Automation - A Car Company Tycoon game

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zeussy

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Joined
Oct 17, 2010
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34
Location
Melbourne - Australia
Car(s)
1992 Suzuki Cappuccino
Hi Guys,

I am working on a project that might interest you, it is a car company tycoon game. My friend and I started to make this project about a year ago now, as we love tycoon games and love cars. The wide range of previous car tycoon games (all 2 of them) kinda sucked. I am a games programming teacher, and my friend is a 3D artist So we figured we would have a go at it, and hopefully make something better, that we actually want to play.


We just want to put the word out to some car guys, as we want to get some feedback as to what is fun in this kind of game, and what people think of what we have done so far. Also we are hoping to get enough interest to take this on as a full time project, and gauge if there is enough interest for this kind of game.

We are going to go into a fair amount of technical detail, in designing engines and cars. For example today we worked out that we have 35 different configurations of fuel systems for an Inline 4.

You are free to run any sort of company you want, from a super car firm to a beige multinational or even a company making Twin Turbo V12 Removalist Vans if you can manage to sell one!

If anyone is interested come look at our site, http://automationgame.com

And here is a pretty picture of an engine on a dyno stand:

Dyno.jpg
 
zeussy said:
Hi Guys,

I am working on a project that might interest you, it is a car company tycoon game. My friend and I started to make this project about a year ago now, as we love tycoon games and love cars. The wide range of previous car tycoon games (all 2 of them) kinda sucked. I am a games programming teacher, and my friend is a 3D artist So we figured we would have a go at it, and hopefully make something better, that we actually want to play.


We just want to put the word out to some car guys, as we want to get some feedback as to what is fun in this kind of game, and what people think of what we have done so far. Also we are hoping to get enough interest to take this on as a full time project, and gauge if there is enough interest for this kind of game.

We are going to go into a fair amount of technical detail, in designing engines and cars. For example today we worked out that we have 35 different configurations of fuel systems for an Inline 4.

You are free to run any sort of company you want, from a super car firm to a beige multinational or even a company making Twin Turbo V12 Removalist Vans if you can manage to sell one!

If anyone is interested come look at our site, http://automationgame.com

And here is a pretty picture of an engine on a dyno stand:

Dyno.jpg
Click to expand...

Sounds pretty cool, I'll check it out.
 
Looks interesting. Will it run on a Mac?
 
Looks awesome.

I remember playing a "Tycoon" kinda game on the original Xbox called Racing Evoluzione, wich was a kind of design your own car and race it, while making cars to sell the the public. I loved it.

Can't wait for a possible demo :)
 
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I'd play it, I was a big fan of Rollercoaster Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon. I also love the sim city franchise (and still play SC4)

You should definetly try to incorperate a design your own car type deal.

Maybe start out with some basic shapes for different classes of vehicles and then somehow allow the gamer to pull and shape it into what he/she wants.
 
I am sorry to say there won't be MAC support on release, we are only 2 people with limited resources, and can't spread ourselves too thin over multiple platforms.

But that is not to say there will never be a MAC version.

If you have watched our youtube video for the engine designer you can see it is quite detailed. You can choose block type, forged or cast crank, pistons. Type of head, valve count, cam profile, intake and exhaust resonance etc.

For our Car Designer, we aim to allow the player to choose wheel base, engine placement (front, middle, rear), FWD, RWR or AWD, how many seats, cargo spaces, and then some form for simple nurb type body modeller with a wide range of presets to manipulate from.
 
I assume you are familiar with Detroit? I thought that was a reasonably good car tycoon type of game, although it did have some issues like running out of tech to research reasonably early in the game...

One thing that springs to mind... With the engine designer (which looks cool, by the way) having the level of detail it has, do you intend to utilize all those details in the tycoon part of the game as well? It's really interesting if you do but I also see the amount of work needed growing exponentially...

Not wanting to be negative, just asking out of curiosity...

In any case, good luck with the project. I already subscribed to the twitter feed and will keep my eyes on this with great interest :)
 
Yes, we are familiar with detroit, in fact it's promising yet not actually that fun nature was pretty much the inspiration for this project



Yes, all that detail will work into the tycoon part of the game, but think of it like this.

All the engine parts will come together to form an engine with stats, some examples are its power curve, how much fuel it uses per KW hour
how loud it is, how smooth it is etc.

then when you put that engine into a car, all those stats will combine with the car parts to work out the final stats,
Eg. power + weight + gearbox etc = acceleration, loudness + how much sound insulation you have = how quiet the car is inside, and many others.



So whilst the the engine designer and car designer will be complex, its mainly going to be a case of juggling different stats, and deciding on compromises between power and economy etc.
and in the end it will boil down to the car's final stats, which is what actual buyers (of which there will be many types) use to judge it by


Thanks for your support, the more interest we get in this the more justification we will have for trying to make it a full time project
 
Good to hear you have a masterplan in place. I know of (and have been involved in) more than one management game where detailed systems (like your engine / car editor) have been developed, only for the details to be 'simplified' out later when the actual game is developed around it.

Any ETA for playable versions?
 
Sounds very interesting. I've never played any of the tycoon games before so it's something completely new to me. :)
 
Do want badly, a fun and relaxing game to play on the couch :D
Subscribed to your twitter feed :)
 
This sounds great, I only hope you will consider some presets for those of us not all that familiar with the bowels of an engine!
 
Sounds great! I'd buy it!
 
thank you for the positive responses, sorry for the slow reply but I am currently fighting the flu :s

At the start of the game, you will be buying crate engines as you will be too small to produce engines yourself. Once you have built yourself up to a point of manufacturing ability you will be able to design and produce engines yourself.

The engine designer has descriptions about every part of the engine, to give the player informed choices about what they put into the engine. I have a belief (and I hope I am not wrong) that the type of people who want to play this game, are also the type willing to learn about the components of cars. So it should not be too overwhelming for a novice.

The engine designer is in a wizard/tutorial format, although if you already know everything about the engines that can be produced you will be able to quickly step through it. With this wizard/tutorial format we hope that a player without any experience or knowledge in this area will leave with more than they started.
 
Any chance you'd release this in bits? I'd be fun to play with and learn the engine designer itself.
 
sorry flu made me forget to mention that, we are aiming to release the engine designer as a stand alone demo before christmas (it will only cover inline 4's initially)
 
Zeussy, can't wait for something Melbourne designed, as we know....Aussie cars are better than *...... *flame proff jocks on* :D
 
argatoga said:
Any chance you'd release this in bits? I'd be fun to play with and learn the engine designer itself.
Click to expand...

zeussy said:
we are aiming to release the engine designer as a stand alone demo before christmas
Click to expand...

You appear to be a real life genie already after being a member for 3 days. :D

Really looking forward to trying this engine designer, I've never come across anything like it before.
 
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