and what you introduce is the means to reach the solution faster.
> Really easy for me to skip these artificial constraints at any time, they still help a lot.
When you remove these you're stuck in a creativity block and failed to achieve your goal. When you remove actual constraints you make the goal easier to reach. It's a matter of perspective and what you want to achieve. You wouldn't want a long road through the mountains as your daily commute but it's probably lovely as a hike.
The only way to make the problems comparable is to set a programming goal of "write the most efficient code to do X" but for real work the goal is almost always "do X".
> So you're not introducing constraints, you're creatively trying out things to fix your problem. They're not a wall preventing you from reaching your goal, they're the bridge. Your constraint is the temporary lack of creativity, and what you introduce is the creative solution.
I feel like we're talking past each other. Adding these sort of requirements in order to "fix the problem", is typically what people are referring to as "adding artificial constraints to foster creativity".
The goal is making a song, anything that restricts you on how you are allowed to do this, is a constraint, as far as I understand the word "constraint" at least.
> When you remove actual constraints you make the goal easier to reach.
Yes, this is why the previous examples are constraints, not "bridges". Without them it's easier, with them it's harder.
I think you're missing the context of what started this thread:
> I was a kid/teenager with a really slow computer [...] b) I think I was a way better programmer. Constraints make you better, you have to be smarter.
The goal is "write software" not "write optimized software".
When your goal is to write a software that runs on your machine, having the constraint of a slow machine forces you to write optimized code which is a slower, more difficult solution. When you have an unconstrained fast machine you can write boilerplate unoptimized code, which is quick and easy. If you constrain your fast computer you go from "easy solution" to "difficult solution" for the same goal of "write software". No programmer will ever say "making the computer slower really helped a lot to write code".
Your goal is "make a creative song" but you're stuck. You don't introduce constraints because they'll make it harder to get unstuck, you introduce them to make it easier. You literally said "they still help a lot".
> I frequently use this when stuck creatively in music production. [...] Really easy for me to skip these artificial constraints at any time, they still help a lot.
That's what you're missing. For you the real constraint would be to get creatively unstuck without any tricks. You are introducing things to help you reach your goal to get unstuck. You're expecting programmers to introduce things that prevent them from reaching their goal of creating programs that run.
In reality one huge reason software is slow and unoptimized is because programmers have beefy machines and can afford to take the easy road.
I didn't expect this simple concept will need so many explanations.
> I didn't expect this simple concept will need so many explanations.
You and me both brother :)
> No programmer will ever say "making the computer slower really helped a lot to write code".
I guess I'll be the first, as a programmer I do this all the time, when developing browser stuff I frequently throttle the available bandwidth and introduce jitter in the network connections so I can see and understand how things work with less optimal network connections, loads of us professional programmers do this when aiming for high quality software meant for end-users, in loads of different environments, not just browser development. Making the computer/IO/whatever slower/"less" does help a lot to write software for others.
> You're expecting programmers to introduce things that prevent them from reaching their goal of creating programs that run.
Well, yes and no. I expect professional programmers, my peers, to do this, as this is how you typically build reliable software, but I don't expect everyone to do this, definitively not amateurs just programming for fun.
> Your goal is "make a creative song" but you're stuck. You don't introduce constraints because they'll make it harder to get unstuck, you introduce them to make it easier. You literally said "they still help a lot".
Cheers for the attempt to decide what my goal is but no, the goal never is "make a creative song", the goal is precisely as previously stated: "make a song". Helpful tip for the future, read and understand what people write and don't assume they lie or misunderstand their own intention, and it'll be easier to understand other's point of view.
Regardless, I feel like both of us are digged into our understanding what the whole "add constraints to do better" process means and is, and no harm no foul, what I know helps me and I'm sure what you know helps you, so lets just leave it at that :) Wish you the best of weekends!
You do that because your goal s “optimized code” not just “code”. Your constraints are a tool that helps you achieve your goal. For most others the constraints are limitations from achieving their goal.
For me wearing a parachute is a constrain and carrying it is an act of will. For a skydiver not so much.
> You do that because your goal s “optimized code” not just “code”.
Again, my goal is "Ship working software", I don't care about optimizing at all, just baselevel "working" state of things, that's why I test things like reliability. But also again, our perspectives and understanding of terms seems to diverge a bunch, so much that discussing them seems relatively fruitless, at least seemingly to the two of us.
Simple and easy are often conflated a bit, but measured by outcomes, are quite different. Comments offerring humorous parallels of common simple and easy conflations will follow.
That's true, I just wanted to maybe add a new perspective to 101008 view that if he enjoyed working with technical constraints, he can still target eg embedded systems with massive resource constraints - and also to force an acknowledgement that the reason for his likely nostalgia to this kind of coding is likely more related to the mental freedom he enjoyed while working back then ... Because that too can be done, albeit with the caveat of time constraints because life doesn't go away no matter how much someone may want it to.
I feel exactly the same way. Though one extra factor is that I feel like my time was so pure back then. Now, with multiple degrees, I keep thinking about weird concepts like 'opportunity cost'. There was no opportunity cost when I was a kid. There was just time. Bucketloads of it!
I enjoy going back to basics every once in a while; do Arduino / embedded programming on a shitty netbook (it came with Windows but it has only 32GB of storage so it couldn't even update), build games / stuff in Pico-8, start a new Go project with just the main toolkit, etc.
Yes, true creativity usually or mostly comes from real constraints, in my experience.
As, if there are no constraints in some specific area, there is no kinda "survival need" to improve there, hence brain is not working as hard/smart/deep as it could.
Re: making things about me (but also kind of related), I am working on a project that requires sending encrypted telemetry data from a Crazyflie drone (so, STM32) and it's such a fun experience. Each telemetry payload is just 26B so I had to get creative, write down packet diagrams and then make it work in C. An AI agent helps a bit with some stuff but you're mostly on your own.
In general I highly recommend going the embedded/IoT way if you look for challenges and constraints.
If you think about how much time a single developer has to invest to create all the assets for such a massive game, 11 years doesn't sound like a lot of time...
(assuming he did all the assets himself and didn't use AI, which might be a bit naive)
The difference between today and 30 years ago is that if you are an individual developer, you are at the complete mercy of a single company (Valve), who can force you to do essentially anything they want for the privilege of publishing on their platform, with no meaningful alternative, and zero recourse if they say “no”.
Even if Valve holds a significant market share of the PC Gaming market, this is a harsh conclusion. There are other significantly more expensive and restrictive options, such as the Windows Store for Windows, or the Play Store for Android, or the App Store for iOS and MacOS.
PC has much free-er and more accessible options for indie developers, like itch.io. It's probably the least monopolistic gaming market out there.
The struggle of course is advertising and reach, not sure who the gate keepers for that were with TTD, maybe magazines?
Steam (which I'm guessing you're talking about) is nowhere close of being a monopoly. There are loads of alternatives out there, in wide use by people already. World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Minecraft, Roblox and more are all examples of big time successful games that never been available on Steam.
I would even go further, and say that this logic applies not just for massive games from massive publishers, but platforms like GoG works well as an alternative for indies.
Plus, consider the software distribution situation in the pre-Internet world. There was getting someone to arrange for very-limited-time distribution in physical stores (and paying out the ass for the privilege), or paying to advertise your mail-order distribution, or encouraging BBS operators to distribute your shareware that includes a "Mail $AMOUNT to this address and we'll mail you a full copy." message inside.
Of those options, the BBS one is probably the lowest cost, but -"shockingly"- that option is still available today... and is probably way easier for people to find your software than it was back in the day.
There are astroturfers out there who pretend that Steam is The Worst Thing Ever, but they distribute your game, dev-selected old (and pre-release) versions of your game, promotional materials for your game, and host forums and a news feed... forever. Valve also pretty clearly chooses to distribute games that are in the intersection of what's legal to distribute in the US and what the busybodies at MasterCard and Visa permit them to distribute.
If we lived in a just world, because of MasterCard's and Visa's enormous size, they'd be declared as something like "payment processors of last resort" and required to process transactions for anything that's legal to sell in the US, and subject to enormous fines if they so much as suggest to any merchant that MC/Visa will stop processing that merchant's payments for any reason other than a clear and obvious history of fraud.
It's 100% possible to publish a game outside of Steam. There used to be a publicity advantage to being on Steam but is that still there now that Steam is 99% slop?
There are successful indie games that only entered Steam late in their lives.
Both Itch.io and GOG are alternative platforms, as is just doing your own thing
Many games I own started their life distributed exclusively through a platform other than steam.
Arguably, you don't even want to approach steam distribution until you've already collected your hype. Steam no longer can surface gems, because it's just far too flooded, so you should seek alternative channels in general.
> Steam no longer can surface gems, because it's just far too flooded...
This hasn't been my experience. I've found that running the "Discovery Queue" a few times once or twice a week brings up an interesting game or two every month. It also brings up a bunch of stuff I'm not interested in, but that's the nature of game development... what you make isn't going to be particularly interesting to most folks.
There's also the "Show me a random game" link, which is fun to hit and see what crap it presents you. [0]
I have said it for a few years now. If Epic ever decided to go public on the stock market, I would throw a significant amount of my savings at them. Their technology is astounding.
Yes, some games have some issues but it really seems like that is a problem of developers not knowing when to say 'No!' to the giant tool kit they have been provided.
I'm not sure myself, as there's Epic the ligitous games company that wants more money from Fortnite, Epic the attempted digital games platform whose main userbase just claims a free game once every two weeks, and Epic the engine company.
I have more faith in Epic the engine company than the other Epics.
In development, you don't have the privilege of using optimised culling and LODs. For rapid development, very little code is compiled & there are extra IDE tools running.
When you consider that 16GB has become the minimum requirement for modern A+ titles (with the Windows OS & background tasks squating on 4-6GB). Creating such a title might be difficult on memory limited machine.
Unreal had made some improvements in this regard recently, with direct from storage assets loading & stuff.
I can tell you right now, from an M5 with 16 GB of RAM, I'd be hard pressed to squeeze a bit of ram for a game of sodoku if I'm already running an Android emulator plus a few IDEs and 10 tabs in Chrome... Being able to produce something of note, especially in the gaming space, with 16 GB of ram IS a feat in and of itself
If unreal cost money up front, would this have been built? No.
Unreal is saying: hey, we contributed to 1/20th of your success, because you could not have done this without us.
Thus, in the event that you're extremely successful, yes, you'll owe unreal a million dollars. But that's only because you made 20mm and keep 19mm for yourself.
Surely better than this engineer having to pay $100k upfront which would likely mean he never made the game at all. 5% over a million seems pretty reasonable to me. I guess it'd be an issue if profit margins were thin, but that wouldn't be the case here.
But it is free up to $1mm in revenue. Anyone can go and download the engine and use it as much as they want free. It is really smart and honestly $1mm is a generous entry point to capture a royalty for everyone involved.
Unreal is like venture capital or a book advance (or the equivalent in music record deal)
Can you self publish? Sure, of course, have fun.
But if you want the support and infrastructure of a company that understands the business of books, you take a deal and it is just like this: if a bunch of authors get book advances, that is generous to the ones who are unsuccessful, and they can only do that _because they capture the upside of those that are successful_.
Without that, you don't get advances for anyone.
So the point I'm making here: unreal provides variance reduction for all game publishers and yes that disproportionately benefits the ones who make under a million. But they're the ones who need the help!
And in exchange, if you're one of the lucky few, you pay a shockingly reasonable 5% in perpetuity.
I know you’re trolling but come on. The entry price for what you are suggesting would never be obtainable for folks like this kid. You can absolutely negotiate pricing if you are a big enough studio but for hobbyist they let you use it for a royalty. It’s great because it opens it up for everyone. If they charged a fixed fee it would have to be at a very high price.
Sure, and then he can afford it, because he's making over $1M/year revenue on this sim, and taking a very reasonable 5% off the top of that. So it blunts the profits a bit at that point, but it hardly seems like such a terrible thing at that point.
To be able to use this tech in the first place? I have no glue about business problems but this sounds far better then the 30% rip off by apple and Google app stores....
By the way you don't only have to file a report for Epic whenever you release a game using UE, you also have to report them your yearly sales and calculate what income is "directly attributable to UE" for that game. For an ordinary small person, for whom you imply lifetime 5% off gross worldwide revenue is a "happy problem", this is way more involved (and prone to legal liability) compared to app stores. You will probably have to hire people well before the million mark to make sure numbers are OK and you don't accidentally owe Epic $$$$$.
I know which model I would choose. Probably the one where I raise prices by 30% and don't have to deal with anything else.
At the point where you have 1 million in revenue you for sure have an accountant even just to do your yearly business taxes. So reporting to Epic just becomes an extra hour of work to make the report.
There is this high correlation with low quality comments and smiley faces, that and when people like to insult others and put a little winky face at the end.
You are simply making up nonsense. It is not a lot of work as most likely sales are being driven through a handful of platforms. Reporting is simple and no different than doing your taxes. It is very much a happy problem. Similar to having to pay more taxes. There is more burden but you are making more money.
Your argument is insane because Indonesia average income in USD on the high side is around $300. If you make $1mm USD, having to do some extra paperwork and pay $50k per $1mm of revenue is an awesome problem to have.
You're calling my argument insane, you're saying my comment is low quality, and imply I'm the one insulting. What is my argument then, in your opinion?
If that’s all you have to respond then you sir are the one with no argument. I have listed my points multiple times. All you keep saying is “they could offer it at a fixed price”. Well that price would be well above any hobbyist. It is kind of an insane argument. They have had fixed pricing before without royalty and usually that price is north of $1mm. Free + 5% is pretty amazing. There is enough competition in this space that you could always go elsewhere.
Classic now the “what are you upset about”. Sorry not upset here just love to push back on ridiculous people. Businesses are free to operate however they choose. There are other options in the market outside of unreal ( though they definitely have some of the best tech). 5% is incredibly cheap for small shops. Larger studios will negotiate better rates or potentially a fixed fee. You have still yet to support your argument.
If you get a million dollars in revenue as a solo dev, it's pretty much just winning the lottery. You've already spent all the working hours to make the game, so it's pretty much all profit at that point. What costs do you even have?
It's a free choice to use the engine, you can use another engine or make your own if 5% is too much for you.
Should unreal give away their work for free? What is your argument. They don’t take a single royalty until $1mm and 5% is not a wild number considering it’s making use of the engine.
Heck steam takes 30% which is much more egregious but factoring in costs of running steam, payment processing and the free marketing its almost always worth it.
Share a counter argument to how it should be please.
There's many ways that are better than royalties. Just sell the engine as a one time purchasec have a non-profit foundation where sponsors fund development, etc.
