2026-11-08 · English
Twenty years, the same question
Devlog 0 (English) — why we know how a tractor feels, and why that is a software problem
My brother and I founded our small game studio back in 2006. We developed a game called Fendt Trial. By today's standards it was a basic tractor game, but at the time we were pioneers — the very first to build a 3D tractor simulator.
We were both working at AGCO, the company behind the Fendt brand. We took our idea and a prototype straight to the marketing department. They loved it and told us: "Start a game studio and build this game."
Two machines, a 936 Vario and a 312. Clearing snow. Bringing straw bales into the barn. Front loader work. Simple by today's measure — and the first of its kind back then.
A van full of DVDs
We got a booth at Agritechnica, the agricultural trade show in Hanover. If you know the show, you know what that means: the largest farm machinery exhibition in the world, and in the middle of it two people with a game nobody had made before.
In the back of the van were pallets of DVDs. Pressed, with cases and covers, like proper software. We sold thousands of copies and were completely sold out within a week.
That feeling — somebody sits down at your booth, drives, and you watch their face and see that it feels right — is the reason this project is still alive twenty years later.
Soon other brands asked whether we would build the same for them. A publisher approached us with an offer we couldn't accept. Amazon suggested a price tag that would have left us with nothing. So we stayed independent and started on version two.
The mistake we can laugh about today
We helped test Landwirtschafts-Simulator — Farming Simulator.
That isn't a joke and it isn't bitterness. It was the small, helpful industry where everyone knew each other. We helped the giant find its feet, and that giant eventually overshadowed our little studio. A textbook mistake in hindsight. At the time it was simply being a good colleague.
Then came the App Store, and that went well again. And then life happened: our kids were born, and the time was gone.
We never fully let go. Year after year we ported the project to the next Unity version. Not because there was a plan — but because you don't let something die that your heart is attached to.
Why this story belongs in a devlog
Because it explains why the next posts look the way they do.
When you read here that we spent three days on a tyre curve, or that a headlight cone passed for sixteen metres of vehicle, it looks like splitting hairs from the outside. It is. But it is the hair-splitting of people who have stood next to real machines and know how they behave.
A tractor is not a car with big wheels. It pulls with the rear axle while the front gets light. It stands on tyres that grip differently on soft ground than on tarmac, and that you can run harder or softer depending on where you are going. Its belly bottoms out before the wheels start spinning. Miss that, and you have built a racing game with a tractor texture on it.
That is why TraktorSim computes per-wheel load, slip, differential lock and tyre pressure. Not as a bullet list on a store page — but because a tractor doesn't feel like a tractor otherwise, and we know the difference.
And an arc that surprised us
Going through the old material for this post, we noticed something. In 2007 Fendt Trial had essentially two jobs: clearing snow and bringing in straw bales.
TraktorSim in 2026 has, among other things: snow clearing — a blade that strips each cell of a snow layer, piles the snow to the right and costs traction. And bale runs — eight round bales, a bale spike, a pyramid at the edge of the field.
The same two jobs. Twenty years later, with physics underneath that we couldn't have afforded back then.
That wasn't planned. It's simply what a tractor does.
Where we are now
There is a new version, and it is out. The goal is Steam and the App Store, and there is a lot of work between here and there.
Hence this devlog: not as marketing, but as an open log. We write down what we build, what goes wrong, and what we measured — especially when it is embarrassing. The interesting stories are the failures anyway.
And one more thing, because it belongs here: I am the only one left to carry this story on, and I use AI for the coding. I know the criticism. For art assets I stick strictly to human work — those are irreplaceable. But as a solo developer in a niche, this is the tool that lets the project breathe again.
Let's see where this journey takes us.
TraktorSim — ten regions with the parts for your tractor scattered across them, a workshop that turns them into a machine, and a year that keeps running.