Subway Builder: A realistic subway simulation game
subwaybuilder.com300 points by 0xbeefcab 4 days ago
300 points by 0xbeefcab 4 days ago
Paid, installed it on Linux and played for 5 minutes. Overall impression: game has potential but is early beta-quality at the moment, especially in UI. I will be waiting for updates to polish things up.
* Map tile rendering is laggy; edges of map are constantly unrendered when rotating the view.
* UI seems not very well thought-out, lots of modality for no good reason. Why do I need to turn off population density view before I can build a station?
* Controls non-intuitive - where exactly do I have to click to connect two stations with a track? (It somehow worked once, and I was unable to repeat it.)
* Undo / Ctrl-Z doesn't work (cannot undo deletion of tracks or station).
* Tutorial hints for some reason always point to a fixed coordinate on your screen rather than a location on the map, so if you zoom or pan, the hint for where to build will now point to a completely different map location. With no way to return to the original location. Is that intentional? Why?
* Can we get names of water bodies, major landmarks, major streets on the map? It would add a lot of character.
In this genre, Mini Metro is really fun, highly recommend.
The moment I have been waiting for: Top 1% player in all scenarios, both Mini Metro and Motorways. AMA.
No, they are both really fun (and highly addictive in my case). I like that you can do a scenario in 30-ish minutes (and even pause if you need to). I personally prefer Motorways over Metro, but alas, both highly recommended. Fantastic game design.
Thanks! I've played the daily Mini Metro challenge for years and very rarely made it into the top 10%. I've gone through phases with widening loops, grids, etc. I always feel like there must be some mysterious "trick" I don't know. Questions:
1. How important is it to make sure you alternate symbols? (Beyond the obvious of not having 3 in a row). Do you go out of your way to avoid two in a row?
2. Is it better to put major junctions at the most common circle/triangle symbols, or on squares, or the rarer ones?
3. How much imortance do you place on the slowdown from lines crossing not at stations? I always go out of my way to avoid doing it but I wonder if I overrate the importance of it in my mind.
4. When you notice that some random station along a single line is getting a lot more traffic than other ones, do you shift other lines to cross it or just add more carriages?
One of the most frustrating (but addicting) things with the game is that a couple of my highest scores happened when I first started playing it, before I thought I knew any tricks at all! Wish I could see what the best players' maps end up looking like.
Oh yeah, one more question... do you play the secret level? What actually happens there, or is it just a gag?
1. Alternation matters because circles spawn most often, triangles next, squares least. I avoid 3+ in a row almost religiously; 2 in a row is fine unless that segment is already stressed. If I can cheaply flip a segment into triangle-circle-triangle (or similar), I do it.
2. Where to put big junctions: Squares are rare magnets, so giving every line access to at least one square prevents square-bound riders from piling up on transfers. My "major" hub is usually a square near the geographic center or a bridge choke, and I try not to merge too many trunks into one block-split load across two nearby interchanges if possible. If you have special shapes (stars, etc.), connecting each special to exactly one line that meets others only at an interchange keeps flows predictable.
3. Crossing lines away from stations: It's not catastrophic, but on busy trunks the cumulative hit adds up. I'll avoid mid-block crossings on high-throughput segments; elsewhere I don't contort the whole map just to eliminate a single crossing. Net: treat it as a tax, pay it only when it saves tunnels or ugly detours.
4. Random station getting swamped: Triage in this order: turn it into an interchange (boarding speed), add a loco, then a carriage on the most burdened line, and only then re-route another line to cross it. If nothing stabilizes, drop a short "shuttle" micro-line from that station straight to a square/triangle sink, then delete it once the queue clears. Pausing to redraw aggressively is part of the game.
On those early "beginner's luck" highs: seed luck is real but also the game rewards ruthless mid-game rebuilds more than early cleverness. Don't be sentimental about lines-pause, re-lay, and keep every line touching a square.
I have not heard of or seen a secret level!
Thanks for the tips! I haven't normally redrawn as aggressively as you suggest. I'm excited to try all these strategies in practice, and it's enlightening as well to hear your thought process.