If Adobe sold their suite as one time purchase many creatives who can just afford a monthly subscription couldn't use it. Does it make it a great business model.
What are you trying to say? You can't even get the name of the company right. "unreal" won't give their work away for free. UE is a product, Epic is the company that develops UE.
Sorry I still could not understand your point about Adobe. Instead of getting defensive and attempting to deflect “what’s unreal?” in the context of unreal engine you should try to defend your position.
Edit: NM you are a new account. Shadow banned on my end. Enjoy!
I mean, if he makes a boatload of money then it's fine if a fraction of it goes to the engine. When his immediate needs are met, he can choose to either stay with unreal or move to an alternative later on without cost pressures.
Yep, and then we always get those regular posts "project XYZ is no longer", yeah people not paying.
Unreal is free to the extent it contributes to bringing even more people into the ecosystem, eventually becoming paying customers, Epic doesn't make it available out of their kindness, rather also taking into account there are other competing alternatives.
It's important to keep development going but commercial projects is not the only way. Godot Foundation exists and there are plenty of others in open-source space.
A nonprofit means actual reports about how money is used, and it's not as if commercial projects are somehow better because they don't fold or get sold or canceled.
And even between commercial ways, charging royalties is one of the worst. It doesn't cost Epic extra if my game starts making more money. Just make the engine a one-time purchase (per version, so you get to keep sales going) and everyone will be much happier. Sell additional services which actually do cost you money to keep up (multiplayer hosting).
I love Godot but it's not a particularly brilliant example of what you are trying to say. Many games made with Godot generate more profit than the entire budget of the engine itself.
The engine itself is far from cutting edge and missing several features that are now quite common elsewhere, like texture streaming, bindless textures, etc. The speed of development isn't blazing fast either (see the implementation of the traits system).
Devs are excellent at what they do but one could wonder how much faster and further it could go with more fundings.
Nothing against Godot, it's a great project, but looking at the wikipedia list of notable games using the engine, there's a single one I have heard of. Meanwhile about 28% of the market share of all video games is using Unreal. So I don't really see the need to make "everyone much happier" honestly.
> Sell additional services which actually do cost you money to keep up
After a game has been released a solo dev often has very little work to do, since they've already invested all of the development time ahead of release. So, by this logic they shouldn't really be allowed to charge anything for the game, except to cover potential work on updates.
Perhaps game projects don't need to operate like nonprofits, but then why do game engine projects?
There are notable games missing from that list. Unrailed 2, for example, which is, in my opinion, one of the best games ever created. I am not even a avid gamer and I recognize several games from that list.
Well then exactly what I was saying. This is a business & it's a commercial product, not a freebie. This is why I see many people look at UE but go with Godot. It's nice when you don't have to notify a megacorp about every game you release & then follow up with yearly revenue reports.
I always wonder how a solo developer can source high quality assets like these, plus develop a full game with them. In this case did the dev create the assets or did they purchase them from a freelancer? How much would purchasing this many assets cost?
Almost every time I see a halfway polished “solo developer” game, they did not do all the work themselves. Especially, they usually hire out the music, maybe other sounds, and much of the artwork. Sometimes they also have freelancers doing marketing and such. Sometimes even some paid help writing the software.
I highlight this not to bring those developers down, but because I think it’s important people understand how these things actually come to be, so they aren’t discouraged to try themselves by thinking they ought to actually be doing 100% of the work solo. That’s pretty rare.
I depends on the background. I'm 2 years into solo developing a game and all programming, artwork and animation is my own. I had to invest into quite some learning to make it possible, but I figured it's a worthwhile investment.
I do work with a composer, though.
Point being, it depends on which skills you bring to the table, which ones you are willing to learn and which ones are worth collaborating on.
I still think the term Solo-developer is justified in any case. The one who soley carries the burden of bringing the game from idea to the finish line is the solo developer, IMHO.
If a project is far more work than one person can do (as this train simulator obviously is), the term solo developer is no more justified than it would have been if Steve Jobs claimed to have solo-developed the iPhone, even if he could have justified saying he "brought the iPhone from idea to the finish line."
I don't know about this particular developer but I don't think there is anything "obviously" out of scope. I've worked in the animation industry and creating hard surface models with this quality is not really that hard for a skilled artist. As such I still stand by the opinion that it could be a solo effort depending on the developers background/skill.
So you need the solo developer not to contract out or buy in existing music, graphics, 3D assets, animations, marketing, or you won't call them a solo developer.
Right, so do you also need them to create the 3D engine or are they allowed that off the shelf? Oh, they need to make it themselves. You're strict!
Ok, so they're allowed to write for a platform? Oh, no they're not, that's relying on other people's code.
And writing in an existing language? Tsk tsk tsk. Got to invent the programming language yourself, otherwise you need to list the entire GCC/LLVM team as your collaborators on the game.
They have to create their own silicon too, it's cheating to rely other people's chips, how can you call yourself "solo"?
Are they allowed to sell it on Steam or do they need to build their own store and payment networks? Heck, should they get themselves accredited as a payment network. Oh, and as a bank.
And presumably, if the game needs to be translated to any language other than the developer's own, they have to do that translation themselves, right? Not rely on experts in that language. Can't really be a "solo" dev that way, can you?
And so on.
Building a game involves effort, and millions of decisions. Is the gameplay right? Is the story right? Are the graphics right? Design the characters, the levels, the world. Make the game run. Make the game available?
I can accept that solo developers will sometimes make the graphics/music/"assets" themselves, sometimes buy off the shelf, sometimes pay others. But unless they hire that person full time to collaborate on the game... they're still the solo developer.
They will definitely lean on existing 3D engines, libraries, plugins, font engines... and that reminds me, I've almost never seen a game developer design their own fonts. These reusable components can be used in games, and some are even intended to (e.g. engine plugins). But do they define the game experience? Generally, no. That's on the game developer.
The perception of what a polymath is is changing incredibly fast, as both the floor and ceiling for being passable or outstanding in any field is rising exponentially. For the last 50-oddish years, it's been the case that being proficient with a single piece of software can make you an invaluable asset in industry; understanding the concepts behind the software and the problems it solves even moreso. Rather recently, we've reached a point where software ergonomics, freely available education and information, and even AI assistance in development or usage have lowered this floor in terms of cost, knowledge, effort, and skill. For example, it's trivially easier today to create a 3d animation than it was 5, 10, or 20 years ago, and the visual quality of it would be similarly disproportionately better.
The domains of different crafts are ever-expanding, including all of their history and all new developments, of which new developments seem to be coming at an ever-increasing pace as populations grow, internet access grows, and the free time of populations spent doing things other than merely surviving grows. There is a larger and broader base of knowledge necessary for a person to be considered competent in the current state of anything, and the number of disciplines is also increasing. Two decades ago, having a person specializing in frontend development for a specific web browser would have been unthinkable.
All of this work is built upon the backs of other people. Game engines, 3d modeling and texturing and animating, language design and implementation, audio software and sound design, graphics libraries, runtime optimizations, operating system APIs, networking improvements, distribution networks, etc. etc.. To think that any one person could possibly create everything they use to then create these final products, no matter the scale they are, is ignorant.
> For example, it's trivially easier today to create a 3d animation than it was 5, 10, or 20 years ago, and the visual quality of it would be similarly disproportionately better.
True, but this also means that the bar has risen for animations in general, so while you might be able to create animations today as an amateur that is even better than the animations just five years ago, it still won't come close to what professionals can actually achieve today.
Your very last point speaks a lot to me though, almost every effort people are amazed by have at least two people involved, indirectly or directly, and attempting things like this on your own would be a fool's errand.
Solo developer just means they developed the game themselves, not made it all themselves. I'm not sure how you could write what you wrote without that occurring to you.
Absolutely not obvious to me, especially since I have heard a lot of solo dev stories that insist it was purely a 1-person project. And it’s true in some cases.
In that case, please, define "developed the game" for us. Is doing all the programming "developing" the game? Is coming up with the game design and hiring programmers "developing" the game?
What if you hire voice actors for each of the characters? And level designers? And animators? At what point does it stop being a solo project? Only when outside investors get involved? Or does it only stop being "solo" if those investors demand board seats? Or can it _still_ be considered "solo" even then?
It's not so much about the assets as the framing, lighting, positioning and blending it all in a compelling way. For instance in the trailer I recognize the large brick building at 0:14 from a cheap/free asset pack, though I don't recall which. And look at it - it's super generic copy/paste layering with some slight variations, and seemingly baked on lighting given the identical shading per floor/layer. But put in a well lit scene with appropriate framing, and suddenly you're here thinking it's a high end custom built asset.
Now a days you can also get basically endless assets for free. Unreal gives away a new pack every few weeks or so on Fab (and has been doing this for years), KitBash3D gives occasionally gives away some amazing assets, and many more. But again none of this matters without some serious artistic and style sense. Given I recognize at least one asset there, I'd imagine a good chunk of his assets are from stuff like this. But you're not going to be able to clone anything comparable even if you had the exact assets he used. Placement and such is way more of an artistic thing than you might expect.
Anecdote, but I recall my friend saying he worked on freelancing assets to some train game and showed me some pictures of the said game. Unless there are more of these in existence, I think it was this.
It wouldn't surprise me if Japan has its own market for train assets. There's a big community of train simulators! Go to the Kyoto or Tokyo train museums, they have dozens where you step into a replica of a train cab and then drive a photorealistic simulation (sometimes also just film) - the ex-keyboarder for Casiopeia runs a train simulation game company that makes those since the 90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoru_Mukaiya). There are some Nintendo Switch train simulators like Densha de GO that are only available in Japan.
I'm sure there's a treasure trove of already-built high-quality assets of Japanese trains.
You can buy them overseas from online secondhand stores like mandarake and play on your switch, because there is no region lock. Interface will still be in Japanese, but it is pretty obvious what to to and how.
I was looking at the controller support and apparently there are game controllers designed to follow the layout of a train operations controller with the same two levers that you can see in game.
There are lots of assets to purchase or even for free. majority of small devs will buy them, if they have money then will freelance. It’s very rare for one dev to do everything but do exist.
Assets are generally cheap, unity asset store itch.io
Unless you commission someone for work 1-2K would cover many small games easily.
In my region of the world this title (and also the title of being "the worst ever made") was reserved for the unnecessarily detailed electric locomotive simulator MaSzyna:
Reminds me of when I was younger and tried the F1 cars in Live for Speed racing simulator. Turns out it's actually really, really hard to keep an F1 car on the tracks.
I think Elder Scrolls Oblivion was like 80 person core team and 4 years of development and New Vegas was like 70 person dev team and 2 years of development.
But starfield, which was widely criticized by fans, was over 100 people and 8 years development. With the most common criticism from former devs being about the additional management structure and difficulty of communication.
I can’t help but feel there is a lesson there for tech companies where engineering orgs for products are 200+ people when a 20-30 person startup is your top competitor in the vertical.
I'm on the fence because I have a TSC-X controller and it's unclear if it's supported. Somebody on the forums posted a tool that converts generic joystick axes to keypresses, but not sure how well that works.
> Somebody on the forums posted a tool that converts generic joystick axes to keypresses, but not sure how well that works.
I don't have a TSC-X, but did frown a little bit that there wasn't a generic support for controllers with plain axes. I have a VKB STECS, and basically a 85% of train sims need a workaround.
The good news: Claude Code threw together a working prototype for me in a few minutes that had me mapping the two axes (power / brakes) perfectly. It's really a low barrier to entry these days. Can confirm that this game is amazing with it.
You make it sound like they didn’t even buy and run the game, but that’s not accurate.
> While the game encourages you to master the reasonably simple controls of its range of perfectly crafted engines, you can also just set it to play itself and then take over the free camera as it does.
That seems like a perfectly valid way to experience the game to me.
The author is "not exactly a train enthusiast" as they say, and nor are the vast majority of the audience . Yet the article presents the game in a way that sounds appealing to such an audience, potentially exposing it to more people than just the train fan niche. I think that alone makes it better than "terrible"
All journalism is terrible these days. They just want a catchy headline for the ad view and nothing else matters, including whether the headline is true or not.
Paid journalism is still often good (Bloomberg, FT). But yeah if you're just going to free sites it's the same as the free newspapers they used to give out for free in the subway - a few salacious articles, one or two ostensibly 'real news' pieces, and a bunch of ads.
The irony being, that youtubers and Twitch personalities have almost certainly played the games they are reviewing.
But they are considered at least a 'rung' lower than games journalists when it comes to how much access they have, and how much their opinion matters professionally.
There's an entire microcosm on youtube of former games journalists, generating a variety of content from good to slop. Most of them are from when "Games journalist" was still a classically trained journalist, and had real credentials and knowledge of how to critique the art form. Which is why they were generally pushed out, to be replaced with know nothings who are just there to parrot a script.
I own it and played it. It's good, very pretty, but highly repetitive. It's one 40km track, two trains, and most of the scenery is the same. It is one step above a Unreal Engine tech demo (e.g. the matrix demo from a few years back).
For one person it's impressive, but it won't knock the major players down any time soon.
what has improved a lot recently is the physically based rendering - specifically, the lighting. Looking at the steam page, this train game has that type of lighting.
Not to dismiss the effort by dev, but all Unreal engine games look photoreal these days. My point is that photorealism does not show effort these days.
Most of the review is about the art assets, and I doubt the big ones (e.g. the trains themselves) are off-the-rack Unreal assets. An engine like Unreal 5 will cast your assets in harsh relief. Which is to say, if your game's assets look custom and look good in Unreal 5, it does indeed demonstrate effort and skill.
It's the lighting etc that provide photo realism with Unreal. Even the demo that comes with Unreal where a robot is running around cubes on a small plain looks photoreal.
"Played properly, Running Train asks you to carefully control your speed, braking, and prompt, safe arrival at train stations, and rewards or penalizes you accordingly"
So it's basically a clone of 'Densha de go!' series.
A full-scale arcade version in this genre, evolving since 1996. Realistic controls, some seem even to include train crew uniforms you can wear while driving…
The article says the game should cost 18$ (should be ~15.74€), but it's actually showing as 19.50€ aka 22.29 USD. Does anyone know what's going on there? Is Stream charging more due to refund laws or something?
I can't find a website for the developer, also nothing listed in the Indonesian Wikipedia article. Sadly no way to buy it directly and give them 100% of the money in their currency
Article was published close to the game's Steam release, and there was a 10% discount on launch. https://steamdb.info/app/4630570/. It's 20 USD now, and I assume the remaining difference is simply due to specifics around setting prices on steam and currency conversion.
I never got the appeal for these sim games. From the screenshots, it looks like a beautiful game and I guess I could enjoy the visuals for an hour or 2.
But I don't see how it'd entertain me for hours on end. If someone here is into these sim games, what's the reason you keep going back to them?
