Rolling Line

Rolling Line is an independent PC and VR sandbox game developed and published by New Zealand game developer Gaugepunk Games. The game simulates railway modelling with a low-poly aesthetic in which players can explore and create model-train layouts and share them online for others to play. The game had a delayed release of 28 April 2018 for Microsoft Windows initially with HTC Vive support. It now supports almost most VR headsets including Oculus, Vive, Valve Index and WMR headsets.

Gameplay
Rolling Line is a 3D sandbox game which is centred on the creation and operation of model railway sets. The game utilises a minimalist low-poly aesthetic commonly used in independent games. It is played from the first-person perspective and can be played in either VR or on PC. The player can either play on the official built-in layouts, based on real-world inspired locations around New Zealand, or create their own in an empty workroom environment.

The game can be played at two scales, one "large" mode where the player is at the typical size of a human viewing a layout, and a "small" mode where the player can experience the layout from a small point of view as if they were a part of the layout itself. In small mode, the player can move with W, A, S, and D keys (or reassign them in the settings menu). The player can also interact with trains, entering them and controlling them via simple control buttons, which include forward, reverse, headlight, cab light, and horn.

Driving
The table-top model railways can be operated in the rooms by pointing the hand-held remote controller and selecting a locomotive which will display the speed and the name of the locomotive. Alternatively, the player can drive the selected locomotives from within the cab by switching from the human-sized scale to the model-sized scale and view the layout from the perspective of the driver. While in the miniature scale, dynamic time and weather will be enabled and the environment and skybox extends beyond the shape of the railway. In the room-scale, more rollingstock types can be found within the drawers underneath the tables which can be added onto the layouts to create custom consists.

Building
Within the rooms drawers can be found underneath the tables which contain categories for all the props and track pieces used for creating and decorating layouts. The player can add these props onto the tabletop. The layouts can be edited by pointing the edit tool onto the table-top and selecting “enable editing” which can be scrolled out to a certain radius. This will enable props to be picked up, moved, scaled and painted.

History
Rolling Line was developed and released by independent developer and publisher Gaugepunk Games, who is solely owned by Jack Huygens, a New Zealand VR game developer currently based in Wellington.

Before working on Rolling Line, Jack Huygens would work on virtual reality game prototypes back in 2014. His first published project, Tsar Roska would be a 3D top-down tank shooter built in the Unity engine using low poly models in a minimalist environment, an aesthetic which would continue throughout Gaugepunk Games including Rolling Line.

Huygens has now developed three commercial games published to Steam being Frontier VR (a wild west nature experience), Echo Grotto (a NZ based cave exploring game) and his most popular title, Rolling Line.