Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game

[Asid]

Automation is a car company tycoon game in which you design and build cars from scratch. It is you who designs everything from the very core that is the engine, over the chassis, to the suspension and the car's looks. Several games have tried this before... but were able to merely scratch the surface.


Homepage: Here
Steam: Here
Official forum: Here
YouTube: Here
Manual: Here


Single-player


Steam Early Access Trailer (Published on 12/03/2015

About

**NEW UPDATE**The "Lite Campaign" simple Tycoon mode has now been released, along with an Open Beta of the much improved Unreal Engine based Car and Engine designers.

Automation will allow the player to become an armchair CEO - to build their own car company from the ground up. Create and run anything from a boutique supercar manufacturer to a mass-market multinational mogul. With powerful tools like the Engine Designer, the player can create cars and their engines in mind-boggling detail.

The grand campaign will start in the year 1946 and run until 2020, with the main goal being to build a successful, renowned car company from scratch. All types of car manufacturers can be led to success if managed properly; building the right image over the years is key. The player’s tasks are to design engines and cars, to manage factories, production, Research and Development, as well as advertising campaigns. In game, time advances at the pace the player chooses and pauses automatically for events and occurrences.

Automation is comprised of three major game components - the Engine Designer, the Car Designer and the Company Manager. These components are naturally strung together by the game’s goals, made to be user-friendly and intuitive to use. A multitude of tutorial missions, videos, and descriptive texts help car novices become experts. Almost infinite options give the player all the creative freedom to create unique cars with vastly different engines.


KEY PLANNED FEATURES FOR THE COMPLETED GAME:

•   Extremely Deep, Technical, Creative – Experience unheard-of creative freedom in a highly technical, realistic gameplay experience revolving around building a car company from scratch. Go ahead and build your dream-car company!
•   Dynamic World Markets – Master realistically modeled dynamic markets, distribution, and demand. Try to cater to the needs of over 40 different target groups and their needs, or find your safe-haven niche in a cutthroat economic environment.
•   Flexible Car Designer – Design the cars you would have in your garage. Choose from diverse chassis types and materials, engine placements and drivetrain setups, gearboxes, suspensions, brakes, tyres, and finish off you design with fully customisable body types, looks and styles.
•   Highly Detailed Engine Designer – Delve into endless possibilities combining different 4-stroke petrol engine configurations, internals, head types, forced induction systems, fuel systems, headers and mufflers. All based on different 4-stroke petrol engine configurations: Inline 3, 4, 5, 6, V6, 8, 10, 12, 16, Boxer 4, 6.
•   Dynamic Engine Sounds - Turn up the volume and blast out the awesome fully adaptive, unique engine sounds that directly reflect your design choices.
•   Grand Campaign, Scenarios, Sandbox – Aim to dominate the world markets with your superior design skills in the grand campaign, play a quick scenario challenge, or just tinker away in sandbox mode to create the most insane engines ever.
•   Complex, yet Easy to Learn – While the game is highly technical, it is made easy to learn by means of well-illustrated in-game tutorial videos, detailed descriptive texts, as well as a multitude of tutorial scenarios.
•   Network Play – Play cooperatively with your friends or take your intuition for the perfect car design and challenge up to 7 human competitors in epic, multi-session network games.
•   Community – Join one of the most awesome and helpful communities out there, share stories about your exploits, talk to like-minded people, discuss your IRL car projects and engage in community challenges.


Current Release Status

The current release contains the Car and Engine design aspects of Automation along with a simplified "Lite Campaign" version of the Tycoon gameplay. As well as an Open Beta of the Car and Engine design aspects of Automation built in Unreal Engine 4, giving major improvements in graphical quality, performance, playability and UI Design.

Currently we're hard at work on a new, improved, Unreal Engine based Campaign mode, coming soon!

Read the Early Access description for a full overview of what is finished so far, and check out out http://www.youtube.com/user/AutomationGame for regular development news updates

[Asid]

***IMPORTANT NOTE:***

The current version contains a simplified "Lite Campaign" version of the Tycoon aspects. More detailed Tycoon gameplay will be the focus of future major updates. Please read the Early Access description above for an overview of what is done so far. The current Open Beta is also an almost complete remake of the game in Unreal Engine 4, for a huge improvement in visuals, performance and usability. Currently the Lite Campaign is only available in the non Beta version, but we're hard at work making a new improved Campaign mode.

[Asid]

Drive Your Automation Cars In BeamNG.drive



Here it is! In collaboration with the BeamNG devs we bring you the joint Exporter Update. It allows you to export your Automation cars to test drive them in BeamNG.drive.



The exporter is simple to use: design your car and engine in Automation, tune them to your liking, hit the export button, start up BeamNG.drive and your new car is right there in the vehicle list. It still is a little wonky in places, and will improve with future versions - but exporter works and is a blast to tinker with!



Automation Test Track in BeamNG.drive
The Automation Test Track was added as a big new level in BeamNG.drive for you to explore and compare track times! Apart from the main track there is an in-field rally circuit and country roads handling track, a tarmac hillclimb with snowy roads, a gravel rally stage up a massive dam and a lot more, all set in beautiful fictional Central Otago (New Zealand).





Collaboration Cross-Promotion Discount
As part of kicking off this collaboration between Automation and BeamNG, players owning either of the two titles will receive a 20% discount coupon on Steam for the respective other game shortly after the joint release. New buyers of the game within the period the coupons are valid will also receive a coupon for the respective other game! All coupons expire exactly 3 weeks after the update release.