The simple pleasure of a job well done, even if the job is completely imaginary, because my real job is complex and stupid.
Driving the train is a little technical, but not overwhelmingly so. You need to pay attention to the gradient, speed, train weight and rail slipperiness to brake with perfect accuracy every time you come to a station. Signalling is not overly complex but you can benefit from tabbing over to a reference sheet every so often (Ah, double flashing yellow means we’re on a diverging route ahead with a reduced turnout speed so I must brake soon). Learning the german safety systems (PZB and LZB) was interesting. Guiding a 3000t freight train down a mountain isn’t something that can be rushed, it forces you to slow down and be patient.
So relaxation mostly. I can launch the game, drive something somewhere for an hour or two, get some endorphins because I did it all right, etc.
These Japanese style train sims are quite a bit less realistic, including fewer signals you need to know (Densha de GO!! essentially only has speed limits, g-forces, train load, and weather modeling.) and simplifying the controls to essentially a single handle that goes from full brake when pushed all the way forward to full traction when pulled toward you, with a switch you need to press to be able to pull it past neutral.
But in return they add very technically difficult tasks, such as stopping within a millimeter of the stopping point within a second of the time in the timetable without re-braking or making passengers uncomfortable, or stuff such as pointing at signals. They even add completely unrealistic stuff just for the sake of gameplay such as bonus zones where you need to stay at an exact speed, sounding the horn for overpasses and level crossings, or dimming the lights for oncoming trains.
They "feel" very different to games like Train Sim World, but I like them both regardless.
Imagine if we can replace all the locomotive drivers with pensions with retired software engineers who literally will pay to do the job remotely? Even better if there is a prediction market and twitch stream on top with bets for the most mundane things.
I play Euro Truck Simulator 2 (ets) and its my happy place, its just zen, Sometimes i will have a plugin that will get me local radio stations and i will cruise through italy and greece listening to talk shows in languages i don't understand, sometimes i will do it listening to the rumble of the truck, and i switch off, and allow my thoughts to run free.
I've recently started getting into flight sims, and i'm looking for the same sort of thing with that (the only problem with ets is the graphics still looks like a 2013 game) and i think i will get there, its just i'm at the 'learning to fly' stage, and thats kinda difficult. Well, actually flying is surprisingly easy, landing is the tricky bit ;-)
If you're flying a larger passenger plane into basically any major airport, ILS should get you most of the way down - you just need to control speed (you're looking for landing speed +10 by the end)
Depending where you're flying, some arrivals have gaps which threw me off massively when I first started - it's because IRL there's ATC there to guide you to the final intersection for the runway, usually 10NM out... so aim for that and capture ILS, it's quite a wide margin for capture.
If you're going manually, 10nm out you want to start descending at around 600-700fpm from ~3000ft and you should have visual on the runway at this point
I started playing Farm Simulator 2025 recently because a friend wanted me to. Even now, I really long for a proper game with progression, etc. But it's really just a way to drive machines.
And I find myself wanting to do that, even without the progression I crave from a game. But then I also feel like I'm massively wasting my time, and I could be playing other games, getting stuff done around the house, or just reading a book. Instead of driving a tractor for no freaking reason. But I still want to do it.
I've been trying to figure that out myself, and I think it involves things being locked away at the start, and unlocking them as you meet certain criteria.
Currently, the only criteria is money. You can literally just buy anything at any time, if you have the cash. Tractors, land, buildings... Anything. Almost all of it is instant. The few things that aren't instant are just annoying and not worth the effort.
There is a mod that unlocks tractors according to the year, matching them up with when they were released. That's at least a kind of progression, but still not what I'd enjoy.
In short, I think I want it more gamified and less of a straight simulation. Unlocking better tractors would mean reaching certain goals while using lesser tractors, etc. Motor Town has this. You need to do a certain amount of work with lesser machines to unlock the later ones. You also need the money.
But it would also go beyond what the game has. For some reason, you can be hired as a contractor for things, and rent the necessary equipment for fairly cheap. But as a landowner, you have to micromanage that situation. It's up to you to have the equipment and actually be ready to do the work before you can hand it off to an AI worker. And they're often terrible at it, especially with the lesser-used machines, like (according to a bug report I saw) carrot harvesters.
The game absolutely nails simulating driving a tractor. But as a "game", it fails.
After school I played countless hours of Euro Truck Simulator. It was an awesome escapism. Being a truck driver, driving through sun and snow, in different parts of Europe. Crazy drivers at night, needed to think quick in difficult situations.
Have you ever wanted to try flying a plane or running a city or being a tycoon of roller coasters without having to invest much time, money, and energy to take flight lessons, run for political office, or work your way up through an amusement park company? Sim games let you play with these complex systems easily and walk away when you get bored.
I have often said that for many people that want to change the world (for the greater negative), they need to get addicted to Sim games. They will end up doing a lot less harm in that situation.
The real question is, how do you determine who is going to do negative or positive gains. A debate that is millennia old.
I get the impression he's not saying all sim games, but "drive the vehicle" sims in general. I have to agree. There's just nothing engaging about it imo.
Similar to you, I don't see the attraction of these sims.
I have a theory it is a mindfulness thing like many hobbies.
Think knitting or crochet or even building and running a model train set in the garage. These things aren't terribly hard once you learn the basics but you have to pay attention to various details over time and it allows you to tune out from the rest of the world when you want to.
A mind is slightly different from a body in that it really does not understand the concept of "off". It is movement by its very nature. Even its relaxation is expressed through activity. Simple repetition and continuous low-level positive feedback is a way for it to rest while moving.
For the same reason that the Vegas attraction “dig a bunch of holes with industrial diggers” was so popular: people want to do jobs they think are cool without years of training cost up front, and this is a way for them to do so.
Farming simulator and Car mechanic simulator are both in my todo list, because those are hobbies I’m truly interested in pursuing and I’d like to know what it’s like to do them as a sim first. Most other live sims like this are deeply uninteresting to me, even if they have lovely visuals. Meanwhile I’ve seriously considered buying a Renesas SH-2A simulator for nearly $3k so that I can develop better car software!
Is there some job you’ve always wanted to do that requires extensive training that you can’t / won’t complete at this time? That would be a use case for sims that’s less game and more hobby for you (but that’s always a blurry line for all of us so don’t take that as criticism).
I have never played any train sim, but I read video game press that this one hits different.
A lot of train sim are about building the rail network, where Running Train focuses on driving. The scenery (dozens of kilometers of japanese railway) is beautiful and it reproduces the japanese railway system realistically.
Like for some other simulation games, I am impressed how can some go to such lengths to get as close as possible to the real thing but would not actually do it as a job.
Not making fun of it, I just found it fascninating.
I can get it. I can totally see something being fun if it's 2-10 hours a week, but not fun if it's 40-50 hours a week.
Also very different when you are in control of exactly when you're doing it, you can pause anytime you need to go grab laundry, etc.
Driving/train sims have pretty much zero appeal to me, but I enjoy flight sims a fair amount. I'd never want to make the sacrifices to my life that would be required to be a commercial pilot. Being a personal/hobby pilot is very expensive and quite a bit more dangerous.
A lot of these train simulator games are a mix between job simulation and arcadey fun. To give a big example of the latter, in the Densha de GO!! games, the goal is to follow all the speed limits, brake gently without allowing the G-forces to exceed a certain amount, and to arrive at the station exactly on time while stopping at the exact right spot to the millimeter.
For some people, just the fact that it's a simulation is enough to make it fun. But to many others, the challenge (and I can promise you it is quite difficult) is what makes it a fun game.
I've been playing these games for half a decade now, and I've only managed a zero zero once (meaning that you come to a stop exactly on time to the second and stop within 0.0cm of the marker.)
There are studies explaining the appeal of the "chore simulators". You should look them up because I may not do them justice, but in a nutshell it's basically that they are very satisfactory because they present clear rules, they allow you to "do a job" and if you do it well, you progress. There are no tricks, no unexpected crisis, you do the thing, you get money, you get better gear, you do the thing better. This is escapism for people frustrated with "real life". Real life sucks. Sometimes you work hard and you still don't get "better gear".
Driving simulations - be it planes, cars, trucks, boats, etc - are maybe a bit different, but essentially it's just a combination of chill vibe, romanticized experience (the classic "I wish I could be a farmer", no you don't) and a degree of what I described above. Obviously there are also people who are just passionate about trains, planes and such.
The chill cozy games are a real trend, and it's due to what I described in the 1st paragraph.
Microsoft used to have "Microsoft Train Simulator". It was being shown off at E3 in 2001 in a dark little corner, by this older gentlemen who for I know may have been the producer or main developer.
I'm not into trains, but I felt bad for this guy so I spent 15 minutes at his booth and let him show me everything. It seemed to have made his day.
> is in fact set in a fictional region of Japan, but is created so lovingly that you’ll believe it’s real life.
This is actually a major cheat. Realism is expensive, and exposes your creation to the equivalent of the "uncanny valley" for vehicle simulation - the simulated world is never accurate enough and you can't help but notice the differences with reality. E.g. if you see generic buildings ("autogen") near a location you know IRL, the simulation feels immediately sloppy.
Yet, as long as I'm not interested in visiting real places, I would go for a vehicle simulation in a fictional world any day. I wouldn't mind if the vehicles were also fictional, as long as they require some technique to drive them. What matters in games is challenge and mastery, but not what you master; your RTS, FPS or chess skills have very little value IRL.
> Zoom out far enough—and for some reason it will let you—and you see the tiles, the roads that don’t line up, and the various tricks and techniques that allow it to look so realistic from low down. But don’t do that! That’s silly. This is a train sim, not a plane sim, you’ve no business in the sky.
OpenBVE one-upped BVE train sim with external cameras, and as a result you see all this too. In my eyes, they sort of miss the point of a train simulation: the view point is normally attached to the driver, so one can use all sorts of tricks to avoid having to "paint the entire wall" - which is quite important if you count on a community of fan modders who have limited resources.
Another notable, if old, train simulator from Japan is OpenBVE. It was easy to model railroads on it. Many short Brazilian routes were/are modeled in OpenBVE. It is particularly convincing since it simulates well the typical lateral wobbling that metric trains are known for.
Do you mean actual Brazilian railway track engineers used this game to plan/develop actual routes? Or just that you can play Brazilian routes in the game?
Looks beautiful and I am filled with an instant sense of nostalgia looking at the screenshots.
Personally if I were going to adopt a nerdy train hobby, I would tend more toward train photography. Recently train photographers have been in the news for mostly bad reasons [1], but I have also seen train photographers setting up in rural locations and the scenery looks stunning and also totally chill. The problems arise when people gather en masse to get the "iconic" shots that have been probably been photographed a million times before.
Or just go out and actually ride a bunch of different routes. It's been a long time since I've done it, but just riding a local or express train through a scenic area is delightful.
Of course there's no reason that true train afficianados can't do all of the above, as well as building model trains!
The one thing that is keeping me from riding the routes that I believe would be the must fun/scenic is the OBSCENE cost of those tickets. Granted, these aren't commuter tickets.
I would love a trip across the high plains and through the mountains by train. Just like I would love to take a cruise from the bottom of the Mississippi to the top.
In Japan it's quite reasonable to ride local trains. I've been meaning to do a trip along the recently re-opened Tadami Line [1], for example. The one way cost for the full 4-hour, 135km trip is only ¥2,750 ($17).
Though when you add in the costs of getting to the start/end of the line, overnight accomodations, and potentially the cost of getting to Japan first - it gets quite a bit more expensive. But staying at a little guesthouse along the way is also part of the charm.
You probably won't enjoy it because it's a sim game and not fun in the same way Super Mario Bros is. But it's probably more interactive than Mixtape since you are operating a train.
I personally probably won't play Mixtape or this game but both look like good experiences to me if you are in the respective target audience.
At least in my experience, every single game I've launched has worked on Linux. I don't play online shooter games which seems to be the only category that doesn't work.
FWIW, many online shooter games work just fine. Those with extremely invasive kernel-level anticheat do not. Some of those with less-invasive anticheat also do not.
So, yeah, shit like the latest CoD, Valorant, Apex Legends [0], and that godawful Marathon game won't run... but that's because of active work by the devs to make it so that it won't.
I game on Linux (have so for years) and the only thing I can't play is a few AAA FPS titles. Honestly not much of an issue depending on what games you play.
I see that MS is trying to force anti cheat stuff out of lower level OS rings. They may unintentionally allow future compatibility with Linux compatibility layers. That is a funny situation.
...and yet out of 280 multiplayer games in my library 200 are marked as Deck Verified or Playable (and most of the rest has no rating available). Also, looks like all of your examples are from a single particular niche.
It should be acknowledged, yes, but not while failing to mention that it mostly applies to the genre of competitive shooters. "Generally don't run" doesn't apply to pretty much anything else, where a statement closer to truth would be "generally run, with some notable exceptions".
> ...where a statement closer to truth would be "generally run, with some notable exceptions".
Yep. Devs usually have to actively make their game not work on Proton for it to not work on the version of Proton that Steam ships. Most devs aren't so petty as to put in that extra work, so they don't.
I do not play multiplayer games, and it has come to the point where I don't even check Proton compatibility on these because it is so reliable now in that situation.
There are a very small minority of games that use kernel-level anticheat that won't work, including newer BF6 and COD. Tbh I wouldn't play those anyway because of that feature, which sucks because BF series was fun.
I enjoyed the hell out of BF I and BF V. I also enjoy shooters that have "modern" weaponry. Given how fun BF I was at launch, and V was when I picked it up, I purchased a copy of BF 2042 at launch because -given that that's the time before the "I'm going to do nothing but snipe from spawn to maxxximise my KDR and get Sick Youtube Clips" crew comes to be the majority of the playerbase- that's the best time to play these games.
I regret that purchasing decision so much. BF 2042 was very, very pretty. It looked so good. But -as a game- it was so bland and boring.
Steam needs a statistic for Wine/crossover. I play tons of games on my mac via steam through crossover. It's crazy that multiple layers of translation work so well.
Mac market share is closer to 20% when you exclude machines installed in offices and enterprises. Some estimates put the number as high as 30% in North America.
The fact that the Steam number is as high as it is, despite the extreme lack of compatible content, is noteworthy.
A pattern I’ve found useful in other settings is starting with code for an existing “game” that sort of resembles what you want to make and then modifying components until you have a whole new game but it shares similar infrastructure to the original. So you benefit from the existing system and avoid a lot of problems.
That's the part that is visible to everyone else, so that's the part that an LLM can see. That means someone else can clone your ideas and aesthetics. The ol' double-edged sword.
