TS19: An Interview with Rivet Games

With the Alpine landscape having been brought to life with the classic Gotthardbahn, which is now out for Train Simulator, we thought we would catch up with Rivet Games, get a better understanding of who they are, what their goals are and what drove them to recreating Swiss rails...

Hi, I’m Matthew Price, Lead Vehicle Artist at Rivet Games, and I’ve been making Train Simulator content for 7 years. And I’m Colin Macdonald, Commercial Director at Rivet Games – I’ve been in the games industry for nearly 30 years, although only joined the Train Sim community earlier this year with the formation of Rivet Games.

Rivet Games is a team of 19 people based in Stirling, Scotland. The studio is mostly art and design, with just one programmer at the moment.

Rivet Games came into life on February 1st this year – formed by a number of ex-Dovetail staff who had a passion for what they had been doing for Train Simulator and wanted to do it under a new venture.

About two thirds of the team have extensive experience developing for Train Simulator – collectively it’d be well over 100 years of experience. But we’ve also been trying to give opportunities for more recent graduates, so the other third of the team have cut their teeth on the Gotthardbahn route and are bringing lots of fresh ideas with them.

(Colin) Speaking for myself, I’m one of the few that hasn’t come from a background of creating Train Simulator routes – although I’ve created games of just about every other genre and for every platform over the years, so our early months have involved everyone else here frantically trying to teach me as much as possible about Train Simulator!

The Gotthardbahn route is a big one – it’s longer than most at 110km, and with so many iconic sections that it’s important are as good as possible – and we wanted our first route as Rivet to be a statement piece that would set the bar for everything else we’ll do going forward. We’re also keen to work with the Train Simulator community wherever possible, which is why it was so exciting to collaborate with TrainworX so that they could ensure their existing rolling stock would be fully compatible with the Gotthardbahn route.

We’re definitely expecting to maintain the high quality bar we’ve set for ourselves with Gotthardbahn, and going forward we want to look at new routes and new countries that we’re confident we can deliver to the level everyone would expect.

It’s our level of ambition that’s driven the size – partly we want to ensure we’re properly staff to be able to produce everything we tackle at the highest quality level, and partly that we’ve a lot we’d like to do, so a larger team gives us more capacity!

The bottom line is that Switzerland has some of the most stunning rail journeys in the world, and we’ve seen the community clamouring for more. Alan Thomson’s unique knowledge and experience, as well as his contacts in Switzerland with the train operators, meant that we could be up and running faster than it might have taken if we’d started with other countries.

Work started February 1st, and as with all these things, you’re still polishing and bug-fixing things until the last possible minute, so it’s been almost six months. Although with a new company things are never fully efficient the first time around so if we were doing it again it shouldn’t take quite as long.

Without a doubt, it’s bringing together all the different parts of it and ensuring everything works together – but the nature of that means any problems with that integration happens right in the middle of production, which can be hard to manage when you’re trying to stay on schedule as well.

We did two survey trips out to Switzerland, where members of the team would travel up and down the route, getting off at every station to photograph every key detail, as well as arranging access to the loco cabs, and anything else we think will be key to add to the authenticity of the experience.

Everyone on the team enjoys a different aspect, but overall it’s when it comes together and it’s playable for the first time that’s most exciting.

The obvious first difference is it being standard gauge, which has been great to see everyone sharing our excitement about. It’s also a longer route, at 110km, and provides a huge variety of scenery throughout the length of it – including of course the 15km of the original Gotthard tunnel, which when opened was the longest tunnel in the world.

Swiss architecture is very unique, so every building in the route had to be built from scratch.

How do you represent the logic behind complex systems such as signalling?
Not easily is the short answer! Like so much else involved in doing this route, it had to be coded from scratch!

It was exciting to be allowed to include such an iconic loco in the game, so we’ve poured over the details both inside and out. If we had to pick one unique feature about it, it would be the cab’s adjustable console.

We genuinely just want to make whatever there’s the most demand for, so folk can absolutely influence us on that by giving us feedback and suggestions!

We are indeed – there’s no rest for the wicked!

We can’t go into any details yet, but let’s just say that looking at the majority of the comments and suggestions for us on the various forums over the past couple of weeks, that we expect to make a lot of people pretty happy!

Forums: forums.rivet-games.com/

YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/RivetGames

Facebook: www.facebook.com/RivetGame

Twitter: www.twitter.com/RivetGame

Instagram: www.instagram.com/RivetGames

And you can also find the delightful sights of Switzerland, as the Gotthardbahn Alpine Classic: Erstfeld – Bellinzona route is available now for Train Simulator!

Want to get a behind the scenes look into how Rivet Games developed the Gotthardbahn? Make sure to give their devblog series a watch and see just what it takes to bring such an iconic route to life!