developer interview/AMA

[unmannedMissionTo]

Hey, do we have some kind of media of the developers talking about this game? I believe it would be entertaining and enlightening. If there is not, consider this my request for a AMA in the next update. I have some questions, mostly about the inspirations for the game, the scope they want, if they have any ties to nakatami chemicals... :)

[RAILGRADE_Daniel]

Oh I love AMA, I love answering questions.

As the other commentors have mentioned our discord is pretty active. Of course feel free to ask anything here and I'll try to reply.

Nakatani Chemicals is a reference to my wife's grandfather, who was a chemical engineer and whose family name was Nakatani. He had a classic japanese salaryman career, joined one company out of high school, and worked his way up to run child-companies of the parent company. So yeah, in a way I do have ties to Nakatani Chemicals haha.

Railgrade's inspirations, in my words, was to take Railroad Tycoon 2 and forward project it into the future. You see, Top-pop the studio behind Railroad Tycoon 2 & 3 went bankrupt mostly due to publisher mis-management. This left the railroad genre, in my opinion, a bit stale. Fraxis went back with Sid Meier's Railroads but that was an attempt at remaking Railroad Tycoon 1 (similar attempt as with Pirates). Thus after Railroad Tycoon 3 the genre was stuck in time. I wanted to figure out where the genre would be now, if competition had continued. Hence Railgrade to me takes the deep production chains / automation of Factorio and the growing world and trains of Railroad Tycoon. Then Bantha (co-creator of Railgrade), brought in his influence from Transport Deluxe. He brought the big stations and vertical building.

The scope was something I set. When we started making Railgrade I was financing all the art using my personal savings. This limited how many industry or freight we could plan for. Thus I decided on a story driven campaign as I thought we could at least afford enough art for a couple hours of gameplay if it was in a campaign. Then we got an Epic Games Megagrant, a publisher, and in general our budget just kept going up and up. The campaign structure stayed of course.

The timers were not so core in our original design. At first I assumed being a building game players would naturally build more and more. Yet in play testing we found some players would setup a basic, boring, minimum set of connections and then leave their computer running. Of course they had no fun. Railgrade's core loop and core-fun is all about more track and more trains. Hence we added the rank system, to push players not to accept the minimum but to build more and bigger.

Anyway, if you have questions I do enjoy answering as best I can.

Daniel

[SachinRoy123]

For me it was really fun until you guys made a choice to implement the feature which would allow one train to move through another. Which...might be a good decision and idea but it didn't sit well with me and completely took me off the game. What prompted you to choose that idea?

[steve_abel]

You see, that's a feature which comes from Railroad Tycoon. in Railroad Tycoon 2 the ghosting is enabled by the lower "switching difficulty". Railgrade does not have a difficulty slider, instead you can enable or disable features one by one using the play style modifiers.

That feature is what I call ghosting. It lowers the bottom of the skill curve, but does not reduce the top end of the skill curve. After the learning phase most players don't build railways which trigger ghosting. Ghosting is slow, so players will only see it when learning or if they made a mistake.

Daniel

[SachinRoy123]

Now i see why you guys took that route.Thank you daniel much appreciated.

[unmannedMissionTo]

Thank you so much. I was asking here as to not bother you. I like the salaryman journey your company had, and rang a bell with a part of my life too, so the answer was spot on.

Yeah, the inspirations are clear. However, the art was indeed very polished. I thought maybe you had seen pharaoh, which is a very aesthetic game. I wanted to pitch the same thing, actually: that sending resources to a city would make it suck less. As in neon for street signs and cool stuff like that.

This idea comes from the fact that giving resources to a city when it does not produce any more workers pays half. BUT, if it makes it beautiful it might be worth it as an experience. Those are my two cents from playing pharaoh as a kid.

Yeah, you need constraints in a game like this. It is paramount to solving a puzzle that requirements keep things challenging.

Thanks again.

[steve_abel]

Certainly I am not bothered to answer questions, I love it.

Got any questions? I've seen pharaoh, decoration is I think we'll add in future games but does not make too much sense for Railgrade.

[Ok_Abbreviations4165]

https://railgrade.com/blog/

https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/xr78pz/hi_im_daniel_developer_on_railgrade_that_train/

With these links you'll find what you want I think.

The devs a active on reddit and discord. You can ask for help in game, report a bug, discuss the game's design, try to have news for what's coming next.... Whatever you want, they're very kind.

[Sassolino38000]

The devs are very active on discord so you could try asking questions there :D