Absolute nonsense. There is no cookie-cutter formula for game development, despite what the idea guys think. Mario 64 was literally just Mario in a single small room until the last six months of development. They focused purely on the actual game - the mechanics, physics, movesets, items, and enemies - inside that tiny room until it felt perfect. Then, in one final push, they quickly slapped together all the levels and the storyline at the very end.
We are very quickly going to see the reality: games are made by programmers. Everyone else who has spent decades comfortably riding on the programmers backs is being replaced by AI. This includes the artists, the junior programmers, the testers, all of them. The future isn't bloated teams, it's going to be just one lone genius (or a small group of programming geniuses banding together) and his magnum opus across the board.
If the Touhou games or Cave Story were released today, all of Hackernews would be like "dude, I wonder what their LLM workflow is like!" Japanese solo hikikomori devs have been putting out insane stuff since long before LLMs emerged.
Not really, those games are very simple code wise. A high schooler could do it (source me).
You could make a bullet hell game engine as a project in an intro CS course.
The hard part is the content in the game, and ZUN was already a composer. That just leaves the code which is easy, and the bullet patterns, which ZUN clearly improved at through his earlier games. (and the art, which is famously bad though endearing)
The other comment said that obviously no solo dev do everything by himself. They must have asset maker or song maker who do all things mostly uncredited. But, here we are, of course there are true solo devs!
> Not really, those games are very simple code wise. A high schooler could do it (source me).
That very much depends on how much they did themselves. If they used unity, and went very light on the simulation, sure.
> You could make a bullet hell game engine as a project in an intro CS course.
No you couldn’t. Well you could but it wouldn’t be appropriate for actual beginners unless you stripped it down so much that calling it an engine was meaningless.
> No you couldn’t. Well you could but it wouldn’t be appropriate for actual beginners unless you stripped it down so much that calling it an engine was meaningless.
You definitely can. One of the assignments in the CS intro course I took was a bullet hell game. "calling it an engine was meaningless" is an opinion that requires ignoring the fundamentals of what a game engine is.
A game engine is a framework that allows you to create games. Assuming you don’t have tons of content (and I’m sure you didn’t in an intro CS class), building a game is an easier task than building a game engine.
Let me ask you this. What were the parameters of your assignment? What libraries were you allowed to use.
By modern standards, yes, writing a bullet hell shooter game is not hard.
But ZUN started on the PC-98.
To put that platform in a western context, imagine if IBM had gone with planar graphics for VGA. Or an Amiga with no coprocessors, sprites, or scrolling[0]. You have a lot of pixels to fill and no help to do it with. It can't even run DooM[1]. Most other developers threw their hands up and shipped RPGs, erotic visual novels, or porn. Getting a fast action game running on PC-98 is a genuine accomplishment.
[0] I am aware that I just described a compact Macintosh.
It actually seems to be a relatively small vocal group. I've marked most of them red (as I previously did the one above) with https://hackersmacker.org
Am I the only one that thinks the word "pretty" is overused to describe the visual quality and artistry of games? I see this word thrown around often and it feels so low-effort.
Looks very realistic, however I have to question the whole premise of a train sim, trains seem to be the most boring vehicle to choose here, they run in tracks so not much freedom, basically accelerate and brake.
Then you know nothing about trains and the track networks they run on, which is probably why you dont find them interesting. Thats fine, just realise there is much more to trains than accelerate and brake :)
Well TBF OP is more or less correct, and I say this as a person who is pretty much into trains (although not train sims specifically). All a conductor can do is accelerate and brake - respect speed limits, brake in time so you don't overrun the platform at the next station (for passenger trains), be on the lookout for people/vehicles crossing the tracks illegally (and hope that they get out of the way fast enough, because once you see them, it's usually too late to stop in time, unless the train is really slow), be careful (especially when you have a freight train) not to be too slow before an incline, otherwise you might not make it all the way up etc. etc. Where you go is not your decision, the points are set remotely.
There is a lot more than that. Monitoring things like power generation, fuel, breaking ability, wheel heating sensors, managing door systems, human aspects like reading signals and lights and deciding what to do, all the way down to simple things like horns, wipers, and lights. Its pretty much exactly the same as a car but without a steering wheel and lots of added electrical systems.
Would you say a car is just accelerate, breaking, and steering?
Just my experience from being on planes, they take off, cruise, slow down and land, am I missing anything?
...seriously, 99%+ of the job of a conductor (and of a pilot) could be automated, the reason you still have a person (or two) in the cockpit is the rest of the time. As the saying goes, "flying is hours and hours of boredom sprinkled with a few seconds of sheer terror". And the same is also valid for trains. There are automated trains, but AFAIK all of them are metros or people movers where the whole system is closed off (platform doors etc.) and track conditions are closely monitored. I'm not aware of an automated train running on a "traditional" track network.
Cmon planes move is 3 axis (yes trains technically do but not via the controls) and take-off landing is a lot more complex than leaving/stopping at a station, the comparison is crazy.
The dev is a person from Indonesia (Rizky Nova) who's device has 16GB of ram.
Being able to use the Unreal Engine for free to develop this is awesome. This couldn't have happened 10 years ago.
I think this is incredible, and I am so happy for him, he deserves all the praise he gets (and maybe more).
I will sin and make this about me, briefly, but just to say that when I was a kid/teenager with a really slow computer, a) I enjoyed coding much more, b) I think I was a way better programmer. Constraints make you better, you have to be smarter. I miss those times.
Well, nothing is easier then adding constraints. Removing them is what's difficult - so why don't you add them back if it makes you a better programmer and you enjoy doing it more?
Personally, I think the reason you enjoyed it more as a teenager is just down to the fact you were fully in control of what to do and had no external pressure to earn money etc, so if anything you had less constraints - at least from my point of view
> Well, nothing is easier then adding constraints.
Which is why dieting and quitting smoking are famously easy things to do! ;)
There's something to be said for the "scrappyness" of resource limitations inflicted upon you when solving some problem. A sense of Triumph against the Universe itself is a nice pay-off
Smoking and eating unhealthy food are constraints to life! ;)
Because the software industry doesn't pay anymore for constraints or doing things "the hard way". Everything is high-level language and by tomorrow. The day after it doesn't exist anymore anyway.
I'd wish to get a project that's low-level, multi-year and high quality of engineering and longevity. Make the best you can – something to be proud of.
Which is often the case in music too actually. So many famous artists and bands created their best work early in their careers. You would think touring and several albums make them perfect the craft of making songs, but I think involving money and external pressure actually kill the creative spark if you’re not mindful about it.
Those early albums often consist of material that was basically battle-hardened by the time it reached the studio. Bands early in their career often spend lots of time all in the same room, writing songs together then do lots of playing for small crowds, where they get a very up close feel for the audience response. Material that doesn’t go over well with band mates and audiences gets dropped.
With the industry’s album release cycle, bands are often under time pressure to cut a new album, so they end up writing in the studio, each person laying down tracks individually, and missing out on all the feedback of earlier iterations.
> Well, nothing is easier then adding constraints.
Technically it's easy. Mentally it's nearly impossible. This comment posted on Ars yesterday blew my mind:
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/we-cannot-choose-to-becom...
tl;dr: When given the easy option, people always take it, even when they know the hard route would be better in the long term. But the full story is interesting and not that long, it's worth reading.
Adding contraints makes it take longer to deliver a result. I probably cannot install today's engines SDKs and related tooling for example. I'd have to write my own. Doable, and would make me a better programmer, but you won't see results for a long time.
As it happens, I do this. I have various projects burning for years and yet to be published because in my hobby time I value good engineering over results.
> nothing is easier then adding constraints
What's easier is removing the constraints you just added artificially. Constraints you can remove with a flick of a finger are not constraints.
> so why don't you add them back
The reason the proverb says "necessity is the mother of invention" is because "desire" is usually not enough to drive it. It's easy to take the hard road when you're forced onto it, but very hard to choose it when there's an easy alternative.
> Constraints you can remove with a flick of a finger are not constraints.
Why not? Who cares how/why they're there, as long as you follow the constraints, regardless of how easy they are to remove, they're still there.
I frequently use this when stuck creatively in music production. "Ok, now I can only use this filter for any sound shaping", or "Make a song using only instruments outputting mono", or "Maximum 10 cables to make a new sound on the modular synth" or whatever. Really easy for me to skip these artificial constraints at any time, they still help a lot.
> Who cares how/why they're there
The people who face them. The constraints are making the goal harder to reach. The goal is on the other side of the constraints and it takes power of will to refuse to remove them and keep pushing. This forces a different, slower, more difficult to reach solution.
> when stuck creatively in music production
So you're not introducing constraints, you're creatively trying out things to fix your problem. They're not a wall preventing you from reaching your goal, they're the bridge. Your constraint is the temporary lack of creativity, and what you introduce is the means to reach the solution faster.
> Really easy for me to skip these artificial constraints at any time, they still help a lot.
When you remove these you're stuck in a creativity block and failed to achieve your goal. When you remove actual constraints you make the goal easier to reach. It's a matter of perspective and what you want to achieve. You wouldn't want a long road through the mountains as your daily commute but it's probably lovely as a hike.
The only way to make the problems comparable is to set a programming goal of "write the most efficient code to do X" but for real work the goal is almost always "do X".
> So you're not introducing constraints, you're creatively trying out things to fix your problem. They're not a wall preventing you from reaching your goal, they're the bridge. Your constraint is the temporary lack of creativity, and what you introduce is the creative solution.
I feel like we're talking past each other. Adding these sort of requirements in order to "fix the problem", is typically what people are referring to as "adding artificial constraints to foster creativity".
The goal is making a song, anything that restricts you on how you are allowed to do this, is a constraint, as far as I understand the word "constraint" at least.
> When you remove actual constraints you make the goal easier to reach.
Yes, this is why the previous examples are constraints, not "bridges". Without them it's easier, with them it's harder.
I think you're missing the context of what started this thread:
> I was a kid/teenager with a really slow computer [...] b) I think I was a way better programmer. Constraints make you better, you have to be smarter.
The goal is "write software" not "write optimized software".
When your goal is to write a software that runs on your machine, having the constraint of a slow machine forces you to write optimized code which is a slower, more difficult solution. When you have an unconstrained fast machine you can write boilerplate unoptimized code, which is quick and easy. If you constrain your fast computer you go from "easy solution" to "difficult solution" for the same goal of "write software". No programmer will ever say "making the computer slower really helped a lot to write code".
Your goal is "make a creative song" but you're stuck. You don't introduce constraints because they'll make it harder to get unstuck, you introduce them to make it easier. You literally said "they still help a lot".
> I frequently use this when stuck creatively in music production. [...] Really easy for me to skip these artificial constraints at any time, they still help a lot.
That's what you're missing. For you the real constraint would be to get creatively unstuck without any tricks. You are introducing things to help you reach your goal to get unstuck. You're expecting programmers to introduce things that prevent them from reaching their goal of creating programs that run.
In reality one huge reason software is slow and unoptimized is because programmers have beefy machines and can afford to take the easy road.
I didn't expect this simple concept will need so many explanations.
> I didn't expect this simple concept will need so many explanations.
You and me both brother :)
> No programmer will ever say "making the computer slower really helped a lot to write code".
I guess I'll be the first, as a programmer I do this all the time, when developing browser stuff I frequently throttle the available bandwidth and introduce jitter in the network connections so I can see and understand how things work with less optimal network connections, loads of us professional programmers do this when aiming for high quality software meant for end-users, in loads of different environments, not just browser development. Making the computer/IO/whatever slower/"less" does help a lot to write software for others.
> You're expecting programmers to introduce things that prevent them from reaching their goal of creating programs that run.
Well, yes and no. I expect professional programmers, my peers, to do this, as this is how you typically build reliable software, but I don't expect everyone to do this, definitively not amateurs just programming for fun.
> Your goal is "make a creative song" but you're stuck. You don't introduce constraints because they'll make it harder to get unstuck, you introduce them to make it easier. You literally said "they still help a lot".
Cheers for the attempt to decide what my goal is but no, the goal never is "make a creative song", the goal is precisely as previously stated: "make a song". Helpful tip for the future, read and understand what people write and don't assume they lie or misunderstand their own intention, and it'll be easier to understand other's point of view.
Regardless, I feel like both of us are digged into our understanding what the whole "add constraints to do better" process means and is, and no harm no foul, what I know helps me and I'm sure what you know helps you, so lets just leave it at that :) Wish you the best of weekends!
You do that because your goal s “optimized code” not just “code”. Your constraints are a tool that helps you achieve your goal. For most others the constraints are limitations from achieving their goal.
For me wearing a parachute is a constrain and carrying it is an act of will. For a skydiver not so much.
> You do that because your goal s “optimized code” not just “code”.
Again, my goal is "Ship working software", I don't care about optimizing at all, just baselevel "working" state of things, that's why I test things like reliability. But also again, our perspectives and understanding of terms seems to diverge a bunch, so much that discussing them seems relatively fruitless, at least seemingly to the two of us.
Simple and easy are often conflated a bit, but measured by outcomes, are quite different. Comments offerring humorous parallels of common simple and easy conflations will follow.
That's true, I just wanted to maybe add a new perspective to 101008 view that if he enjoyed working with technical constraints, he can still target eg embedded systems with massive resource constraints - and also to force an acknowledgement that the reason for his likely nostalgia to this kind of coding is likely more related to the mental freedom he enjoyed while working back then ... Because that too can be done, albeit with the caveat of time constraints because life doesn't go away no matter how much someone may want it to.
I feel exactly the same way. Though one extra factor is that I feel like my time was so pure back then. Now, with multiple degrees, I keep thinking about weird concepts like 'opportunity cost'. There was no opportunity cost when I was a kid. There was just time. Bucketloads of it!
I enjoy going back to basics every once in a while; do Arduino / embedded programming on a shitty netbook (it came with Windows but it has only 32GB of storage so it couldn't even update), build games / stuff in Pico-8, start a new Go project with just the main toolkit, etc.
Yes, true creativity usually or mostly comes from real constraints, in my experience.
As, if there are no constraints in some specific area, there is no kinda "survival need" to improve there, hence brain is not working as hard/smart/deep as it could.
> I will sin and make this about me (continues to make an awesome, general point about engineering)
:)
And that is why gamedevs do not get machine-upgrades
Re: making things about me (but also kind of related), I am working on a project that requires sending encrypted telemetry data from a Crazyflie drone (so, STM32) and it's such a fun experience. Each telemetry payload is just 26B so I had to get creative, write down packet diagrams and then make it work in C. An AI agent helps a bit with some stuff but you're mostly on your own.
In general I highly recommend going the embedded/IoT way if you look for challenges and constraints.
Unreal Engine's been free for just over 11 years now: https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free
If you think about how much time a single developer has to invest to create all the assets for such a massive game, 11 years doesn't sound like a lot of time...