Boxers, Inline 5s, and V16 Engines
With this update we added the remaining promised engines to the game: Boxer 4, Boxer 6, and Inline 5 engines. Also, after almost a year of V16 exclusivity for our pre-Steam early premium supporters, the “support the devs” V16 upgrade of Automation is available for purchase now. Check out the V16 FAQ for all the info and background story.



Other Features
Since the release of the Car Designer Revamp update we have done a lot more bugfixing and polishing of the UI. Also, we have added a few new tutorial scenarios in which you design engines in the context of a car to cater to certain demographics, as well as four basic open car scenarios.



Campaign Status
During all the development of the exporter we have not stopped working on the campaign on the side. Obviously, this “little” surprise has slowed down the process a bit, but the campaign update is not too far off. As per usual we’ll make sure to keep you updated with Little Dev Update videos.

Enjoy, cheers!

[Asid]

Lite Campaign V3 Opt-In Beta & Development Timeline
21 December - Killrob

First Patch B181222

•   Fixed "Corrupt Data" startup issue
•   Fixed issue where engine didn't calculate at all
•   Activated manual save function (disk icon in top right)
•   Hooked up tutorial video on campaign startup notice

Unless some crazy issue pops up, this will be it with patches until January 4th as noted in the timeline below. Cheers!

Original Release Notes
We just released the first, somewhat playable version of the Lite Campaign V3 (LC V3). Most features planned for the LC V3 have been implemented, but despite working on it flat out for the last few months, there is still a lot left to do before we consider it done and good enough for a full public release of this update. To put it into perspective, at the point of writing this there are 238 yet unsolved items on the ToDo list for just the LC V3. The new version contains only the first beta version of the LC V3 and neither the sandbox mode, nor the exporter - both are coming back to this new UE4.21.0 based version of the game along with fixes and improvements in mid January.

Little Dev Update about today’s release:



LC V3 Update Features
A first rough version of the LC V3, including engineering, factories, marketing, selling your cars, etc.

•   Facelifting existing car trims and engine variants
•   Reusing old engines, sharing engines between different models
•   More car bodies, body fixes, and new variants
•   Many more rear- and mid-engine compatible bodies
•   More fixtures of various types
•   Modelled factories & add-ons
•   Improved game mechanics and realism in car and engine designers
•   Various car and engine designer bugfixes
•   Improved and fixed UI, and UI feedback

Game Engine Switch from 4.17.2 to 4.21.0
The engine switch from Unreal Engine 4.17.2 to 4.21.0 was necessary due to the so-called “garbage collection bug” that was plaguing a lot of our players with seemingly random crashes. While we cannot confirm the issue is gone as we never were able to properly recreate the issue on any of our machines in the office, we can say that the part of the code the crashes stemmed from no longer even exists after a major rewrite by Epic. So here is hoping for the best! Among other benefits of the new engine version, a big one for us is that the build time for the game is down from 90 to 20 minutes, making “let’s just try that real quick” tests more feasible.

The engine switch means that mods won’t be working in this opt-in version until they have been updated by their creators to be based on UE4.21., we’ll add the updated mod tools once we launch the normal open beta phase in mid January.

Playing the LC V3
Due to how rough and unpolished it still is, we give you access to this version not via the main branch of the game but via opting into the lcv3_test branch via the Properties - Betas selection (right-click the game in your Steam Library). We do not recommend to the average player to try this version yet because of how difficult it is to navigate with so much of the much needed UI feedback still missing. If, on the other hand, you are a curious and hardened Automation player with a good grasp of the game mechanics, give it a go and see if you can figure it out with our little video tutorial. Having played the LC V2 in the old game engine certainly will prove helpful as well.



Note: The first opt-in beta version of the LC V3 has not been properly tested nor balanced. There will be plenty of bugs and most likely it will play strangely due to issues with the overall balance and issues with the AI generated competitor cars.

Here is a tutorial video on how to try out (and play) the LC V3 in its current state. Note: currently the link to the video in game doesn't work yet.



Development Timeline for the LC V3



View a full-size version of the development timeline here

Release is on December 21st. The goal is to have a rough but “playable-if-you-know-how-to” version with rudimentary UI implementation and all kinds of rough edges. If necessary, we are going to get a patch out on the December 22nd to address any major game breaking issues that pop up.

We’ll be out of office over the Christmas holidays until January 2nd. On January 4th we’ll get the first patch out for this big update based on your feedback and our highest priority ToDo list items. After that you can expect one big patch each week as we are adding or polishing up UI, fixing bugs, as well as balance the campaign. On January 18th we are going to add back in the Sandbox and the new BeamNG Exporter version with some new features and fixes.



We’ll continue updating that version with 1-2 patches each week until it is ready to be put onto the main branch in its proper release version in Mid February. Thereafter we’ll patch it as necessary and start working on implementing the LC V4 features in a new (shorter) development cycle. The LC V4 will come with (among other things) the new proper sales model and engineers / staff.

Beyond LC V3
We are delighted to have reached a point in the development of the campaign where the fundamentals are in and smaller features, polish, and fixes can be added rather quickly. We too prefer more frequent updates to the game, but unfortunately that was just not possible in the past few months due to the game-breaking nature of the new features and the game engine switch.

From here the campaign will take shape at a good pace and we are much looking forward to finishing LC V3, getting to V4, V5 and then the grand campaign, the forced induction revamp with superchargers and non-80s turbo tech, and ultimately epic multiplayer company battles.

This was quite the year for Automation. Especially the BeamNG exporter update proved very successful and has given us the additional financial backing to see this all the way to the end as planned and promised. Big thanks to the awesome BeamNG devs too, of course, they have been great to work with!

Thank you all for your continued support and for coming along on this long journey.
Merry Christmas!