Very interested about this game but I have my doubts about it.
First of all I tried the Engine Designer Demo (just the inline 4’s) and found out that it is actually fun designing new kinds of engines. But if the games ultimate idea is to build your own car company, then I would like to know how it is going to (gameplay wise) make any difference if your engine has 100hp or 120hp? How is the game considering the situation if you have high reving engine or low reving engine in your car(s). I mean there are just ton of choices and combinations you can make just in this engine designer! If you have adjustments then these adjustments should also have (at least) somekind of impact in the final game, if they don’t have any impact in the full final game, then gameplay wise when looking at the big picture, they are pretty much pointless adjusments.
Im not sure how many adjustments there are going to be the car body designer, but as far as I can see it, the same thing applies to that as well.
PS. I also think that designing new engine should be somewhat rare treat. It should cost so much (as it kind of does in the real world when you calculate all the manufacturing changes and stuff) that you just cant design new engine for every new model, at least not in the early days.
Very valid concerns, and appropriate questions asked.
When building cars, the engine you build does not really matter on its own, but only in conjunction with the car
you’ve designer to go with the engine. The difference between 100 and 120hp will then be in the car’s performance:
acceleration, top speed, sportiness (contains a lot of performance related engine stats), ease of driving, economy, etc.
All of the stats from the engine are in some way considered in the “perceived” performance of the car as well as its
durability. These qualities or the lack thereof goes into the buying decisions of car buyers considering their specific
needs. I can’t think of any “pointless adjustments” in the engine designer… and indeed we would not have put them
in if they weren’t used in a meaningful way. There are some rather arbitrary stats such as responsiveness, smoothness,
and loudness, but they all (will) make their way into meaningful and important stats for the car the engine was installed in.
And yes, designing a new engine will be a costly and in-game-months-consuming undertaking.
First of all thanks for replying, I really appreciate it!
The question that I asked in the opening post was my main concern about this game, and im happy to hear that you guys aren’t just making a game that would be just about designing cars (yes I read the info in the main page but I was still sceptical mainly because of the ultra detailed engine designer), with just little thought to the actual “building a car company” -gameplay.
Now im 100% sure that I will be purchasing this game, but the only problem is that I generally dont like to do pre-orders before the release day is announced. So do you have ANY info about the release day? Even a release year like 2013 or -14, anything?
And that’s a valid concern too… seeing Indie Game studios that fall prey to horrible development practice, and
feature-creeping themselves as well as their game to death, unfortunately still is rather common. While we have
been pretty bad at estimating how long stuff takes, we certainly do not allow any feature creep to happen.
When the game will be out is really hard to tell when you consider that the engine designer is just one of three
major modules of the game. The car designer and the economy part / grand campaign will need a lot of love
(and painstaking testing) too, and honestly I’d expect a release some time 2014: if things go well (which I
naturally assume they will) it would be early 2014.
You need to consider though that those who preorder do get a lot of content to play along the way. Currently
there is 3-5h of pretty decent gameplay in the demo for those who have preordered, and this will basically double
as soon as we finish up the revamp of the engine designer, which we are working on right now.
Promising replies here. I to was concerned that the sheer complexity of the ‘designing’ part of the game may overshadow the ‘company building’ side of it. I hope it does not! because the designing part is already awesome.
As far as Car buyers and what they want in a car. Will this be regional based?
I’m sure you wont sell a lot of v12 supercars in Vietnam during the 60’s & 70’s. But at the same time, you wont sell a lot of eco hatches in american during the same time period.
How will the game handle theses different regional demands? Will my 400hp muscle car sell better here over the 400hp family sedan put out by my competitor? And what about the
small tidbit changes you make, say you have one model with cheap cloth interior, and another with leather seats. How can we tell what the individual regions want? And can we even
afford to satisfy all the regions?
But this all begs what question… Will my eco hatch make me for money if i put a turbo in it or leave it out…?
As far as Car buyers and what they want in a car. Will this be regional based?
I’m sure you wont sell a lot of v12 supercars in Vietnam during the 60’s & 70’s. But at the same time, you wont sell a lot of eco hatches in american during the same time period.
How will the game handle theses different regional demands? Will my 400hp muscle car sell better here over the 400hp family sedan put out by my competitor? And what about the
small tidbit changes you make, say you have one model with cheap cloth interior, and another with leather seats. How can we tell what the individual regions want? And can we even
afford to satisfy all the regions?
But this all begs what question… Will my eco hatch make me for money if i put a turbo in it or leave it out…?[/quote]
Yeah. Different regions will have different wealth level, different roads, different taxes and fuel prices etc. So, during 60’s, Vietnamese buyers won’t be rich enough to make your V12 supercar production profitable. On the other hand, American buyers at that time wouldn’t be poor enough, and fuel price wouldn’t be high enough to make your ecohatch’es economy or price something they’d care about as much as about space, trunk capacity, performance.