(assuming he did all the assets himself and didn't use AI, which might be a bit naive)
Apparently he was into 3d-modeling since 11 years old, he got into programming later.
> This couldn't have happened 10 years ago.
I agree. Something similar could have happened 30 years ago, and it did, see Transport Tycoon (or a lot of early games). But from 2000 to 2020?
a) Transport Tycoon does not have that detail grade, actually its a "comic sim"
b) Chris Sawyer had a team of graphic artists etc, IIRC
c) TT is not about a "train sim", but a business sim
How is Minecraft doing these days?
The difference between today and 30 years ago is that if you are an individual developer, you are at the complete mercy of a single company (Valve), who can force you to do essentially anything they want for the privilege of publishing on their platform, with no meaningful alternative, and zero recourse if they say “no”.
Even if Valve holds a significant market share of the PC Gaming market, this is a harsh conclusion. There are other significantly more expensive and restrictive options, such as the Windows Store for Windows, or the Play Store for Android, or the App Store for iOS and MacOS. PC has much free-er and more accessible options for indie developers, like itch.io. It's probably the least monopolistic gaming market out there. The struggle of course is advertising and reach, not sure who the gate keepers for that were with TTD, maybe magazines?
> with no meaningful alternative
Steam (which I'm guessing you're talking about) is nowhere close of being a monopoly. There are loads of alternatives out there, in wide use by people already. World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Minecraft, Roblox and more are all examples of big time successful games that never been available on Steam.
I would even go further, and say that this logic applies not just for massive games from massive publishers, but platforms like GoG works well as an alternative for indies.
Plus, consider the software distribution situation in the pre-Internet world. There was getting someone to arrange for very-limited-time distribution in physical stores (and paying out the ass for the privilege), or paying to advertise your mail-order distribution, or encouraging BBS operators to distribute your shareware that includes a "Mail $AMOUNT to this address and we'll mail you a full copy." message inside.
Of those options, the BBS one is probably the lowest cost, but -"shockingly"- that option is still available today... and is probably way easier for people to find your software than it was back in the day.
There are astroturfers out there who pretend that Steam is The Worst Thing Ever, but they distribute your game, dev-selected old (and pre-release) versions of your game, promotional materials for your game, and host forums and a news feed... forever. Valve also pretty clearly chooses to distribute games that are in the intersection of what's legal to distribute in the US and what the busybodies at MasterCard and Visa permit them to distribute.
If we lived in a just world, because of MasterCard's and Visa's enormous size, they'd be declared as something like "payment processors of last resort" and required to process transactions for anything that's legal to sell in the US, and subject to enormous fines if they so much as suggest to any merchant that MC/Visa will stop processing that merchant's payments for any reason other than a clear and obvious history of fraud.
Alas.
I don't follow gaming news closely. Are there examples of this being a problem that I can read about?
It's 100% possible to publish a game outside of Steam. There used to be a publicity advantage to being on Steam but is that still there now that Steam is 99% slop?
There are successful indie games that only entered Steam late in their lives.
Both Itch.io and GOG are alternative platforms, as is just doing your own thing
Many games I own started their life distributed exclusively through a platform other than steam.
Arguably, you don't even want to approach steam distribution until you've already collected your hype. Steam no longer can surface gems, because it's just far too flooded, so you should seek alternative channels in general.
> Steam no longer can surface gems, because it's just far too flooded...
This hasn't been my experience. I've found that running the "Discovery Queue" a few times once or twice a week brings up an interesting game or two every month. It also brings up a bunch of stuff I'm not interested in, but that's the nature of game development... what you make isn't going to be particularly interesting to most folks.
There's also the "Show me a random game" link, which is fun to hit and see what crap it presents you. [0]
[0] <https://store.steampowered.com/explore/random/>
Very cool to see an Indonesian dev on the homepage of HN!
I have said it for a few years now. If Epic ever decided to go public on the stock market, I would throw a significant amount of my savings at them. Their technology is astounding.
Yes, some games have some issues but it really seems like that is a problem of developers not knowing when to say 'No!' to the giant tool kit they have been provided.
I'm not sure myself, as there's Epic the ligitous games company that wants more money from Fortnite, Epic the attempted digital games platform whose main userbase just claims a free game once every two weeks, and Epic the engine company.
I have more faith in Epic the engine company than the other Epics.
And then Epic, the medical records company? Oh man!
That sets off alarm bells for me.
Wouldn't they have used Unity 10 years ago?
Out of curiosity, what is the significance of the 16GB of RAM?
In development, you don't have the privilege of using optimised culling and LODs. For rapid development, very little code is compiled & there are extra IDE tools running.
When you consider that 16GB has become the minimum requirement for modern A+ titles (with the Windows OS & background tasks squating on 4-6GB). Creating such a title might be difficult on memory limited machine.
Unreal had made some improvements in this regard recently, with direct from storage assets loading & stuff.
I can tell you right now, from an M5 with 16 GB of RAM, I'd be hard pressed to squeeze a bit of ram for a game of sodoku if I'm already running an Android emulator plus a few IDEs and 10 tabs in Chrome... Being able to produce something of note, especially in the gaming space, with 16 GB of ram IS a feat in and of itself
> Being able to use the Unreal Engine for free to develop this is awesome
... and paying Epic 5% of all lifetime profit is a blessing too (if he makes money appropriate for "the best train sim ever made")
Unreal is completely free for up to $1 million in revenue. And at that point, the 5% royalty is very much a happy problem.
Lifetime royalty fee on any related worldwide gross revenue is a happy problem?
The question is about counterfactuals
If unreal cost money up front, would this have been built? No.
Unreal is saying: hey, we contributed to 1/20th of your success, because you could not have done this without us.
Thus, in the event that you're extremely successful, yes, you'll owe unreal a million dollars. But that's only because you made 20mm and keep 19mm for yourself.
That's an incredible bargain.
Shiny, that's why I thought you might've felt it fair, but couldn't have put it this well.
Surely better than this engineer having to pay $100k upfront which would likely mean he never made the game at all. 5% over a million seems pretty reasonable to me. I guess it'd be an issue if profit margins were thin, but that wouldn't be the case here.
Sure as long as we acknowledge that this isn't really free it's just deferred payment
But it is free up to $1mm in revenue. Anyone can go and download the engine and use it as much as they want free. It is really smart and honestly $1mm is a generous entry point to capture a royalty for everyone involved.
They could have just sold the engine, even a subscription is better than royalties. If my game sells more it doesn't cost Epic any more money.
You misunderstand the business model.
Unreal is like venture capital or a book advance (or the equivalent in music record deal)
Can you self publish? Sure, of course, have fun. But if you want the support and infrastructure of a company that understands the business of books, you take a deal and it is just like this: if a bunch of authors get book advances, that is generous to the ones who are unsuccessful, and they can only do that _because they capture the upside of those that are successful_.
Without that, you don't get advances for anyone.
So the point I'm making here: unreal provides variance reduction for all game publishers and yes that disproportionately benefits the ones who make under a million. But they're the ones who need the help!
And in exchange, if you're one of the lucky few, you pay a shockingly reasonable 5% in perpetuity.
I know you’re trolling but come on. The entry price for what you are suggesting would never be obtainable for folks like this kid. You can absolutely negotiate pricing if you are a big enough studio but for hobbyist they let you use it for a royalty. It’s great because it opens it up for everyone. If they charged a fixed fee it would have to be at a very high price.
Not deferred payment for most devs as they do not reach the 1 million revenue
For "the best train sim ever made" they probably reach it.
Sure, and then he can afford it, because he's making over $1M/year revenue on this sim, and taking a very reasonable 5% off the top of that. So it blunts the profits a bit at that point, but it hardly seems like such a terrible thing at that point.
To be able to use this tech in the first place? I have no glue about business problems but this sounds far better then the 30% rip off by apple and Google app stores....
I mean, he's still going to be paying 30% to Steam.
> 30% rip off by apple and Google app stores
Sounds like a happy problem to me;)
By the way you don't only have to file a report for Epic whenever you release a game using UE, you also have to report them your yearly sales and calculate what income is "directly attributable to UE" for that game. For an ordinary small person, for whom you imply lifetime 5% off gross worldwide revenue is a "happy problem", this is way more involved (and prone to legal liability) compared to app stores. You will probably have to hire people well before the million mark to make sure numbers are OK and you don't accidentally owe Epic $$$$$.
I know which model I would choose. Probably the one where I raise prices by 30% and don't have to deal with anything else.
At the point where you have 1 million in revenue you for sure have an accountant even just to do your yearly business taxes. So reporting to Epic just becomes an extra hour of work to make the report.
Or not. I depends on the country and its tax system.
What is this insane argument. Now you are telling me it’s a burden of paperwork because reporting your revenue gets complicated?
I'm saying it's not a "happy problem":)
There is this high correlation with low quality comments and smiley faces, that and when people like to insult others and put a little winky face at the end.
You are simply making up nonsense. It is not a lot of work as most likely sales are being driven through a handful of platforms. Reporting is simple and no different than doing your taxes. It is very much a happy problem. Similar to having to pay more taxes. There is more burden but you are making more money.
Your argument is insane because Indonesia average income in USD on the high side is around $300. If you make $1mm USD, having to do some extra paperwork and pay $50k per $1mm of revenue is an awesome problem to have.
You're calling my argument insane, you're saying my comment is low quality, and imply I'm the one insulting. What is my argument then, in your opinion?
If that’s all you have to respond then you sir are the one with no argument. I have listed my points multiple times. All you keep saying is “they could offer it at a fixed price”. Well that price would be well above any hobbyist. It is kind of an insane argument. They have had fixed pricing before without royalty and usually that price is north of $1mm. Free + 5% is pretty amazing. There is enough competition in this space that you could always go elsewhere.
If you are a fan of royalty based business models, you can be that. What are you so upset about?
Classic now the “what are you upset about”. Sorry not upset here just love to push back on ridiculous people. Businesses are free to operate however they choose. There are other options in the market outside of unreal ( though they definitely have some of the best tech). 5% is incredibly cheap for small shops. Larger studios will negotiate better rates or potentially a fixed fee. You have still yet to support your argument.
Yeah, you also get updates to the engine, Steam's share is bigger, and you still keep everything else.
I would be okay with getting 75% of everything earned over $1M.
> you also get updates to the engine
They could sell the engine and sell new versions separately as one time purchase.
> I would be okay with getting 75% of everything
I'd be okay getting 70% from the start. That's not what it's about.
If you get a million dollars in revenue as a solo dev, it's pretty much just winning the lottery. You've already spent all the working hours to make the game, so it's pretty much all profit at that point. What costs do you even have?
It's a free choice to use the engine, you can use another engine or make your own if 5% is too much for you.
> If you get a million dollars in revenue as a solo dev, it's pretty much just winning the lottery
You know it's not 1 mil per year, it's 1 mil over your lifetime
The vast, vast majority of indie game devs will not see $1m in revenue in multiple lifetimes.
Should unreal give away their work for free? What is your argument. They don’t take a single royalty until $1mm and 5% is not a wild number considering it’s making use of the engine.
Heck steam takes 30% which is much more egregious but factoring in costs of running steam, payment processing and the free marketing its almost always worth it.
Share a counter argument to how it should be please.
There's many ways that are better than royalties. Just sell the engine as a one time purchasec have a non-profit foundation where sponsors fund development, etc.
If they sold it as a one time purchase this kid would have never been able to use Unreal.
If Adobe sold their suite as one time purchase many creatives who can just afford a monthly subscription couldn't use it. Does it make it a great business model.
Sorry I don’t know what you are trying to say?
What are you trying to say? You can't even get the name of the company right. "unreal" won't give their work away for free. UE is a product, Epic is the company that develops UE.
Sorry I still could not understand your point about Adobe. Instead of getting defensive and attempting to deflect “what’s unreal?” in the context of unreal engine you should try to defend your position.
Edit: NM you are a new account. Shadow banned on my end. Enjoy!
That is fair for something that makes the game possible in the first place.
Can’t tell if you mean it (that it’s fair) or you would’ve preferred a different pricing structure?
It was sarcasm to remind this is a commercial product.
I mean, if he makes a boatload of money then it's fine if a fraction of it goes to the engine. When his immediate needs are met, he can choose to either stay with unreal or move to an alternative later on without cost pressures.
Unreal devs have bills to pay as well.
We already know what happens in Nebraska.
To those asking about the reference to Nebraska, I'm pretty sure it's a reference to XKCD 2347 "Dependency": https://xkcd.com/2347/
Yep, and then we always get those regular posts "project XYZ is no longer", yeah people not paying.
Unreal is free to the extent it contributes to bringing even more people into the ecosystem, eventually becoming paying customers, Epic doesn't make it available out of their kindness, rather also taking into account there are other competing alternatives.
It's important to keep development going but commercial projects is not the only way. Godot Foundation exists and there are plenty of others in open-source space.
A nonprofit means actual reports about how money is used, and it's not as if commercial projects are somehow better because they don't fold or get sold or canceled.
And even between commercial ways, charging royalties is one of the worst. It doesn't cost Epic extra if my game starts making more money. Just make the engine a one-time purchase (per version, so you get to keep sales going) and everyone will be much happier. Sell additional services which actually do cost you money to keep up (multiplayer hosting).
I love Godot but it's not a particularly brilliant example of what you are trying to say. Many games made with Godot generate more profit than the entire budget of the engine itself.
The engine itself is far from cutting edge and missing several features that are now quite common elsewhere, like texture streaming, bindless textures, etc. The speed of development isn't blazing fast either (see the implementation of the traits system). Devs are excellent at what they do but one could wonder how much faster and further it could go with more fundings.
Nothing against Godot, it's a great project, but looking at the wikipedia list of notable games using the engine, there's a single one I have heard of. Meanwhile about 28% of the market share of all video games is using Unreal. So I don't really see the need to make "everyone much happier" honestly.
> Sell additional services which actually do cost you money to keep up
After a game has been released a solo dev often has very little work to do, since they've already invested all of the development time ahead of release. So, by this logic they shouldn't really be allowed to charge anything for the game, except to cover potential work on updates.
Perhaps game projects don't need to operate like nonprofits, but then why do game engine projects?
There are notable games missing from that list. Unrailed 2, for example, which is, in my opinion, one of the best games ever created. I am not even a avid gamer and I recognize several games from that list.
Cruelty Squad was developed in Godot which means most dev's are just weak /s
I just think of Steve Ballmer's ad for Windows 1.0 (1986)
"Order today! PO box 286 DOS... Except in Nebraska!"
https://youtu.be/sforhbLiwLA
Curious. Why wasnt it available in Nebraska? :-)
I doubt Epic struggles for money. By the way what happens in Nebraska?