The secret level plays in endless mode. On the home screen of the game, tap the white arrow in the upper left corner to go to the credits page. Then return to the home screen and go to the credits page again. The second time there will be a sort of gear looking design next to the credits. Tap on that.
I don't know if there's a further easter egg to solving it but maybe you'll figure it out ;)
I have a similar set of questions about a different puzzle game.
I've reached a point where I don't feel I'm improving and I'm not discovering any more tricks.
Going online to find other people's solutions just feels wrong. Like buying a "how to complete $X" from the olden days. I don't learn when someone else provides the way to a solution; I like progressive learning, and I dislike the frustration when I stop progressing.
I keep wondering about the meta-problem of how to change my mental gears...
There's an itch to create my own version of the game which would force me to learn the underlying mathematics. Most games are designed to level your skills or knowledge up slowly (sometimes a social component involved). Building yourself forces one to understand the constraints better.
OR do I just train up my meta-skills e.g. playing similar but different games?
I do feel stupid!
Obviously I've also reached my limit on the metagame here, given that I'm asking...
When you reach an impass with a solo intellectual challenge, what's the next step?
Well, I don't usually ask for help and I don't want solutions handed to me, but getting another player's thought process doesn't seem like cheating. I suppose it depends on whether there's one trick to always solving the puzzle, in which case learning the solution without solving it yourself ruins the fun, or whether it's a game that you can always keep improving at and never completely be perfect at (like Mini Metro, which everyone loses eventually, or Poker, or chess, etc) where sometimes learning from others' strategies helps you level up and become familiar with concepts that unlock further skills and open up new questions as well.
Wow. AMA, you say? When do you prefer loops, or lines? Additional lines, or carriages? How much do you tear down at once? if you don't mind me asking
I'm like median on Metro, ~60 hours over years (though perhaps just the one hour, 60x, &c). Never too late to learn some strategy, I guess. Never played Motorways.
Loops vs lines: Loops only in a dense core where you can keep shapes alternating and include a square. Use lines for suburb<->core and river hops.
Lines or carriages: Early add lines, midgame add a loco, then carriages on the trunk that is actually redlining. Late add an interchange at the first overloaded transfer before more cars.
Tear-down: Hm... how much, not sure how to quantify. Definitely something you must do in every long running game but the extend is different. As a heuristic: Pause and rebuild when queues outrun a single weekly upgrade. Reorder shapes, make sure every line touches a square, split any mega-hub into two nearby transfers.
As you probably have guessed: There is no real silver bullet. Knowing the best move is basically impossible, the space is too complex. As a most useful general skill, it's important to recognize problems very early and optimize ruthlessly.
How did you learn strategies? There are very few reliable sources of strategy for both games, compared to other, more common simulation games.
How do you balance the struggle to recognize your own greatness while also making time to engage with the little people?
Also, how much time would you say it's taken you to refine your skill to get to that 1%?
> How do you balance the struggle to recognize your own greatness while also making time to engage with the little people?
Alas! I lie awake many a nights.
> Also, how much time would you say it's taken you to refine your skill to get to that 1%?
Just checked Steam stats. Surprisingly (well, to me) little: Around 60 hours of Mini Metro and 200 hours of Mini Motorways. I guess it's not exactly competitive esports.
I like it but it always felt like there was an escalating kill screen that happens way too quickly. Either that or I'm bad at it.
I am also bad at mini Metro but the thing that makes me crazy is that when the game ends it says something like “your city shut down.” That makes absolutely no sense and the endgame message should’ve been “you were fired!” Such a missed opportunity!
Maybe it does make sense: public transportation is vital to your city. If you fail at it, your city fails?
Serves this city right for putting all its eggs into one basket.
Where are the alternate forms transport: the bike paths and bike shares, LRTs/buses, and yes, roads? What about other upstream policy levers such as WFH mandates, and a decentralized urban core?
/s
I love Mini Metro, so chill, but challenging.
