ZUG

"The war to end all wars" — this phrase was meant to predict the future, to suggest that the Great War would be so devastating that no one would dare to repeat such a conflict. But did it truly end all wars? Can any war ever end all wars? These are questions for philosophers.
My goal is to show how devastating this war was — how it began, how it changed the nature of warfare by introducing trench combat, how the propaganda machine urged everyone to enlist, and how, in the end... it changed nothing.

ZUG, translated from German, means train — which is the actual setting of the game: an old train from the early 20th century. But it’s also a metaphor. A train represents movement — not just through space, but through time.
My game invites you to travel across the events of the First World War, from the assassination of Franz Ferdinand to the Treaty of Versailles.
But keep in mind, this isn’t a museum. You can’t just walk through — there will be obstacles, or more precisely, puzzles to solve. They aren’t too difficult: some require careful attention, others rely on logic.

The game is about the Great War — one of the largest and deadliest conflicts in history. A war that destroyed four empires and took around 40 million lives.
Maybe I didn’t include many facts about the war — its causes, battles, and so on — but instead, I tried to create a game that sparks interest in learning about this conflict.
I focused on building a unique atmosphere: showing how ordinary people were forced into the trenches — into the meat grinder of war — how they used ciphers and other codes to communicate, how propaganda tried to convince everyone to enlist, and how, in the end... it all ended.

The game was originally created as a demo for my new engine. Furthermore, the source code for both the game and the engine is available on GitHub.
As mentioned, it uses my own custom game engine, which is quite flexible and provides good performance on most PCs. The only real requirement is a GPU with Vulkan API support, as the main rendering pipeline is based on Vulkan.
Controls are standard: WASD for movement, Esc to pause, mouse look, and left mouse button to interact with objects. The game automatically saves your progress.