It is also not a charity, it is a business.
xkcd has the answer.
Well then exactly what I was saying. This is a business & it's a commercial product, not a freebie. This is why I see many people look at UE but go with Godot. It's nice when you don't have to notify a megacorp about every game you release & then follow up with yearly revenue reports.
What happens in Nebraska?!?
xkcd has the answer.
I always wonder how a solo developer can source high quality assets like these, plus develop a full game with them. In this case did the dev create the assets or did they purchase them from a freelancer? How much would purchasing this many assets cost?
Almost every time I see a halfway polished “solo developer” game, they did not do all the work themselves. Especially, they usually hire out the music, maybe other sounds, and much of the artwork. Sometimes they also have freelancers doing marketing and such. Sometimes even some paid help writing the software.
I highlight this not to bring those developers down, but because I think it’s important people understand how these things actually come to be, so they aren’t discouraged to try themselves by thinking they ought to actually be doing 100% of the work solo. That’s pretty rare.
I depends on the background. I'm 2 years into solo developing a game and all programming, artwork and animation is my own. I had to invest into quite some learning to make it possible, but I figured it's a worthwhile investment. I do work with a composer, though.
Point being, it depends on which skills you bring to the table, which ones you are willing to learn and which ones are worth collaborating on.
I still think the term Solo-developer is justified in any case. The one who soley carries the burden of bringing the game from idea to the finish line is the solo developer, IMHO.
If a project is far more work than one person can do (as this train simulator obviously is), the term solo developer is no more justified than it would have been if Steve Jobs claimed to have solo-developed the iPhone, even if he could have justified saying he "brought the iPhone from idea to the finish line."
I don't know about this particular developer but I don't think there is anything "obviously" out of scope. I've worked in the animation industry and creating hard surface models with this quality is not really that hard for a skilled artist. As such I still stand by the opinion that it could be a solo effort depending on the developers background/skill.
This is somewhat deconstructive.
So you need the solo developer not to contract out or buy in existing music, graphics, 3D assets, animations, marketing, or you won't call them a solo developer.
Right, so do you also need them to create the 3D engine or are they allowed that off the shelf? Oh, they need to make it themselves. You're strict!
Ok, so they're allowed to write for a platform? Oh, no they're not, that's relying on other people's code.
And writing in an existing language? Tsk tsk tsk. Got to invent the programming language yourself, otherwise you need to list the entire GCC/LLVM team as your collaborators on the game.
They have to create their own silicon too, it's cheating to rely other people's chips, how can you call yourself "solo"?
Are they allowed to sell it on Steam or do they need to build their own store and payment networks? Heck, should they get themselves accredited as a payment network. Oh, and as a bank.
And presumably, if the game needs to be translated to any language other than the developer's own, they have to do that translation themselves, right? Not rely on experts in that language. Can't really be a "solo" dev that way, can you?
And so on.
Building a game involves effort, and millions of decisions. Is the gameplay right? Is the story right? Are the graphics right? Design the characters, the levels, the world. Make the game run. Make the game available?
I can accept that solo developers will sometimes make the graphics/music/"assets" themselves, sometimes buy off the shelf, sometimes pay others. But unless they hire that person full time to collaborate on the game... they're still the solo developer.
They will definitely lean on existing 3D engines, libraries, plugins, font engines... and that reminds me, I've almost never seen a game developer design their own fonts. These reusable components can be used in games, and some are even intended to (e.g. engine plugins). But do they define the game experience? Generally, no. That's on the game developer.
Here is Jonathan Blow's placeholder art for Braid: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/Braid-art-1.j...
Here is how good David Hellman, the artist he hired, made it: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2e/Braid-art-2.j...
David Hellman is credited as the game's artist, but it's still effectively Jonathan Blow's game from top to bottom.
The perception of what a polymath is is changing incredibly fast, as both the floor and ceiling for being passable or outstanding in any field is rising exponentially. For the last 50-oddish years, it's been the case that being proficient with a single piece of software can make you an invaluable asset in industry; understanding the concepts behind the software and the problems it solves even moreso. Rather recently, we've reached a point where software ergonomics, freely available education and information, and even AI assistance in development or usage have lowered this floor in terms of cost, knowledge, effort, and skill. For example, it's trivially easier today to create a 3d animation than it was 5, 10, or 20 years ago, and the visual quality of it would be similarly disproportionately better.
The domains of different crafts are ever-expanding, including all of their history and all new developments, of which new developments seem to be coming at an ever-increasing pace as populations grow, internet access grows, and the free time of populations spent doing things other than merely surviving grows. There is a larger and broader base of knowledge necessary for a person to be considered competent in the current state of anything, and the number of disciplines is also increasing. Two decades ago, having a person specializing in frontend development for a specific web browser would have been unthinkable.
All of this work is built upon the backs of other people. Game engines, 3d modeling and texturing and animating, language design and implementation, audio software and sound design, graphics libraries, runtime optimizations, operating system APIs, networking improvements, distribution networks, etc. etc.. To think that any one person could possibly create everything they use to then create these final products, no matter the scale they are, is ignorant.
> For example, it's trivially easier today to create a 3d animation than it was 5, 10, or 20 years ago, and the visual quality of it would be similarly disproportionately better.
True, but this also means that the bar has risen for animations in general, so while you might be able to create animations today as an amateur that is even better than the animations just five years ago, it still won't come close to what professionals can actually achieve today.
Your very last point speaks a lot to me though, almost every effort people are amazed by have at least two people involved, indirectly or directly, and attempting things like this on your own would be a fool's errand.
Even the famously brought up cases of solo projects often end up hiring help once they become popular. Stardew Valley and Dwarf Fortress come to mind.
I think for the later stages it's common to contract someone for other platforms, especially mobile.
Dwarf Fortress didn't have any assets at all initially...
The Stardew Valley dev did do everything himself though
Which is impressive, but he is both an outlier and was heavily supported by his partner during development.
I would never view a truth-teller in a negative light.
If that's how it was developed, then it wasn't made by a solo developer. What you're describing is called a team.
Yes, solo developer does not mean "solo developer, composer, artist, etc."
Not lately, loads of sub-jobs going to LLMs..
Solo developer just means they developed the game themselves, not made it all themselves. I'm not sure how you could write what you wrote without that occurring to you.
Absolutely not obvious to me, especially since I have heard a lot of solo dev stories that insist it was purely a 1-person project. And it’s true in some cases.
In that case, please, define "developed the game" for us. Is doing all the programming "developing" the game? Is coming up with the game design and hiring programmers "developing" the game?
sits back with popcorn
> Is doing all the programming "developing" the game?
Yes, if you're also doing game design.
> Is coming up with the game design and hiring programmers "developing" the game?
Yes, so is using LLMs to do the programming.
What if you hire voice actors for each of the characters? And level designers? And animators? At what point does it stop being a solo project? Only when outside investors get involved? Or does it only stop being "solo" if those investors demand board seats? Or can it _still_ be considered "solo" even then?
Given that Death Stranding 2 only credits Kojima as the game's writer and designer, I guess -by GGP's very silly definition- it's a solo project. XD
Designing the game and having codex shit out the code is how I roll.
Hmm, it didn’t occur to me. Yeah, not sure it’s obvious to many people so was glad for the explanation
FWIW, that was not obvious to me either, and I appreciated the parent comment
It's not so much about the assets as the framing, lighting, positioning and blending it all in a compelling way. For instance in the trailer I recognize the large brick building at 0:14 from a cheap/free asset pack, though I don't recall which. And look at it - it's super generic copy/paste layering with some slight variations, and seemingly baked on lighting given the identical shading per floor/layer. But put in a well lit scene with appropriate framing, and suddenly you're here thinking it's a high end custom built asset.
Now a days you can also get basically endless assets for free. Unreal gives away a new pack every few weeks or so on Fab (and has been doing this for years), KitBash3D gives occasionally gives away some amazing assets, and many more. But again none of this matters without some serious artistic and style sense. Given I recognize at least one asset there, I'd imagine a good chunk of his assets are from stuff like this. But you're not going to be able to clone anything comparable even if you had the exact assets he used. Placement and such is way more of an artistic thing than you might expect.
Anecdote, but I recall my friend saying he worked on freelancing assets to some train game and showed me some pictures of the said game. Unless there are more of these in existence, I think it was this.
Well, there are 864 other train sim games on Steam right now, so there are quite a few others in existence.
Please tell him thank you from us all :)
100% they look incredible.
It wouldn't surprise me if Japan has its own market for train assets. There's a big community of train simulators! Go to the Kyoto or Tokyo train museums, they have dozens where you step into a replica of a train cab and then drive a photorealistic simulation (sometimes also just film) - the ex-keyboarder for Casiopeia runs a train simulation game company that makes those since the 90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoru_Mukaiya). There are some Nintendo Switch train simulators like Densha de GO that are only available in Japan.
I'm sure there's a treasure trove of already-built high-quality assets of Japanese trains.
You can buy them overseas from online secondhand stores like mandarake and play on your switch, because there is no region lock. Interface will still be in Japanese, but it is pretty obvious what to to and how.
I was looking at the controller support and apparently there are game controllers designed to follow the layout of a train operations controller with the same two levers that you can see in game.
I mentioned Densha de GO above, they have a designated controller like that for the Nintendo Switch too :)
It was below when I left the comment.
I thought it was kind of commoditised these days - there's an Unreal asset store I think? Probably one for Unity as well.
There are lots of assets to purchase or even for free. majority of small devs will buy them, if they have money then will freelance. It’s very rare for one dev to do everything but do exist.
Assets are generally cheap, unity asset store itch.io
Unless you commission someone for work 1-2K would cover many small games easily.
Nowadays a solo developer could use AI to generate some of these assets.
In my region of the world this title (and also the title of being "the worst ever made") was reserved for the unnecessarily detailed electric locomotive simulator MaSzyna:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1033030/MaSzyna/
Turns out that such a vehicle, even though simple in principle, has quite the startup procedure and a layman would have trouble making it go.
Reminds me of when I was younger and tried the F1 cars in Live for Speed racing simulator. Turns out it's actually really, really hard to keep an F1 car on the tracks.
One person made the best train sim. Meanwhile AAA studios need 400 people to make the same game twice.
I think Elder Scrolls Oblivion was like 80 person core team and 4 years of development and New Vegas was like 70 person dev team and 2 years of development.
But starfield, which was widely criticized by fans, was over 100 people and 8 years development. With the most common criticism from former devs being about the additional management structure and difficulty of communication.
I can’t help but feel there is a lesson there for tech companies where engineering orgs for products are 200+ people when a 20-30 person startup is your top competitor in the vertical.
including patches to make "it stable", and do not forget DLC additional updates!
> including support for the Zuiki MASCON, a bespoke peripheral for train driving sims.
This just makes me feel so glad to be alive today!
Yeah, love that is just works.
I'm working on a bit of a hobby project to rebuild a beefier Mascon. Mainly inspired by how much I enjoyed Running Train
I'm on the fence because I have a TSC-X controller and it's unclear if it's supported. Somebody on the forums posted a tool that converts generic joystick axes to keypresses, but not sure how well that works.
> Somebody on the forums posted a tool that converts generic joystick axes to keypresses, but not sure how well that works.
I don't have a TSC-X, but did frown a little bit that there wasn't a generic support for controllers with plain axes. I have a VKB STECS, and basically a 85% of train sims need a workaround.
The good news: Claude Code threw together a working prototype for me in a few minutes that had me mapping the two axes (power / brakes) perfectly. It's really a low barrier to entry these days. Can confirm that this game is amazing with it.
"Somebody on the forums posted a tool that converts generic joystick axes to keypresses, but not sure how well that works."
Joy2Key has been a staple for many a gamer for a while, and reliable. I've used it to control my mouse, even, from my gamepad.
Game looks amazing from a solo dev but this article is terrible, like the journo didn't even play the game they just watched the game.
You make it sound like they didn’t even buy and run the game, but that’s not accurate.
> While the game encourages you to master the reasonably simple controls of its range of perfectly crafted engines, you can also just set it to play itself and then take over the free camera as it does.
That seems like a perfectly valid way to experience the game to me.
The author is "not exactly a train enthusiast" as they say, and nor are the vast majority of the audience . Yet the article presents the game in a way that sounds appealing to such an audience, potentially exposing it to more people than just the train fan niche. I think that alone makes it better than "terrible"
Yeah, it’s a classic bystander’s assessment.
The job of a games journalists isn't to play games or explain games to gamers. It's to explain the social context of a game to a general audience.
If you want a review service or consumer guide then pay for it.
All journalism is terrible these days. They just want a catchy headline for the ad view and nothing else matters, including whether the headline is true or not.
Paid journalism is still often good (Bloomberg, FT). But yeah if you're just going to free sites it's the same as the free newspapers they used to give out for free in the subway - a few salacious articles, one or two ostensibly 'real news' pieces, and a bunch of ads.
There is like 1 or 2 actual "video game journalists" everyone else is just a glorified blogger.
The irony being, that youtubers and Twitch personalities have almost certainly played the games they are reviewing.
But they are considered at least a 'rung' lower than games journalists when it comes to how much access they have, and how much their opinion matters professionally.
There's an entire microcosm on youtube of former games journalists, generating a variety of content from good to slop. Most of them are from when "Games journalist" was still a classically trained journalist, and had real credentials and knowledge of how to critique the art form. Which is why they were generally pushed out, to be replaced with know nothings who are just there to parrot a script.
>like the journo didn't even play the game
That is industry standard
I like this one, too : https://alexanderperrin.com.au/paper/shorttrip/
I own it and played it. It's good, very pretty, but highly repetitive. It's one 40km track, two trains, and most of the scenery is the same. It is one step above a Unreal Engine tech demo (e.g. the matrix demo from a few years back).
For one person it's impressive, but it won't knock the major players down any time soon.
This is a 1 person job?! It looks practically photorealistic. That's absolutely wild.
> It looks practically photorealistic.
what has improved a lot recently is the physically based rendering - specifically, the lighting. Looking at the steam page, this train game has that type of lighting.
Another game that uses similarly realistic lighting is https://store.steampowered.com/app/2406770/Bodycam/
When the dev for BodyCam posted his initial streams, I thought it was fake. Also was a solo dev though I think he either has a partner or a team now
Not to dismiss the effort by dev, but all Unreal engine games look photoreal these days. My point is that photorealism does not show effort these days.
Most of the review is about the art assets, and I doubt the big ones (e.g. the trains themselves) are off-the-rack Unreal assets. An engine like Unreal 5 will cast your assets in harsh relief. Which is to say, if your game's assets look custom and look good in Unreal 5, it does indeed demonstrate effort and skill.