One catch is that riders only need to get a particular "shape" of station (roughly analogous to residential, commercial, industrial, stadium, etc). That is to say, they normally don't insist on going to a particular station. Also and it's free in time, money, and political captial to change routes. The model is, I feel, slightly too simple to feel like real transport infra. That doesn't stop it being hella fun though.
I figure all the triangle stations must have well-connected bus routes going to the same area, and so on down the shapes. I mean surely you're not responsible for building an entire transit system!
It’s obvious in hindsight, but before I lived in the Boston area I never appreciated just how critical it is to have buses to supplement a subway, subway & buses to supplement light rail.
Whenever the idea of light rail came up in my hometown, I would point out to my enthusiastic friends that without a better bus system, there’s not much point to rail.
My suburb has solid light rail to the city but a poor bus system to complement it. My closest bus doesn't run at all on weekends. There is a huge park and ride lot but, since I'm already in my car driving towards my destination, it always ends up being a question of whether I want to deal with a rail ride that might be equivalent to driving inbound but will be at least 30 minutes longer on the return. The deciding factor tends to come down to parking costs in the city or whether I plan to drink and need the long return ride to sober up.
It's the kind of game you can lose hours to without realizing, even if it's more "transit-inspired" than a full-on sim
I had fun with Mini Metro for a while, but in the long run it's a really frustrating game, because it always ends in failure - you start with a few stations and a few lines, but the game keeps throwing more and more passengers at you until you end up frantically trying to plug the holes in your network or "rewiring" it on the spot, and sooner or later everything inevitably blows up in your face. Plus of course it's wildly unrealistic with the way you are able to just delete your existing "tracks" and instantly construct completely new connections between your stations out of thin air, or just "teleport" trains/carriages from one line to another.
>it's wildly unrealistic with the way you are able to just delete your existing "tracks" and construct completely new connections between your stations out of thin air
You can disable that in the settings.
Seconded. Big fan of network optimization rail games like the Empire Builder series, but Mini Metro is just simple fun!
I love this game. And I have been waiting for the Mini Motorways for years...but for now it has not Linux version.
Mini Motorways is Platinum rated on Protondb, you should be able to play the Windows version on Linux just fine: https://www.protondb.com/app/1127500
Well, it is a option, but Mini Metro was linux native....I hope that Mini Motorways the same quality.
IMO, Mini Metro is the far better game. In Mini Metro it always feels like the congestion can be solved, it's never hopeless... in Motorways the congestion does really feel impossible to work around, and then you lose. Not sure if that's due to my lack of skill or the difference between rail (discrete, must connect stations) and roads (continuous, can be drawn anywhere on the map)
Transport planner here. Haven't played either game, but it sounds like Motorways has an accurate model behind it. That's how the real world works, too.
I'll be entirely honest here, this kind of game is generally up my alley but I clicked off when I came across the list of available cities to build in being exclusively in the US. Not even a fictional playground for messing around in the engine, just "US primacy or bust", doesn't inspire confidence for a full release down the line. Not that I don't understand why it's like this, pulling the required real-world data is hard enough as it is, but it will limit the market I think.
It's US focused because it uses US Census data to be very realistic and uses US open map data for the map. The dev tried to do Canada but couldn't get it working properly because Canadian census data is weird. I've heard someone from Germany managed to use some work arounds to get the game earlier than anyone else and modded in Berlin
> but I clicked off when I came across the list of available cities to build in being exclusively in the US.
Huh. I feel like the average US city would require a very different _sort_ of metro to the average European or East Asian city, if it even had the density to make it work at all. Like, more diversity in city types would make it a more interesting game.
Does any US city besides NYC even have a full subway network (vs one or two lines?)
DC, Chicago both have good coverage (I lived in both without a car, although did need busses at times).
Boston and SF in my limited experience have somewhat usable networks but definitely a step below
This was my experience too, lots of cities to choose but all of them US-based. Not even London or Berlin. I'll wait and see :)
Same. I'm not American and outside of NY I don't have a lot of interest in building subways there!
Realistic? Does it contain corruption, bribery, backstabbing and other political stuffs?
OK nvm my congratulations to the game designer!
