Train Fever

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Train Fever
Train Fever logo
Developer(s)	Urban Games
Platform(s)	Linux Microsoft Windows OS X
Genre(s)	Business simulation game
Mode(s)	Single-player
Distribution	Download

Train Fever is a business simulation game by Urban Games, funded 20 March 2012 via the crowdfunding platform Gambitious, for a total budget of €300 000.

The planned release date as of 20 March 2013 is May 2014.^[1]

The game is heavily inspired from other transport simulation games,^[2] such as Transport Tycoon, Railroad Tycoon, Cities in Motion and Open TTD.

Funding

On 22 June 2012, the Train Fever team announced that they would need to seek funding in order to be able to develop the final release of their game.^[3] It was decided to use a crowd-funding platform, although no name was given at that time. The first activities on Train Fever's Gambitious page were observed on 26 August. The crowd-funding campaign started officially on 1 September 2012.^[4] The original funding target was €300 000, split by €20 shares, with an initial equity of 60% for private investors. The deadline was fixed for 1 March 2013, for a total duration of six months.

On 14 October 2012, Train Fever lead developer announced that everyone investing €40 (2 shares) or more in the project will receive a copy of the final version of the game.^[5] On 27 October, a new gameplay video was released and announced on both the Gambitious project page and the official website.^[6]

Three months after the beginning of the campaign, on 12 December 2012, the campaign had reached 6.5% completion, with 70 investors and €20,000 invested.^[7] On 27 December 2012, Train Fever was accepted on Valve's Steam Greenlight, in the "Concept" section.^[8] Reception was very positive, allowing Train Fever to reach the first page of Steam Greenlight "Top Rated All Time" at beginning of February. At that time, the project was supported by 200 investors on Gambitious.^[9]

On 18 February 2013, eleven days before the campaign deadline, the Train Fever team announced that an institutional investor backed the project for a total of €50,000.^[10] As a consequence, several decisions were made:

The target funding on Gambitious campaign was lowered from €300,000 to €250,000
The equity for private investors was lowered from 60% to 50%. However, the same ratio of "equity percentage / money invested" was kept (1% of equity for €5,000 invested).
The campaign deadline was moved to 31 March 2013, in order not to surprise investors with last-minute changes.
The start of the development was moved to May 2013, with a new expected release date in May 2014.

On 25 February 2013, the Train Fever team announced that the game will be available at release on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. On 2 March 2013, €155,000 was invested, with €95,000 remaining to find, and 29 days to the deadline.^[11] Finally, on 20 March 2013, the crowd-funding campaign reached its target of €250,000, with 651 investors.^[12]

Gameplay

The game is a single player game designed for 20 hours of gameplay in which the story-time runs from 1850 until 2050.^[13]
The game takes place in an environment comparable with Europe and the cities are procedurally generated and evolve accordingly. The player builds transport infrastructure like railroads and stations and has to maintain this infrastructure. The player also buys vehicles and creates routes. He needs to develop his transport company, eventually becoming a transport empire.
The game contains RPG elements, skills that have to be trained, they influence the player on parameters like purchase prices.

References

External links

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