It's the lighting etc that provide photo realism with Unreal. Even the demo that comes with Unreal where a robot is running around cubes on a small plain looks photoreal.
No engine in the world can make bad assets look good.
Are we talking about train engines or games engines:)
Eskil Steenberg's LOVE has entered the chat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-A8xvFKaRA
His Behind the Scenes video for LOVE is one of my favorite developer vids ever.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f90R2taD1WQ
Oh wow, I didn't know engines provided that much functionality. Thank you.
This game is fantastic, it seems that Japanese train arcade / sims are having a renaissance at the moment.
It works brilliantly with the Zuiki Mascon controller.
"Played properly, Running Train asks you to carefully control your speed, braking, and prompt, safe arrival at train stations, and rewards or penalizes you accordingly"
So it's basically a clone of 'Densha de go!' series.
That's a good thing.
For the uninitiated:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/gaming/a28954/new-j...
A full-scale arcade version in this genre, evolving since 1996. Realistic controls, some seem even to include train crew uniforms you can wear while driving…
Pretty much, but no complaints there.
The game in question is https://store.steampowered.com/app/4630570/RUNNING_TRAIN/
Link added to toptext. Thanks!
Q to the video in the middle of the article:
Is THIS the in-game graphics of the game??
If Yes - just WOW!!
How much AI did the person use?
I bought it yesterday, not too hard to get running on linux, and played for an hour, it's immense fun.
What do you have to do to get it working on Linux? Is there a way to signal my hatred of Windows when I buy it?
You just buy it on steam and click play.
The article says the game should cost 18$ (should be ~15.74€), but it's actually showing as 19.50€ aka 22.29 USD. Does anyone know what's going on there? Is Stream charging more due to refund laws or something?
I can't find a website for the developer, also nothing listed in the Indonesian Wikipedia article. Sadly no way to buy it directly and give them 100% of the money in their currency
Article was published close to the game's Steam release, and there was a 10% discount on launch. https://steamdb.info/app/4630570/. It's 20 USD now, and I assume the remaining difference is simply due to specifics around setting prices on steam and currency conversion.
Different regions have different pricing unfortunately.
https://partner.steamgames.com/pricing/explorer?l=english&ut...
I fell down a YouTube hole and watched all of these Derail Valley playthroughs: https://youtu.be/JSONttyEJ4o
Highly recommend if you like having something interesting on in the background.
I wonder if it's got VR. There's not many train Sims that do even though the sim community in general has really embraced VR.
It works great with UEVR, there's a discussion post in the steam forum on how to set that up. It plays really nicely in VR.
Not yet. It's been asked but since the original dev is doing all the work, he has to prioritize the backlog.
Oh ok I'll still try it out though. But hopefully it'll come one day
derail valley is pretty good in VR if you've not tried it.
Ah I think I've seen it but it's not a serious sim, right? I'm really looking for a more serious one.
Edit: It does look serious on steam, maybe I am thinking of another. Thanks!
Derail Valley is about as serious at it gets!
I have almost no appreciation for trains and I’m incredibly interested in trying this.
> one-person development team
:)
Looks great. Too bad that steam deck isn’t supported, I hope they’ll add it.
This YouTube is a pretty good walk through of the gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxGEMOzWt8w
I never got the appeal for these sim games. From the screenshots, it looks like a beautiful game and I guess I could enjoy the visuals for an hour or 2.
But I don't see how it'd entertain me for hours on end. If someone here is into these sim games, what's the reason you keep going back to them?
The simple pleasure of a job well done, even if the job is completely imaginary, because my real job is complex and stupid.
Driving the train is a little technical, but not overwhelmingly so. You need to pay attention to the gradient, speed, train weight and rail slipperiness to brake with perfect accuracy every time you come to a station. Signalling is not overly complex but you can benefit from tabbing over to a reference sheet every so often (Ah, double flashing yellow means we’re on a diverging route ahead with a reduced turnout speed so I must brake soon). Learning the german safety systems (PZB and LZB) was interesting. Guiding a 3000t freight train down a mountain isn’t something that can be rushed, it forces you to slow down and be patient.
So relaxation mostly. I can launch the game, drive something somewhere for an hour or two, get some endorphins because I did it all right, etc.
These Japanese style train sims are quite a bit less realistic, including fewer signals you need to know (Densha de GO!! essentially only has speed limits, g-forces, train load, and weather modeling.) and simplifying the controls to essentially a single handle that goes from full brake when pushed all the way forward to full traction when pulled toward you, with a switch you need to press to be able to pull it past neutral.
But in return they add very technically difficult tasks, such as stopping within a millimeter of the stopping point within a second of the time in the timetable without re-braking or making passengers uncomfortable, or stuff such as pointing at signals. They even add completely unrealistic stuff just for the sake of gameplay such as bonus zones where you need to stay at an exact speed, sounding the horn for overpasses and level crossings, or dimming the lights for oncoming trains.
They "feel" very different to games like Train Sim World, but I like them both regardless.
It hits that mid point between complexity and simplicity. You can kind of chill out but without the process becoming too mundane.
Imagine if we can replace all the locomotive drivers with pensions with retired software engineers who literally will pay to do the job remotely? Even better if there is a prediction market and twitch stream on top with bets for the most mundane things.
edit: This actually sounds awesome
An Enders Game for train drivin’ eh
for me its the abilty to 'switch off'
I play Euro Truck Simulator 2 (ets) and its my happy place, its just zen, Sometimes i will have a plugin that will get me local radio stations and i will cruise through italy and greece listening to talk shows in languages i don't understand, sometimes i will do it listening to the rumble of the truck, and i switch off, and allow my thoughts to run free.
I've recently started getting into flight sims, and i'm looking for the same sort of thing with that (the only problem with ets is the graphics still looks like a 2013 game) and i think i will get there, its just i'm at the 'learning to fly' stage, and thats kinda difficult. Well, actually flying is surprisingly easy, landing is the tricky bit ;-)
If you're flying a larger passenger plane into basically any major airport, ILS should get you most of the way down - you just need to control speed (you're looking for landing speed +10 by the end)
Depending where you're flying, some arrivals have gaps which threw me off massively when I first started - it's because IRL there's ATC there to guide you to the final intersection for the runway, usually 10NM out... so aim for that and capture ILS, it's quite a wide margin for capture.
If you're going manually, 10nm out you want to start descending at around 600-700fpm from ~3000ft and you should have visual on the runway at this point
I never thought of mixing that with local radio. That sounds wonderful.
I started playing Farm Simulator 2025 recently because a friend wanted me to. Even now, I really long for a proper game with progression, etc. But it's really just a way to drive machines.
And I find myself wanting to do that, even without the progression I crave from a game. But then I also feel like I'm massively wasting my time, and I could be playing other games, getting stuff done around the house, or just reading a book. Instead of driving a tractor for no freaking reason. But I still want to do it.
Maybe that is the lesson. No matter how much we wish to progress, we just have to accept the stasis of the world. There will always be more to do.
What would progression look like in a farming simulator? I tried it a few times but have had a similar feeling.
I've been trying to figure that out myself, and I think it involves things being locked away at the start, and unlocking them as you meet certain criteria.
Currently, the only criteria is money. You can literally just buy anything at any time, if you have the cash. Tractors, land, buildings... Anything. Almost all of it is instant. The few things that aren't instant are just annoying and not worth the effort.
There is a mod that unlocks tractors according to the year, matching them up with when they were released. That's at least a kind of progression, but still not what I'd enjoy.
In short, I think I want it more gamified and less of a straight simulation. Unlocking better tractors would mean reaching certain goals while using lesser tractors, etc. Motor Town has this. You need to do a certain amount of work with lesser machines to unlock the later ones. You also need the money.
But it would also go beyond what the game has. For some reason, you can be hired as a contractor for things, and rent the necessary equipment for fairly cheap. But as a landowner, you have to micromanage that situation. It's up to you to have the equipment and actually be ready to do the work before you can hand it off to an AI worker. And they're often terrible at it, especially with the lesser-used machines, like (according to a bug report I saw) carrot harvesters.
The game absolutely nails simulating driving a tractor. But as a "game", it fails.
In Farm Simulator 2025, progress for me was felling and processing every single tree on the map. They were "in the way"
I have problems.
Going from a little tractor on a small family farm, to a huge corporate megafarm with all the toys.
After school I played countless hours of Euro Truck Simulator. It was an awesome escapism. Being a truck driver, driving through sun and snow, in different parts of Europe. Crazy drivers at night, needed to think quick in difficult situations.
Have you ever wanted to try flying a plane or running a city or being a tycoon of roller coasters without having to invest much time, money, and energy to take flight lessons, run for political office, or work your way up through an amusement park company? Sim games let you play with these complex systems easily and walk away when you get bored.
I have often said that for many people that want to change the world (for the greater negative), they need to get addicted to Sim games. They will end up doing a lot less harm in that situation.
The real question is, how do you determine who is going to do negative or positive gains. A debate that is millennia old.
i remember years ago reading a tweet, i'm paraphrasing but it went something like:
"I love how men go from 'I'm gonna conquer the world!!' to 'im gonna sit here and paint my model figures'"
I think about it a lot, and your comment made me think of it again.
Flight sims are my 'model railways'
I get the impression he's not saying all sim games, but "drive the vehicle" sims in general. I have to agree. There's just nothing engaging about it imo.
Similar to you, I don't see the attraction of these sims.
I have a theory it is a mindfulness thing like many hobbies.
Think knitting or crochet or even building and running a model train set in the garage. These things aren't terribly hard once you learn the basics but you have to pay attention to various details over time and it allows you to tune out from the rest of the world when you want to.
But I really don't know.
A mind is slightly different from a body in that it really does not understand the concept of "off". It is movement by its very nature. Even its relaxation is expressed through activity. Simple repetition and continuous low-level positive feedback is a way for it to rest while moving.
At least, that's my working model of it.
For the same reason that the Vegas attraction “dig a bunch of holes with industrial diggers” was so popular: people want to do jobs they think are cool without years of training cost up front, and this is a way for them to do so.
Farming simulator and Car mechanic simulator are both in my todo list, because those are hobbies I’m truly interested in pursuing and I’d like to know what it’s like to do them as a sim first. Most other live sims like this are deeply uninteresting to me, even if they have lovely visuals. Meanwhile I’ve seriously considered buying a Renesas SH-2A simulator for nearly $3k so that I can develop better car software!
Is there some job you’ve always wanted to do that requires extensive training that you can’t / won’t complete at this time? That would be a use case for sims that’s less game and more hobby for you (but that’s always a blurry line for all of us so don’t take that as criticism).
I have never played any train sim, but I read video game press that this one hits different.
A lot of train sim are about building the rail network, where Running Train focuses on driving. The scenery (dozens of kilometers of japanese railway) is beautiful and it reproduces the japanese railway system realistically.
Japan has a history of train-driving sims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_simulator#Driving_simula...
Like for some other simulation games, I am impressed how can some go to such lengths to get as close as possible to the real thing but would not actually do it as a job.
Not making fun of it, I just found it fascninating.
I can get it. I can totally see something being fun if it's 2-10 hours a week, but not fun if it's 40-50 hours a week.
Also very different when you are in control of exactly when you're doing it, you can pause anytime you need to go grab laundry, etc.
Driving/train sims have pretty much zero appeal to me, but I enjoy flight sims a fair amount. I'd never want to make the sacrifices to my life that would be required to be a commercial pilot. Being a personal/hobby pilot is very expensive and quite a bit more dangerous.
An hour or two of entertainment for $19.99 isn't outrageous these days. A trip to the movie theater can easily cost more.
I like this comparison. That’s a good way to think about it.
A lot of these train simulator games are a mix between job simulation and arcadey fun. To give a big example of the latter, in the Densha de GO!! games, the goal is to follow all the speed limits, brake gently without allowing the G-forces to exceed a certain amount, and to arrive at the station exactly on time while stopping at the exact right spot to the millimeter.
For some people, just the fact that it's a simulation is enough to make it fun. But to many others, the challenge (and I can promise you it is quite difficult) is what makes it a fun game.
I've been playing these games for half a decade now, and I've only managed a zero zero once (meaning that you come to a stop exactly on time to the second and stop within 0.0cm of the marker.)
To crash the [train, plane, automobile] of course.
Escapism fun. Being able to do the fun parts of something without the bullshit of doing it for real.
If you fall asleep while playing Truck Simulator, nobody dies.
That depends upon where one is playing Truck Simulator
Ender’s Truck Simulator
Now I'm imagining a Boeing 777 pilot playing Truck Simulator because he's bored while the plane is landing.
ATC will have to use a CB radio to get his attention.
"I could enjoy", "How it'd entertain me" - have you even tried a few?
I tried a “cleaning sim”. I already forgot the name but it was just like doing chores with a pressure cleaner.
Have not tried the train / driving sim though.
There are studies explaining the appeal of the "chore simulators". You should look them up because I may not do them justice, but in a nutshell it's basically that they are very satisfactory because they present clear rules, they allow you to "do a job" and if you do it well, you progress. There are no tricks, no unexpected crisis, you do the thing, you get money, you get better gear, you do the thing better. This is escapism for people frustrated with "real life". Real life sucks. Sometimes you work hard and you still don't get "better gear".
Driving simulations - be it planes, cars, trucks, boats, etc - are maybe a bit different, but essentially it's just a combination of chill vibe, romanticized experience (the classic "I wish I could be a farmer", no you don't) and a degree of what I described above. Obviously there are also people who are just passionate about trains, planes and such.
The chill cozy games are a real trend, and it's due to what I described in the 1st paragraph.
Microsoft used to have "Microsoft Train Simulator". It was being shown off at E3 in 2001 in a dark little corner, by this older gentlemen who for I know may have been the producer or main developer.
I'm not into trains, but I felt bad for this guy so I spent 15 minutes at his booth and let him show me everything. It seemed to have made his day.
> is in fact set in a fictional region of Japan, but is created so lovingly that you’ll believe it’s real life.
This is actually a major cheat. Realism is expensive, and exposes your creation to the equivalent of the "uncanny valley" for vehicle simulation - the simulated world is never accurate enough and you can't help but notice the differences with reality. E.g. if you see generic buildings ("autogen") near a location you know IRL, the simulation feels immediately sloppy.
Yet, as long as I'm not interested in visiting real places, I would go for a vehicle simulation in a fictional world any day. I wouldn't mind if the vehicles were also fictional, as long as they require some technique to drive them. What matters in games is challenge and mastery, but not what you master; your RTS, FPS or chess skills have very little value IRL.
> Zoom out far enough—and for some reason it will let you—and you see the tiles, the roads that don’t line up, and the various tricks and techniques that allow it to look so realistic from low down. But don’t do that! That’s silly. This is a train sim, not a plane sim, you’ve no business in the sky.
