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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.

Unreal Engine's been free for just over 11 years now: https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free
> 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?

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.

Very cool to see an Indonesian dev on the homepage of HN!
Out of curiosity, what is the significance of the 16GB of RAM?
Wouldn't they have used Unity 10 years ago?
Oh not even from Japan? I just assumed he's from there because that's what the game is about
> 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")

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.

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.

> including support for the Zuiki MASCON, a bespoke peripheral for train driving sims.

This just makes me feel so glad to be alive today!

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.
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.

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.
One person made the best train sim. Meanwhile AAA studios need 400 people to make the same game twice.
The game in question is https://store.steampowered.com/app/4630570/RUNNING_TRAIN/
I like this one, too : https://alexanderperrin.com.au/paper/shorttrip/
I have almost no appreciation for trains and I’m incredibly interested in trying this.
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.

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.
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 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?

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.
This YouTube is a pretty good walk through of the gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxGEMOzWt8w
Looks great. Too bad that steam deck isn’t supported, I hope they’ll add it.
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...

> one-person development team

:)

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.

I bought it yesterday, not too hard to get running on linux, and played for an hour, it's immense fun.
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?

Unreal 5 is amazing with photo realism. Bodycam uses this feature well too
Windows only? :-(
Very impressive! Well done
> 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.

It’s beautiful. I wonder how much an LLM was involved if at all.
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.

So is it fun to play or just fun to look at? I'm getting "Mixtape" vibes from the article (not good!)
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.
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