OpenTTD has corruption and bribery.
https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Manual/Local%20authority#bribe-t...
Well, I recognize this is a joke. I would enjoy having a simulation where you inherit and hold poorly maintained subway system like the Boston MBTA and have to bring it back to health with all the challenges these systems face
Isn't the principal problem with the MBTA that it's been underfunded for decades and has a maintenance backlog of about a gazillion dollars? I realize it's getting better on the rolling stock front, but it sounds like the track is still a challenge despite some real efforts to address some of the problems.
I do kind of miss riding it though. For the last couple years I was living there, I got to ride the Ashmont-Mattapan trolleys as part of my commute. That was a treat. One of the last weeks before we moved to Vermont, my wife rode down to Ashmont with me and rode the trolley to Mattapan, then back to Ashmont to take the Red Line back to her office.
Under Eng it has apparently turned around in the last year or so.
I rode it a lot from 2011 to 2019, and still do though less frequently. I don't presonally feel things were ever as bac as point like to claim they were, and I'm not really sure what's been "improved" so much.
The biggest changes are that you can pay with tap to pay everywhere, which is nice, and the trains drive a lot more cautiously, which irritates me because they feel considerably slower now.
I can live with slow but consistent versus faster sometimes and late or even unavailable at other times. For a while there the Green Line only made sense for students who valued saving a few bucks at the expense of an unknown amount of time.
yeah its been surprisingly usable this year. a lot less delays and a decent amount faster
You can already play that game, just put a static picture of the system map on your screen, then click all over the place and watch nothing improve
This makes me realize simulations like this will be possible with AI at some point, and could be an interesting way for a city to hire employees
Yeah, I was expecting a gag game where you, e.g. try to build a subway but get told you don't have enough budget to do anything.
Then you have to have dinner with an influential member of the city's planning committee and promise that the residential zoned real-estate that your company currently holds will be on offer to the committee before it is publicly offered. Also that you'll stay announcements of the new platform locations until they've bought the properties.
This was my first thought when it stressed realism. Dealing with red tape, bureaucracy, zoning issues, opposition from citizens and local officials, etc.
Even without the political chaos, modeling the physical and commuter-side complexity is already a huge win
Anyone know how big the bay area map is? Would be neat to build dream BART, including north bay and San Joaquin valley.
EDIT: Nevermind, purchased and answered my own question. Outer cities included going clockwise from north bay: Novato, Vallejo, Benicia, Brentwood, Livermore, Santa Teresa, Los Gatos, the full peninsula northward starting from Half Moon Bay. So a good amount, but missing some outer commuting areas like Santa Rosa, Fairfield, Tracy, Gilroy.
The price point on steam is a little expensive for what (seems like?) might be an early access game by a single individual. Looks interesting though..
Yeah, I think it's way too expensive if you're not using USD. It's +70% more than the price of the current Factorio steam price in my local currency. And with 40$ for the steam release, it has to be higher than Factorio post-conversion (current Factorio USD price is 35$).
It's a hard sell for me, considering Factorio has a ton of actively developed mods (cough Space Exploration 0.7 cough), a demo, and in early access era it's cheaper and insanely polished.
From a quick glance, I'm not sure whether it's a fun game or not, as realism tends to be not fun. Requiring an internet connection for map tiles also sounds not good for offline play.
Well, I'll wait for reviews when it's out before deciding then.
At $30, I've got a lot of expectations. At $40, I've got a lot more. Neither of those price points are the impulse buy for "it might be a nice game that I could waste a few hours on." It's competing with things like Satisfactory and Factorio for promise of enduring in my library gaming.
This feels something closer to Puffin Planes ($12), Rail Route ($25), Station Flow ($18).
The difference between $25 and $30 isn't too much, but there's another significant hurdle to get up to a perceived $40 value.
It does look interesting, but for a purchase at that price point, I'm going to need to feel that its worth more than a weekend or two of gaming and something that will be a game that I want to pick up again after a month or two away from it.
