Is there some place I can read up on the business side of the game? I'd just like to know more about it. I don't recall seeing any info on it yet, which may very well be because it is not fully designed(-:
But, based on the first videos I've watched this seems like something I could really enjoy, even just for the car designing.
I'll give you an overview of how we see the business side, but with the following disclaimer.
Whilst we have a clear idea of what we want from it, We haven't made any of the business side yet, besides a few basic prototypes. If our experience with the engine and car designers is anything to judge by, things will change and evolve a lot as we work though the development process, and there will be features dropped because they aren't fun, other ones added because they ARE fun etc etc.
Basically you'll be starting the game in 1946 with a very small factory in the world region of your choic and very basic capabilities to design cars. The 1940s will mostly be about finding your feet and getting some cash flow going and your first cars will probably be bought in chassis/engines with maybe some minor tweaks by you, or even just cars assembled by you.
Once you start getting some decent cashflow going, you'll start revising your designs a bit more and then designing your own car from scratch once you can afford it.
Your small factory will become a limitation and you'll expand it, add research facilities, and build dealer centres in different markets so you can export your cars
Technology will unlock automatically as the years go by, but at a slow rate, you'll get technology for free maybe 20 years after it first appears, so if you want to stay ahead of the curve tech wise, you'll need to spend more on research in the area you want tech for.
Sales wise, there is a detailed system we've designed for buyer preferences that bases the number of buyers who are looking for a paticular kind of car, on the demographics and atributes of the region (fuel price, wealth, etc.) and then each of those buyers will buy the car that most meets their needs.
You'll have to deal with regulations like safety and emissions, forcing you to redesign and research new tech to allow your cars to still be sold.
You'll also have to think about different regional preferences, how they change over time, taxes in different places (like some countries tax you on engine capacity, so you might need to make a special small engined varient for those places, some might have cheap fuel and loads of rich people, like the UAE etc)
There will also be aspects of retooling your factories, deciding where to manufacture cars and where to export them (labor costs and taxes are a factor here)
Thats my kind of random blurb about it all, its all open to being changed as we work on it, but thats about our target gameplay
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Topic: Automation - A Car Company Tycoon Game (Read 35387 times)