OpenBVE one-upped BVE train sim with external cameras, and as a result you see all this too. In my eyes, they sort of miss the point of a train simulation: the view point is normally attached to the driver, so one can use all sorts of tricks to avoid having to "paint the entire wall" - which is quite important if you count on a community of fan modders who have limited resources.
Another notable, if old, train simulator from Japan is OpenBVE. It was easy to model railroads on it. Many short Brazilian routes were/are modeled in OpenBVE. It is particularly convincing since it simulates well the typical lateral wobbling that metric trains are known for.
openBVE's not directly Japanese, it's an open-source re-implementation of the original BVE 2 and 4, which is.
Do you mean actual Brazilian railway track engineers used this game to plan/develop actual routes? Or just that you can play Brazilian routes in the game?
Just to play the routes.
Looks beautiful and I am filled with an instant sense of nostalgia looking at the screenshots.
Personally if I were going to adopt a nerdy train hobby, I would tend more toward train photography. Recently train photographers have been in the news for mostly bad reasons [1], but I have also seen train photographers setting up in rural locations and the scenery looks stunning and also totally chill. The problems arise when people gather en masse to get the "iconic" shots that have been probably been photographed a million times before.
Or just go out and actually ride a bunch of different routes. It's been a long time since I've done it, but just riding a local or express train through a scenic area is delightful.
Of course there's no reason that true train afficianados can't do all of the above, as well as building model trains!
[1] https://petapixel.com/2025/12/15/japanese-railway-pleads-wit...
The one thing that is keeping me from riding the routes that I believe would be the must fun/scenic is the OBSCENE cost of those tickets. Granted, these aren't commuter tickets.
I would love a trip across the high plains and through the mountains by train. Just like I would love to take a cruise from the bottom of the Mississippi to the top.
But them tickets is too high.
In Japan it's quite reasonable to ride local trains. I've been meaning to do a trip along the recently re-opened Tadami Line [1], for example. The one way cost for the full 4-hour, 135km trip is only ¥2,750 ($17).
Though when you add in the costs of getting to the start/end of the line, overnight accomodations, and potentially the cost of getting to Japan first - it gets quite a bit more expensive. But staying at a little guesthouse along the way is also part of the charm.
[1] https://fukushima.travel/blogs/tadami-line-5-sights-you-shou...
Very impressive! Well done
So is it fun to play or just fun to look at? I'm getting "Mixtape" vibes from the article (not good!)
You probably won't enjoy it because it's a sim game and not fun in the same way Super Mario Bros is. But it's probably more interactive than Mixtape since you are operating a train.
I personally probably won't play Mixtape or this game but both look like good experiences to me if you are in the respective target audience.
'Gameplay' isn't what this is about. The is literally an option to turn it off. For some it will be thousands of hours of fun.
Unreal 5 is amazing with photo realism. Bodycam uses this feature well too
Windows only? :-(
Nowadays most games will run on Linux thanks to Valve's Proton compatibility layer.
"most" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Multiplayer games generally don't.
Haven't tried this one yet, but in my experience it's like 90% of single player games work and the remaining 10% will never work.
You said 90% of single player games work. That is within the mathematical definition of “most.”
Also, a good amount of anti-cheat programs have official Linux builds. I played Dune Awakening on Linux just fine, no configuration needed.
This particular game works flawlessly.
"Most is doing a lot of work".
So, 90% isn't most in your book?
At least in my experience, every single game I've launched has worked on Linux. I don't play online shooter games which seems to be the only category that doesn't work.
FWIW, many online shooter games work just fine. Those with extremely invasive kernel-level anticheat do not. Some of those with less-invasive anticheat also do not.
So, yeah, shit like the latest CoD, Valorant, Apex Legends [0], and that godawful Marathon game won't run... but that's because of active work by the devs to make it so that it won't.
[0] ...for some crazy reason...
I game on Linux (have so for years) and the only thing I can't play is a few AAA FPS titles. Honestly not much of an issue depending on what games you play.
Games with anticheat generally don't. Multiplayer games without anticheat generally so work.
I see that MS is trying to force anti cheat stuff out of lower level OS rings. They may unintentionally allow future compatibility with Linux compatibility layers. That is a funny situation.
> Multiplayer games generally don't.
"generally" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Recent big multiplayer games:
Marathon, no Linux support.
Call of Duty, no Linux support.
Battlefield 6, no Linux support.
Valorant, no Linux support.
The Finals works and is great, but I'd be mindful of what games I'm giving up if considering a full switch
...and yet out of 280 multiplayer games in my library 200 are marked as Deck Verified or Playable (and most of the rest has no rating available). Also, looks like all of your examples are from a single particular niche.
I like Linux alot.
But if the biggest multiplayer games straight up don't support it, that needs to be acknowledged.
Add League of Legends to the list.
I've had Deck verified games straight up refuse to work on Linux.
It always feels like it's my fault somehow. 'Well of COURSE Wayland doesn't work, skill issue'. Vs Windows where I can blame Microsoft.
It should be acknowledged, yes, but not while failing to mention that it mostly applies to the genre of competitive shooters. "Generally don't run" doesn't apply to pretty much anything else, where a statement closer to truth would be "generally run, with some notable exceptions".
> ...where a statement closer to truth would be "generally run, with some notable exceptions".
Yep. Devs usually have to actively make their game not work on Proton for it to not work on the version of Proton that Steam ships. Most devs aren't so petty as to put in that extra work, so they don't.
Those all require kernel level anticheat.
I do not play multiplayer games, and it has come to the point where I don't even check Proton compatibility on these because it is so reliable now in that situation.
I was just playing Sand: Raiders of Sophie.
Before that Arma Reforger.
Before that Arc Raiders.
There are a very small minority of games that use kernel-level anticheat that won't work, including newer BF6 and COD. Tbh I wouldn't play those anyway because of that feature, which sucks because BF series was fun.
> ...which sucks because BF series was fun.
Was, yeah.
I enjoyed the hell out of BF I and BF V. I also enjoy shooters that have "modern" weaponry. Given how fun BF I was at launch, and V was when I picked it up, I purchased a copy of BF 2042 at launch because -given that that's the time before the "I'm going to do nothing but snipe from spawn to maxxximise my KDR and get Sick Youtube Clips" crew comes to be the majority of the playerbase- that's the best time to play these games.
I regret that purchasing decision so much. BF 2042 was very, very pretty. It looked so good. But -as a game- it was so bland and boring.
Big BF fan from the first one up to BF1 (WWI)
Bad Company 2 is probably my fav next to BF4
2026 Steam hardware survey [1]:
[1] Click the "OS Version" row to expand the table, https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...Something of a self-reinforcing statistic. Steam is rarely installed on Mac because there’s hardly any point doing so.
Steam needs a statistic for Wine/crossover. I play tons of games on my mac via steam through crossover. It's crazy that multiple layers of translation work so well.
Macs have a single digit market share globally, so even if people started installing games on them the needle wouldn't move much.
Mac market share is closer to 20% when you exclude machines installed in offices and enterprises. Some estimates put the number as high as 30% in North America.
The fact that the Steam number is as high as it is, despite the extreme lack of compatible content, is noteworthy.
Proud 2.2%er
But I also have had it installed via Crossover at some points to check out a Windows-only game.
Which I just realize also skews the statistic because Crossover basically creates a Windows VM.
Windows versions running on Linux over Proton tend to be more stable than any native Linux version would be.
It’s beautiful. I wonder how much an LLM was involved if at all.
I’m wondering the same thing. I’ve been thinking about getting into solo LLM game dev. I don’t know the first thing about it
You’re all set!
A pattern I’ve found useful in other settings is starting with code for an existing “game” that sort of resembles what you want to make and then modifying components until you have a whole new game but it shares similar infrastructure to the original. So you benefit from the existing system and avoid a lot of problems.
What would be your added value?
The ideas and aesthetics
That's the part that is visible to everyone else, so that's the part that an LLM can see. That means someone else can clone your ideas and aesthetics. The ol' double-edged sword.
It only works when starting with open source to show to LLM. To monetize my modification, I would not make mine open source.
If the licensing allows for it I’m fine.
If the LLM does the work, why should someone pay you when they could use their own tokens?
Everything. The story, how the game works, the art assets, voice lines, music, etc.
Programming is like 10% of a game. The world building and UX is the juice.
Anybody can make Lord of the Rings, but there's only one.
Absolute nonsense. There is no cookie-cutter formula for game development, despite what the idea guys think. Mario 64 was literally just Mario in a single small room until the last six months of development. They focused purely on the actual game - the mechanics, physics, movesets, items, and enemies - inside that tiny room until it felt perfect. Then, in one final push, they quickly slapped together all the levels and the storyline at the very end.
We are very quickly going to see the reality: games are made by programmers. Everyone else who has spent decades comfortably riding on the programmers backs is being replaced by AI. This includes the artists, the junior programmers, the testers, all of them. The future isn't bloated teams, it's going to be just one lone genius (or a small group of programming geniuses banding together) and his magnum opus across the board.
Most of my favorite games don't have physics engines, and many are story sequels. One of my favorites is the modern Equivalent to Myst.
Good luck with your idea tho
I vouched for you
I'd be happy to help you! I'm working on a game myself.
My first piece of advice is: Pick one mechanic or idea, and ship it all the way to a player (a friend) to see if it's legible or fun.
Thanks for the offer! Unfortunately I don’t have the time right now, but I am going over some ideas at a high level.
Are you building a single player or multiplayer game?
Step 1: acquire land for datacenter.
If the Touhou games or Cave Story were released today, all of Hackernews would be like "dude, I wonder what their LLM workflow is like!" Japanese solo hikikomori devs have been putting out insane stuff since long before LLMs emerged.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Don't be snarky."
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Not really, those games are very simple code wise. A high schooler could do it (source me).
You could make a bullet hell game engine as a project in an intro CS course.
The hard part is the content in the game, and ZUN was already a composer. That just leaves the code which is easy, and the bullet patterns, which ZUN clearly improved at through his earlier games. (and the art, which is famously bad though endearing)
The other comment said that obviously no solo dev do everything by himself. They must have asset maker or song maker who do all things mostly uncredited. But, here we are, of course there are true solo devs!
> Not really, those games are very simple code wise. A high schooler could do it (source me).
That very much depends on how much they did themselves. If they used unity, and went very light on the simulation, sure.
> You could make a bullet hell game engine as a project in an intro CS course.
No you couldn’t. Well you could but it wouldn’t be appropriate for actual beginners unless you stripped it down so much that calling it an engine was meaningless.
> No you couldn’t. Well you could but it wouldn’t be appropriate for actual beginners unless you stripped it down so much that calling it an engine was meaningless.
You definitely can. One of the assignments in the CS intro course I took was a bullet hell game. "calling it an engine was meaningless" is an opinion that requires ignoring the fundamentals of what a game engine is.
A game engine is a framework that allows you to create games. Assuming you don’t have tons of content (and I’m sure you didn’t in an intro CS class), building a game is an easier task than building a game engine.
Let me ask you this. What were the parameters of your assignment? What libraries were you allowed to use.
By modern standards, yes, writing a bullet hell shooter game is not hard.
But ZUN started on the PC-98.
To put that platform in a western context, imagine if IBM had gone with planar graphics for VGA. Or an Amiga with no coprocessors, sprites, or scrolling[0]. You have a lot of pixels to fill and no help to do it with. It can't even run DooM[1]. Most other developers threw their hands up and shipped RPGs, erotic visual novels, or porn. Getting a fast action game running on PC-98 is a genuine accomplishment.
[0] I am aware that I just described a compact Macintosh.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj0-KvV0SC0
What you described is even better: an Atari ST :)
the (physical) zuiki mascon seems like a labor of love too.
This place has become an AI-focused hellscape. It really is sad.
It actually seems to be a relatively small vocal group. I've marked most of them red (as I previously did the one above) with https://hackersmacker.org
The people touting LLMs or the people complaining about LLMs? :)
Thanks for the recc, very cool extension!
I'll sometimes search for the LLM string on random non-AI related articles. It's sad.
I read the title and assumed this was going to be about Transport Tycoon.
>And oh my goodness, it’s so pretty.
Am I the only one that thinks the word "pretty" is overused to describe the visual quality and artistry of games? I see this word thrown around often and it feels so low-effort.
It's a simple word that does the job. No need to overthink it.
Looks very realistic, however I have to question the whole premise of a train sim, trains seem to be the most boring vehicle to choose here, they run in tracks so not much freedom, basically accelerate and brake.
Then you know nothing about trains and the track networks they run on, which is probably why you dont find them interesting. Thats fine, just realise there is much more to trains than accelerate and brake :)
Well TBF OP is more or less correct, and I say this as a person who is pretty much into trains (although not train sims specifically). All a conductor can do is accelerate and brake - respect speed limits, brake in time so you don't overrun the platform at the next station (for passenger trains), be on the lookout for people/vehicles crossing the tracks illegally (and hope that they get out of the way fast enough, because once you see them, it's usually too late to stop in time, unless the train is really slow), be careful (especially when you have a freight train) not to be too slow before an incline, otherwise you might not make it all the way up etc. etc. Where you go is not your decision, the points are set remotely.
There is a lot more than that. Monitoring things like power generation, fuel, breaking ability, wheel heating sensors, managing door systems, human aspects like reading signals and lights and deciding what to do, all the way down to simple things like horns, wipers, and lights. Its pretty much exactly the same as a car but without a steering wheel and lots of added electrical systems.
Would you say a car is just accelerate, breaking, and steering?
Just my experience from being on trains, they accelerate, cruise, slow down and stop am I missing anything? They must be ripe for automation.
Pretty much (see Docklands Light Railway), with the caveat of most trains still needing a safety driver to watch for humans.
Just my experience from being on planes, they take off, cruise, slow down and land, am I missing anything?
...seriously, 99%+ of the job of a conductor (and of a pilot) could be automated, the reason you still have a person (or two) in the cockpit is the rest of the time. As the saying goes, "flying is hours and hours of boredom sprinkled with a few seconds of sheer terror". And the same is also valid for trains. There are automated trains, but AFAIK all of them are metros or people movers where the whole system is closed off (platform doors etc.) and track conditions are closely monitored. I'm not aware of an automated train running on a "traditional" track network.
Cmon planes move is 3 axis (yes trains technically do but not via the controls) and take-off landing is a lot more complex than leaving/stopping at a station, the comparison is crazy.
You're correct for train driving sims, but they hit a very particular niche of people who really like trains.
They're insanely popular in Japan.
Railroad Tycoon hints at a world outside of accelerate and brake.
Ah yes that's wider than driving a train, if thats what this games I misunderstood.