Why Early Access?

“NIMBY Rails is both our most personal, and most ambitious game. After playing thousands of hours of transportation simulation games, we were left wondering what could happen if some of the traditional limits of the genre didn't exist: in map sizes, track layout complexity, or train scheduling. NIMBY Rails was born out of the desire of playing a game without these limits. Of wanting to blurry the lines between a game and a real world design tool.

The result is unconventional and risky. Early Access will help the development of the game by proving our concept in front of wide audience. There are still many interesting features left to implement, test and polish. Early Access will both give us the extra time, and the feedback from a community, to make the best possible game.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“We work on delivering a solid major version every quarter or so, with both major new features and a myriad of small enhancements and QoL improvements. This pace of development has worked very well for the first year of Early Access. The roadmap is now certainly shorter than at launch, but we prefer to not put a definite release date on its completion, and we would rather push the final release date down the line, and stay in Early Access, than impose a hard deadline on its development.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“Here's a high level roadmap of the planned, pending features. A lot of items formerly in this list have been completed during the first year of EA. But some may not make it to game in the end.

• Player-built buildings with gameplay influence
  
• Real time based, fixed timelines for trains
  
• Linked, complex, programmable signaling
  
• NIMBYism: your construction choices have political consequences
  
• Public work contracts
  
• Better real-world population influence on traffic demand, and non-population influence
  
• Procedural building generation
  
• Ruleset modding
  
• Freeform train composition at the player UI level, not just in mods

”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“The game is fully playable, both as offline single player and as cooperative multiplayer. All areas of the gameplay as described in the store description are present starting from the first public version. But keep in mind it leans heavily on the sandbox aspect, lacking in more guided gameplay features like a campaign mode.”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“There will be a small price increase after Early Access.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

“We will regularly publish new versions, documenting the development process, gameplay changes and additions, for our community to play. The feedback we get from our players will be invaluable to steer the development of the game. The developer is active in the Steam forum and in our own Discord server and directly answers questions from players. We are also supporting Steam Workshop mods from day 1 and we can't wait to see what train designs, tracks and buildings modders come up with.”