So far I’m happy with the game getting better now with the enginngering aspect. But in some ways I still feel it could be better.
In the Early access game now, what we do regarding “design” a car mostly, is taking your (actual) time, to fine tune every selection of your car/engine, and get an optmized result. Then send your blue print to your team of enginner, let them take their (in-game) time to re-invent your design.
That feels sort of float, you don’t feel your working taking in this game pay back as it would.
Also, the time you taking on “optmize” your car also feels sort of empty, you just lock on 2 markets, and try every scroller, to get the competitive max out, that feels like something a low-level AI could done better…
I know the final game with full tycoon mode would be better than this. But still, I 'd like to share my concept regarding this, hope it could help developers to make this game better.
- Assign your Team BEFORE starting design a car. Well, that’s how the real world works, not you design your car alone and then call for a team to re-design it. you would be able to modify your team during designing, but that will costs.
- Predict modifcation only with in a LIMIT based on your team’s experience. So you are designing your car/engine, you made a test, and think somewhere could be improved. You made changes on some scroller, if that’s with in your team’s capability, It well act like the game works right now, you can see the new behaviour of your engine/car instantly ,without extra costs. But beyound that, you’ll need to re-test it.
- If you just do some modife like mixture of fuel/air, aerowing’s angle, that would be a fast adjust and re-test. But if you change your cylinder diameter, tire type or so, that well takes you more (in game) time to rebuild one test platform for doing the test. Finally if you blow up your engine during test, that will of coures, costs you a lot.
- All the re-build and test time will add up to your overall enginering time and fund. So not just the type of parts you select will effects that, your action on how you designing your car well effect the final costs (both time and money) too. the over all funding and efficiency scroller could still be there to do some fine tune on that.
- A Marketing team that works in simular way. Your should also assign your marketing team, that may not be car type/family related. Maybe a regional team, and team member will have different exps regarding different buyers. So even if you have put your car on your test yard and get the data of how it’s handling. Still you need your marketing team to ues these data to predict how would your car sells in the market.
That also costs a lot. So you need to test your car in your test yard to get some optmized result on your own, before starting a market research. That would make you designing car more on your own style, rather than automaticlly follow the market result like a robot.
Also, the marketing predict could goes wrong after you really put your car into the cruel world, so you’ll need to follow up after launch, and make adjustment with customer’s feedback.
The problem with these ideas are: you can’t stop people cheat by just hand copy a known well-working car. That well save them most of the re-build and re-test time. But on the other hand, if the player became more experienced on their own, they will be able to make a fine car quicker and cheaper than a rookie. Isn’t that great? Personally, I don’t like the game that store your “experience” as a number in the hard drive, I prefer the game that gives player the experience in their own brain. (regardless whether that experience could be used in real-world life:sweat_smile:)
