Freerailers!
200,000 of you have wishlisted Enginefall, thank you. For an independent studio, that number means everything, and we don't take this kind of support lightly.
This game gets built alongside its community. Your playtest feedback shapes what we make and knowing you're out there waiting at the platform keeps us pushing. To say thank you properly, we're pulling back the curtain on one of the ‘biggest’ visual overhauls in Enginefall's development so far.
If you know someone who hasn't grabbed their ticket yet, now's a great time to bring them along for the ride, we cannot wait to celebrate 300k wishlists and more with you, plus, this is the kind of game that gets better the more people help build it.
The Titan Trains have been rebuilt from the ground up. Here's how.
Building the Titan Trains: Redesigning the Exterior
There's something primal about a train arriving at a station.
The floor starts vibrating before you see it. You feel it in your feet first, then your chest. It's a sensation most of us have carried since childhood, a grip tightening on a parent's hand as the platform shakes. That sensory memory is the foundation the Titan Trains are built on. We all have trains imprinted somewhere in our unconsciousness. Creating a believable one should be easy, right!?
...Except Enginefall isn't a corridor shooter.
Gameplay came first. Everything else followed.
The Titan Trains were built from the inside out. Floor by floor, carriage by carriage, the team added whatever the gameplay demanded. Undercarriage traversal. Resource platforms. Rat tunnels threading between floors. For a long time, the exterior was almost an afterthought.
Then someone added a vent with destructible panels.
One playtest later, there was footage of a player raiding another player from the outside, scaling the hull mid-journey, breaching through the vent. "A lot of laughter and emotions," as Art Director Seb puts it.
That single clip cracked the brief wide open. An open cargo carriage followed. A grapple gun for scaling vertical walls. Fights on the roof became a real thing. The exterior wasn't set dressing anymore; it was a full combat layer. Players jumping from the Control Room at the tip of the train. A skyscraper falling onto the Shirley Titan, ripping a hole through the 3rd Class carriage. The exterior now had become a ‘feature’.
The first pass on the exterior was built to match that moment in time, reactive, functional and designed to validate the gameplay loop rather than make a statement. It did the job. But the team always knew it was a placeholder. When the opportunity came to rework it properly, Seb and Concept Artist Lucas sat down together to do it right.
Finding the reference
"We wanted players to feel like they are on a real train," Seb explains, "no matter if they walk down the main corridor, crawl through rat tunnels, or run over the ceiling past fortified enemy lines."
The answer wasn't science fiction. A slick bullet train surface would be too clean to make visually interesting, and too far removed from the memory most players carry. Something too generic would read as set dressing. What the Titans needed was a design that already lived in the cultural imagination.
Something with real engineering authority behind it.
They landed on the Amtrak.
"The Amtrak lives in a sweet spot between real-world engineering and cinematic presence." Clean elongated bodies. Strong horizontal branding. A clear visual hierarchy from big uninterrupted surfaces down to fine technical detail. It feels powerful and contemporary without tipping into fantasy. It suggests that an advanced society actually built and ran these things, which, in the world of Enginefall, they once did.
[New Exterior Concept Art]
The new design drew heavily from classic American trains, sheet aluminium, bold red, white and blue colouring, those long clean flanks. The Titan Trains aren't copies of anything real: the nose is more monumental, the body modules stretched, the running gear enlarged, roof equipment added. But the underlying logic comes from that lineage. Grounded, but mythic.
From concept to construction
Once the design direction was locked, the work landed with Bryn, Senior Environment Artist. The scale of the task was immediately apparent.
"We have ten carriages per Titan Train," Bryn explains, "and multiple potential Titan Trains with different carriage variations. That's a lot of different exteriors to create and manage."
Before a single polygon was moved, Bryn built out a full reference collage, trains, ships, oil rigs, large industrial vehicles. "I especially liked how large ships show the structure of the hull under the thin metal exterior skin. Getting that sense of scale across to the player was essential." With reference locked, every carriage was mapped against a detailed list of requirements, identifying where window sizes and structural elements could be standardised across modules, and what workable geometry from the old exterior could be carried forward with updated materials.
[[i]Reference collage]
Only then did the blocking begin, large forms roughed out in 3D and dropped into the engine to see how the concept translated into real space. Where proportions needed adjusting. Where the design held up under a first-person camera and where it didn't.
[3D blockouts]
Building for scale, and for 200 years of damage
With the forms approved, Bryn moved into final art production. Trim sheets, decal atlases, and tiling materials were built to be shared across all the carriage modules, a smart investment that dramatically accelerated texturing across the whole train. Window frames, structural fastening points, panel joins: the kind of granular detail that makes a surface read as something built rather than something modelled.
[Material Sheets]
One of the core design pillars was time. The Titan Trains have been roaming the earth for two hundred years. The metal needed to show it, bent, rusted, worn in a way that felt earned rather than decorative. Material variations were built specifically to carry that history across different damage states.
[Rooftop details]
[Completed window detail]
The final piece was destruction, and this is where Technical Artist Rich came in. With so many carriages to maintain and future updates to consider, a fully manual approach to destruction wasn't viable. Rich built a procedural tool that lets the team mark where damage should occur, automatically ripping chunks from the mesh and swapping in the appropriate worn materials. Future-proofed, and fast.
[Destruction States]
The result is a train that feels like it belongs to its world, something an advanced civilisation built at the peak of their engineering, now carrying two centuries of wear, conflict, and survival across the rails.
[Hero Shot of the Finished Exterior]
🚂 Grounded, but mythic!
200,000 of you are waiting at the platform. We can't wait to show you what's coming!
Thanks for reading, we'll be back soon with more deep dives! Let us know if you enjoyed this content in the comments.