Hey guys,
As I wrote in December, something new has been cooking for about 8 months now. Today I’m super excited to introduce you to our new upcoming VR game - Derail Valley!
Before I continue, let me just say this - Derail Valley actually already helped fund further Switchcars development! There’s a ton of interesting things to share, but I’ll try to keep it as short as possible and stick to the key points, so please bear with me:
https://youtu.be/p5PEKotBNfo
What is Derail Valley?
Derail Valley is a next-gen train simulation made for VR. You drive a train using your own hands in a virtual cab, tasked to reposition rolling stock between trainyards on time. Derailment is a big part of it and it also brings some advancements to the realistic train sim genre, such as decayed railway simulation. More info on its Steam page and announcement.
If you have an HTC Vive, you can try the free demo!
Who’s making it?
Derail Valley is made by a team of three developers: Nenad, Ivan and myself. As of now, we are all part of Altfuture! You’ll find a bit more info about our history and roles on the website. I remain working on Switchcars in parallel of course, as I did in the previous 8 months, with Damir who’s done work on the upcoming beta features. More on that soon!
What’s the plan?
Derail Valley is still in development, and planned to release in Early Access in Q2 2017. While still in early phase, the game is already playable and offers hours of playtime.
Initial released version will introduce some new features compared to the free demo, such as procedural shunting missions, NPC trains and more car variety. We plan to regularly make news posts about all additions to the game, with a lot more to come. You can see more info about this in the Early Access section of Derail Valley Steam page.
How come you’ve made this?
It’s a long topic, but basically all three of us are passionate about vehicles, game development and technology. Having experienced train sims and VR games, we simply saw room for improvement on both markets and wanted to do something about it. I wrote more about this in my new blog post.
Couldn’t you have made Switchcars 2 instead?
Probably not at this point. As we are all working on this unpaid, we were brought together by passion and a collective idea around making a project that we saw ourselves the most efficient at making, which also had the highest chance of success. Based on what we’ve achieved so far I’d say Derail Valley was a great choice. As I wrote in the past, the idea is that the potential success of Derail Valley will pave the way to more future projects.
How will this affect Switchcars?
Here comes the amazing news: Those of you who read my last blog post might know that Switchcars development days were limited due to finances. Thanks to Derail Valley, that is no longer the case!
What happened, which is also the reason we’re announcing Derail Valley a bit earlier than we originally expected, is that among more than 600 participants on an international MSI VR Jam, our game won 3rd place! We were awarded with $15.000 and some extra prizes, which will be spent ensuring stable development of Derail Valley for months to come. Obviously, since I’m working on both games simultaneously, this applies to Switchcars as well. The goal is to bring it to full release by the end of this year.
If you’re wondering if I can pull off working on both games at once, have no worries. In fact, updates 1.010 and onwards have all been made this way, and they were quite large. Lately I’ve been slowed down by the contest and preparing for this announcement, but Damir has been putting a lot of work into Switchcars in the meantime. I am back working regularly on the upcoming 1.014 update now, which I expect to come out in a few weeks.
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Finally I’d like to express huge thanks to all of you for the support so far - revealing our second game is a big moment for us, and it absolutely wouldn’t have been possible without you!
If Derail Valley is your cup of tea, for all future updates and news you can follow it on these links:
Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | Website
You can also find @nothke, @_bgr_ and me individually on Twitter.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about Derail Valley, feel free to post on its Steam forum!
See you all soon with another (Switchcars) update!
edit: fixed mysteriously expired image link