This seems like a game with a niche audience, and I'm sure it'll be worth $30 to the right people
It's possible... but it's not as much of an impulse buy.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1124180/Rail_Route/ is pretty niche (and is in my library) ... and its $25, which is a fair bit less than the $40 price point planned for Steam. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY_Rails/ NIMBY Rails is at $19 (also in my library).
It could very well be a great game... though that price is one that's setting the expectations for it high.
Maybe it's worth it, but currently it's very hard for those people to distinguish it from a game that's not worth it to them.
This gets into the economics of whether it's more worthwhile to sell to a large, casual audience for say $10 or a small enthusiast audience at $30-40. At the enthusiast price I expect a polished game at launch and loads of reasonably priced expansions in the not too distant future.
I like the idea.
But this is a very weird way to sell a game.
1st, we have Steam. That's where I and most people buy games. 30$ for a random exe is going to be really inconvenient.
Launch it on Steam at the same time, or at a minimum promise a key.
It's also not clear why it's just a bunch of American cities, if you're pulling the data from Google anyway, any city ( within reason) should work. If you need additional data, let users add it.
Maybe on steam I'll buy it
>why it's just a bunch of American cities
They said they pulled commuter data from the census and another source. They'd need to get a few datasets from other countries to pull it off that aren't in google maps.
No reason they can't provide a way for users to add this.
I'll wait on the Steam release.
Perhaps my most favorite game is not on steam and sold as a sketchy exe/jar file. I say more power to sketchy .exe game devs and down with steam.
Now excuse me, my Pather friends called and there is a colony using ai which must be purged by Lud’s holy fire.
Ha I was going to mention Star Sector as an example of a great game that's not on Steam, but looks like you've already got that covered.
Highly recommended space sim for anyone else reading this!
In the FAQ they explain that they use US federal data for the population simulation, including home and workplace locations, college student counts, and flight information from the FAA.
It will be on steam, says on at the bottom.
For $10 more. I get that Steam takes their pound of flesh but this feels shortsighted given how games are consumed these days.
I like the concept and am intrigued but at this price point I'll wait for reviews from people who have played it extensively.
Colin is a friend of mine - a really wonderful self taught programmer. Subway builder gets a thumbs up from me.
Tell him that asking for 30/40$ without delivering even a single video is asking too much. Especially for such a minimalistic game.
I’ve been following this game on twitter, and I’m probably going to lose my entire weekend to playing it. We need more sweaty simulators like this—the genre doesn’t have enough entries.
There's something incredibly satisfying about diving deep into systems that actually make you think and optimize
I love these kind of games, but 40$ is incredibly expensive. I hope the price on Steam is at least region adjusted. As long as it is US cities I am out anyway.
My thought also.
RimWrld, a game with a small dev team but seemingly endless potential is $28.00 for the base game.
I can't imagine how this game could justify those $40.
Note to the dev - FYI one of Steam's terms is that your game can't be sold cheaper somewhere else. Not sure if they enforce that though.
Their terms are that you can't sell *Steam keys* for cheaper than the game is listed for on Steam.
There is a class-action lawsuit on this that's been ongoing for half a decade now, but as far as I can tell the plaintiffs have not been able to produce any actual contract text supporting this claim. The closest their filings come is some random customer support rep.
I wonder how the terms of that work exactly in practice. For example I'm pretty sure Humble Bundle includes games that are on Steam every now and then, with a pretty solid discount if you consider what you get for your money.
In practice it means Steam reviews the key requests you make for third party bundles and sales. If they decide the deal is too generous, they may deny the key requests until you've offered the game for a comparable price on Steam.
Really? I've noticed a few games that are cheaper via apple's app store than they are from steam. It's not a big difference, usually ~$5.
Is there a steam version though? I don't see it on there
It's mentioned as upcoming in the FAQ under "How much will it cost?": "$30 on subwaybuilder.com and $40 on Steam (page is coming soon). The Steam launch won't happen for a few months after the launch on subwaybuilder.com."
Saw a lot of buzz about this on Twitter, looks fun! I'm hoping there's some good mod support so I can add in my hometown.
