About a half a year ago, I had a discussion with my colleague what our next project should be. For the last two years, we have not worked full-time job but we have spent two days a week on our own projects.

What do we want to do? And it might have been  a little of a coincidence, but we made up a plan for a game. A game about trains. Because everybody loves video games and everybody loves trains. Especially we do.

How Rail Route was born

Screenshot of rail network simulator, http://brnosim.wz.cz/

But let’s start from the beginning – about the game itself and about our inspiration. We were quite sure that the game will be from a railroad environment. But not the tycoon style game as Railroad Tycoon or Train Simulator – these games are already there. We want to make something unique in terms of a game play. So we were thinking more of a train dispatcher simulator, railroad network manager, train signaling simulation and so on. There are some simulators there for railroad fans (attaching screenshots two of them), but they are not a game. They are pretty hardcore and want to exactly simulate the work of a train dispatcher who operates the railroad. But we liked them and their spirit so they were our inspiration for our game.

Train Director 3, http://www.backerstreet.com/traindir/en/trdireng.php

Team

Meet me (Zdenek, aka angel) and my colleague (Michal). We live in Prague, Czechia and we are passionate developers with a pretty wide area of interest in the IT field. The game development have been our dream for many years. We agreed that we wanted to share our path through the indie game development process as well as our ideas what our game will be. We hope there is someone that will enjoy reading about ideas we are going to share, and – maybe – help us with new, striking insights. We are seeking a community interested in our game, being happy that there are people passionate about Rail Route as we are.

We have more than ten years of experience in IT development  industry and currently (beside the Rail Route) we also have a freelance contract with a bank for three days per week. Michal is an IT architect and I’m working as a Java developer.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask us anytime or contact us via e-mail.

The next posts will be about our core game design ideas of Rail Route, what obstacles we already overcame and we will also  show you what’s already done in the game.