First of all, I would like to thank all of you who have been following our game ever since I’ve started these DevLogs. The past few days have been a rollercoaster of emotions for me. The amount of visibility the Steam Next Fest gave my tiny project has been insane. We jumped from 700 wishlists to almost 2.000 in a matter of 48 hours. We got featured in 4 big gaming news websites (Retro Gamer, Time Extension, GameSpark.jp and DenfaminicoGamer.jp) with a great reception and praise, as well as on X/Twitter to which I cannot thank enough. I never expected RRG to reach these heights and reach so many people.
Unfortunately, there is also a big sad side to the story, which has been many people complaining about the game being a rip-off, clone and even wishing japanese companies to sue me and take the project down. Naturally, this has saddened me to an extreme, and I am honestly considering giving up on the game all together, given so much online hate and accusations.
This is a tiny passion project made by a single person with very little to no resources and struggling through life as most of us all (hence the dev name “Barely Making Games”). Since I was a child, I have always loved trains, even though I only got to see one in person and ride it at age 26. Coming from a developing country, I was not able to play many of the famous japanese games not only due to the high prices, but mainly due to language barrier - and this was a struggle I shared with millions of other players that grew up in the same situation, as there were zero localization efforts towards non-US-EU countries.
So there it was, a little gap in which I thought to build my first game on Steam: a fun and short retro train simulator, localized and fully customizable, set at a cheap price so people from everywhere could buy it and have a few hours of fun.
Retro Rail GO! naturally builds on top of nostalgia, but it was never meant to be a rip-off, to infringe any copyrights or offend anyone. It’s a tiny experience for a tiny audience, who is looking for ways to experience, even briefly, a throwback into simpler times where games were just games, made and played for fun. That 's it. Not a cashgrab, not a huge success, not an asset flip. There are a few placeholder AI generated images that I had to make in the effort to finish the demo on time for the festival, but have been tasked to an actual artist to make complete and will completely removed once they are done.
My original idea was that during Early Access, I could try and test different ideas, such as modes (cargo, tram, bullet train, etc.), minigames (cargo loading, announcer, etc) and different locations, so that me and the community could build on top of a solid and simple train sim foundation into new ways, so again, it was never meant to be a rip-off, but an original yet retro/nostalgic experience, slowly built by someone who is eager to listen to player and who is open and replies every single comment about the game.
I’ll wait for things to settle a bit to make a decision about halting the project, and if that’s the case, I deeply and sincerely apologize to those who were in for what the project is and was meant to be, as I do not have the resources to fight such an uphill battle against accusations and possibly legal matters.