automationgame.com

I love this game. But, I fell like the design for the cars is a bit repetitive and boxy. They should ad a curving tool of some sort and have cars not start with bumpers, but be able to put them on yourself with different finishes like chrome or body color. The game seems to be progressing nicely and it is very fun to play.

I'm not sure what you mean by a curving tool?

Let me just chime in.

I think what Rasmanac is talking about is being able to shape cars more freely. Let's say you represent the car's silhouette by a curve. I can now add points to this curve and freely move those points around, thereby affecting the car's shape. The resulting curve is then translated into polygons by the game. There should be only few restrictions, say for example some less curved space for a windshield, a minimum roof length, etc. This is of course just for the silhouette. For other parts of the car, I'd love to simply pull on e.g. the edge of a window frame and change its shape - or add and remove points defining its outline, then freely moving them around. Adding to that, many cars have inward or outward indentations on the sides, which are IMHO an essential component of car design. A first step in this direction would perhaps be possible in the way of modifying some of the grills - there are already "blind" ones, that don't actually provide air flow and just add a fancily shaped dent. This alone would enable things like what the Hyundai Veloster uses to accentuate the lower part of its doors and its tail lights.

The current way of designing cars, at least judged from the demo, feels extremely restrictive. You are constantly fighting the controls and the limitations instead of expressing your ideas. We can change very few parameters of some blocky, extremely low-poly pre-designed cars and then add detail in the form of lights, grills, door handles, etc. Adding detail is actually the part of the car design element that works best (I love the lights and grills - there is a nice selection and they look brilliant), although controls are still very clunky, especially once you are laying design elements on top of each other. I'd love to have copy and paste elements I've placed down or groups of elements, I'd love to be able to place any element anywhere, e.g. attach a door handle to the boot lid. There should also be some kind of quick save function, allowing the user to experiment a little, select a few components, save the selection, modify them and having the option to return to the saved selections if the modifications didn't turn out that well. The current revision mechanic is a nice idea, but it affects the whole car.

I've only played the demo so far and currently, the car design element feels like an underdeveloped afterthought compared to the complex, realistic and extremely fascinating engine design element. I know your game is still in a very early state and I'm sorry if my words were a bit too harsh. Your game is unique in the current market, full of innovation and it definitely shows a ton of promise. Once it's on Steam, there will be few things holding me back from a purchase, despite its flaws. However, if the car designer doesn't see a major overhaul, I don't think I'll spend much time with it compared to the engine designer.

You see, the problem is that the car design has to be quick and easy to grasp. Once the tycoon part is out, you really would not want to draw a silhoulette, define outline of every single car your company makes, especially when you play in realtime design mode (that is, with the game time passing while you design the car). It could be done in a way that can be got easily and quickly, but even doing this idea, let alone doing it good is simply too hard for 3 people. That's why the team went for a detail-adding design mechanic instead of base-shape-creation design mechanic as a way to add variety.

This approach also lets control the styling trends available in a given decade, without running into "is this shape looking good for given year" rating problem, which is too easy to be done bad.

They intend on mitigating some of the limitations, by adding more predesigned cars, and by fixing the fixture adding interface, by improving interaction with layered fixtures mainly, but also possibly adding some options (duplicating, grouping them and layering them is considered AFAIK)

I agree that the whole car design process should be as easy, fast and intuitive as possible. However, I think it's not a bad idea to have advanced options for those who wish to spend some extra time with their creations. I don't want the template cars to disappear, I don't think the simple car shaping tools should go, but I believe the car editor in its current form is very unsatisfactory for users who wish some more influence on their designs.

I think it is fine the way it is now for gameplay. Later when this game is finished, the devs could possibly work on a way to improve this and offer it as some sort of DLC maybe (not too expensive)

The way I look at how this body shaping could be made more freely is by making dots to drag groups of polygons in and out, where they automatically get smoothed out. Here a little photoshopped example:



Maybe too many dots, but u can make less dots with a bigger influence area.

I too would love to have more freedom available in car design, but I can't really see any way of doing it that would be technically doable for us. Adding lots more control points on the body creates messy scrunched up dents.

moving points on a curve and having polygons automatically generate is almost impossible to get working correctly with the fixture stamping tools and would have to retain all the shapes of seam lines etc as it deformed, I don't think we could make it work well.

We've pretty much gone with the only solution that we can be sure will work properly, I agree its not perfect, but even with the limited design choices so far, people are making a lot of awesome and varied designs. Lots more bodies and fixtures are on the way too.

I'd say there is a good reason there aren't any real games letting you design the styling from scratch. Even in a 3d package its pretty challenging, and I have no idea how you'd bring that kind of design freedom to the game. Thanks for the feedback, and we will always strive to make the styling tools as functional and flexible as we can, but don't expect miracles

I agree with you its the best option which offers enough fun and variation in gameplay with the resources and manpower you've got for this project.