There comes a time in every car nut's life where they dream of designing their own automobile. Maybe it struck you at an early age in the form of drawings and lego blocks, or maybe you doodle at your office desk today, dreaming of a design that could be the next big thing.
Well, with the Automation Car Company Tycoon game, now you can! It's a game that lets you get as technical as you want with your creativity, and makes an excellent entry-level game into the car culture scene. Do you love the look of classic 50's Americana? Well, go make your own! Are you into engines, anything from 3-cylinders to V12? Make your own, and stuff it into your creation. It even goes so far as suspension tuning, aerodynamics, and a whole list of stats to shoot for that'll make the number cruncher in you jump for joy!
Automation takes car design to a whole new level, truly allowing anyone to design their own car from the ground up for the first time. And whether you know every car part in and out, or just have some automotive inspiration, here's why Automation is the only game gearheads will ever need!
Build And Design Your Own Car From Headlamp To Tow Hitch
The layout of the game is very simple: you start by selecting your car's body, and then things like chassis materials (steel, aluminum, carbon fiber, and so on), suspension (leaf springs, coils, pushrods, and other pieces of the car's exoskeleton, before moving onto the engine designer. Fiddle with displacement to make a tiny 500cc puff-box, or a drag-ready 10L. After that, you're brought to the design screen, where you put grilles and rims, as well as the little details like gas caps and door handles. Then you throw in your preferred transmission, the proper tires, brakes, it even gets as intricate as tuning the suspension just the way you want it. So yes, there are a lot of steps, but they all come together to form your masterpiece
Anyone with an ounce of creativity could get lost in Automation's easy-to-use Sandbox mode. With a vast array of customizable body styles that go all the way back to the 1940s, Automation has your niche and makes it easy to create your very own car from practically any era. Convertibles of the 50s, muscle cars of the 70s, extended cabs of the 90s, modern sedans of today, and everything in between. And while the game is already loaded with fixtures, there are dozens of mods that add other bits, bobs, and bodies to truly make your car one of a kind.
Meanwhile, the engine designer will likely get the number crunchers excited, as there are delicate balances to maintain, such as your power to fuel economy ratio. Squeezing every ounce of power out of your engine by toying with the fuel mixture, cam profile, and exhaust systems, but watching those torque and horsepower arcs slowly shift upwards is incredibly rewarding.
And, after your car's all put together, you'll find out how it stacks up against other (fictitious) automobiles in the same market, from budget commuters to GTs. Fiddling with the parts you use will impact all sorts of things, from the car's drivability to its reliability to how much it costs. All these different scores affect the various market scores and can show you where your car excels and where your car is lacking.
Convinced that this game has something for everyone? Just wait until you look at the campaign mode.
Manage Your Own Car Company In Automation Light Campaign
Fair warning, the campaign mode of Automation is not for the faint of heart. It is math-heavy, getting deeper into how well you market your car in the 5 different countries (with loosely mirror America, the UK, Germany, India, and Russia), as well as how much you sell your car for, and how desirable it'll be after 5 or 10 years. In short: it's hard (I know because I've played it many times, and only broke even once).
That being said, it still provides the player with a great sense of pride to make and manufacture their own trims, see the profits rise, and create a car with lasting desirability. It requires the player to update the trims every year, and predict what might be appealing before the car comes out. You truly are running a business.
And the campaign does take itself quite seriously, so if you're looking to challenge your brain, and your automotive design skills to create a car that isn't only good, but desirable, marketable, and profitable, you'll find hours of fun manipulating the numbers in the Light Campaign, which is constantly being updated and refreshed to reflect the real world (as much as a videogame can).
There are plenty of tutorials out there to help new players, such as this one created by the developers themselves:
But after all this car building, what can you do with them? Well, you can take lovely photographs of the cars you designed in the Automation game... or you can take them for a spin.
Export Your Automation Creations To BeamNG Drive
In what may very well be the greatest crossover in videogame history, Automation allows you to export any of your creations to BeamNG Drive. If you're not aware of what Beam is, it's a soft body physics simulator used primarily for driving and crashing cars. While it's not entirely realistic, the crash damage is more accurate than that of other racing games, such as Forza. If you slam into a wall at 60mph, you won't be able to just roll it over and keep on trucking.
While the exporter isn't perfect, it's constantly being updated so that the cars you make in Automation are accurately reflected in Beam. The Automation Test Track, a feature that allows Automation to calculate lap times, is actually in BeamNG. So rather than looking at numbers and figures, you can find out how easy your car is to drive by doing some lap times.
Or, if you're just feeling silly, use Beam to crash cars in spectacular fashion. That's quite fun as well.
Engage With The Buzzing Automation Community
While the game itself is still in Early Access, the community grows larger and stronger by the day. On the Automation Forums, you'll find a wide array of discussions (both about real cars or in-game creations), as well as challenges to take part in, and a whole host of people willing to answer any questions you may have about the game. Go take a look at all the real-car-replicas players have made and, once you've created cars, share your own!
The Automation game will run you $30, and adding BeamNG to the mix bumps the total cost up to around $60, but it's an investment that'll bring you hours of fun, and tickle the automotive funny bone in you whether you're a hardcore gearhead, or just like looking at cars.