Hey guys!
The suggestion subforum is a popular one. The reason for that I see is that we have an awesome, dedicated and knowledgeable community that wants to see Automation to become the game that covers just about everything car or engine related. At the same time it is easy to forget that while ideas for features may be totally awesome superficially, when you get to the meat that is design, gameplay and implementation of said feature it all falls apart.
Thus, in his endless wisdom, Andrew “Daffyflyer” Lamb, spoke the 3 Suggestion Commandments:
All features shalt be:
- A key technical part of real life car/engine design, a major focus of real life engineers, not a small engineering chore.
- An interesting design compromise. There have to be advantages and disadvantages to every choice in said gameplay mechanic.
- A worthwhile trade-off considering both development effort and gameplay value.
If thy suggestion obviously doesn’t pass the “3 Suggestion Commandments”, thou shalt receive the following answer to your request:
I’d like to add some thoughts to the above stated rules:
Development time is a finite resource that needs to be spent wisely.
Hence, a broader game (in terms of features) needs to be shallower at the same time.
Added complexity needs to return more than its weight in added gameplay value.
If a feature isn’t viable now, it probably won’t be viable in the future either.
If you still don’t get it, this post might put things into perspective some more.
Please do not post suggestions without reading the FAQ, repeated nonsensical suggestions will get you a warning.
The features of the Engine Designer are locked down at this stage of development!
Suggestions are still welcome for the Car Designer, and we will of course take them into consideration, although a lot of the design for that aspect of the game is now reasonably well planned out, however if someone suggests something that fits in well and improves things we’ll use it, of course.
Suggestions are more than welcome for the Tycoon Part of the game, we are very much interested to see you guys throwing ideas around of what you want to see out of that. As that is in a fairly early design stage there is lots of potential to add and change parts of its design.
Cheers!