Are there NIMBYs protesting about the Character of the Neighborhood™? If not, it's not fully realistic.
no demo? just a link to pay $30?
Not a demo necessarily but Miles In Transit - a delightfully nerdy public transit YouTuber - did a live stream playing the game early a couple of days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3RrlV9YrS4
There are plenty of demo videos on Twitter:
that doesn't help people who aren't on twitter.
How about support for offline tiles? Portable and private.
Looks nice but will it have other cities around the world?
I think the dev said maybe in the future, but currently (i think) all the population simulation stuff is tightly coupled with US Census data so this initial release doesn’t support international cities yet
The rest of the world actually funds and builds public transit, making a simulation of doing so less necessary
That was my first reaction ... does it simulate having a federal executive that randomly cancels your funding? A nonzero chance that the local authority demands you cooperate with the "personal rapid transit" huckster?
well it would be interesting to compare european and american cities wrt. population density and building costs. the claim is that american cities are not dense enough to be worth while. in a simulation you could set the parameters so that you can specifically look at the population density as a factor.
please add "super hard mode in germany" - you want to build new station? fill out 120423423 forms, 10 years of waiting, 35 lawsuits from NIMBY retirees, 312 lawsuits from environment protection agency, and after thats passed you run out of money or baloon your initial budget 10x.
Pft. Dublin's first underground metro (you could maybe vaguely argue that the surface-level/elevated DART is a metro-alike; it fits into the same not-quite-commuter-rail category as an S-Bahn) just finally got its railway order (planning permission), 24 years after it was first proposed and 17 years after the first application (though the south surface portion will not be built, as it would have required the closure of like three level crossings of the existing tram line that it would have used, and enough people complained that they gave up). All going well, it will be done around 2035, but realistically there will probably be a judicial review or two which will knock it back to 2040. All this is assuming that there isn't another recession; if there is funding will of course immediately be withdrawn.
Laughs in American. You can do all of that and one Karen who lives 300 miles from the project site and who has time to attend a 10am meeting on a random Tuesday gets the whole thing shut down.
Was hoping this would be a sandwich art simulator:’)
Is there a free demo? I might like this game, but I might not.
Yep. $30 is a big ask (especially for such a visually simple game), and the prospective customer has to decide if they're interested based off a threadbare list of features and 6 screenshots.
Is this game actually ready, or is it a pre-purchase where you pay now and get it when it's done? The splash page seemed to be giving me mixed messages, but dearth of screenshots/video makes me think the latter? A bit sketchy to take people's money for a pre-pay for an unfinished game without being entirely clear that's what's happening? Or it obvious to gamers?
What tech did you go with here?
Not my game, but the creator https://x.com/colin_d_m?lang=en posted a lot of tweets with technical details, also his website I think has some info.
He had some pretty interesting methods for 3D building transparency and stuff like that
He looks like he had a lot of fun with that. 3D maps like Google Maps/Mapbox/Maplibre can more or less serve as your engine if you have a game in mind.
It would be great if they had a version of this where you had to progress through sampling soil, union negotiations, working with city planners, and then the actual digging with all the delays of machinery, strikes, planning issues, NIMBY's and such.
A great name for this game would be Hell.
Is there a demo I'm missing or is this just a link to buy the game site unseen?
I've seen a few youtube videos about it and the developer has been posting about it on his twitter for a few months: https://x.com/colin_d_m
Like SimCity meets OpenTTD but with a laser focus on subway logistics
This looks great, I hope you can include European capitals at some point. I've always wondered what the actual cost and layout would be in some of the cities I've lived in that don't have a subway.
Warning: There are no sandwiches in this simulation :)
I've had a lot of fun playing this the past weeks. And very happy to learn the game uses Prisma on the backend :-)
Windows/Mac/Linux?
Put it on steam please
this is just worse NIMBY rails
Not too familiar with any games in this category, but I’ve been vaguely following development of this game on Twitter and one of the more interesting features is the passenger demand stuff is based off of current US census metrics about commuting methods, so I imagine this is probably better than NIMBY rails in that regard