Design and Manufacture Cars for your AUTOMOtive Empire.
In Automation it's you who designs every detail of your cars, from the heart of the car that is the engine, the chassis, the suspension and the styling.
Detailed Car Design
Choose various chassis and materials, drive train layouts, suspension types and more. A huge range of car bodies, styling tools and cosmetic design items let you create unique car designs through the decades.
Test and tune your cars’ performance to optimise handling, aerodynamics, acceleration and comfort to squeeze the last bit out of your designs.
Lots of design options, parts and gadgets let you build anything from a cheap and nasty budget hatchback or van to a supercar or opulent luxury cruiser. Tailor your cars to a wide audience or pioneer niche markets.
In-Depth Engine Design
Solid engine design is a big part of creating a successful car in Automation. The game gives you the opportunity to build your own engines from scratch; from the engine configuration, over the valvetrain design, to the fuel system and detailed turbocharging systems. Many design changes even affect the engine sound.
Compromises and challenges abound, do you need the smallest and cheapest engine possible for a budget mini-car or a no-expense-spared twin-turbo beast for your next supercar? There are literally quadrillions of possible engines to design. (We counted..)
Want to challenge your engine building skills? 50+ different engine scenarios put you in the shoes of an engineer to build motors for every possible application, while the Engine Design Multiplayer lets you test your skills against human opponents in a race against the clock.
Lots of video tutorials, part descriptions and an extensive manual help engineering novices learn how engines work and how they can apply these skills in-game.
All these features are already available right now in the current release, with lots more engine types coming soon.
Cut-throat Tycoon Gameplay
The core experience of the game will be the Grand Campaign. In this game mode, spanning from 1946 to 2020, you start your enterprise from scratch and try to become one of the most renowned car companies in the world. Many roads can potentially lead to success: catering to the masses with small, affordable cars, being an exclusive supercar manufacturer, or focusing on big luxurious flagship cars for the few.
Conquer niches with targeted marketing, or diversify while keeping an eye on brand awareness, brand reputation and prestige to build a loyal following. Compete in ever-shifting regional and global dynamic markets that come with various regulations, featuring many different market segments and buyer demographics.
Set up and manage your factories, expand your production capabilities and improve your cars by investing into research and development to get an edge over your competition. High quality cars and good quality assurance might cost a fortune, but may pay for themselves in the long term. Like in real life, in Automation car design and marketing is full of compromises.
To build and maintain a core team of leading engineers helping you shine in different areas of expertise is just as much part of running a successful business as to properly manage your finances. Keep track of commodity and stock markets and invest your hard-earned cash.
Multiplayer Campaign mode will be available, allowing you to cooperate or compete with other players.
Early Access
Automation is still heavily in development. There is already many hours of interesting gameplay to be had out of Automation, but some major features are not complete. Large updates are usually released every few months.
The current release contains an all new Unreal Engine 4 based update to the Car and Engine design aspects of Automation, with a whole load of scenarios and challenges to play. A small taste of the Tycoon gameplay can be had in the "Lite Campaign" Although this is running on an older game engine version and doesn't look as stunning right now!
We're currently hard at work on the "Lite Campaign V3" update which will be a much more in-depth and polished campaign game mode, in the Unreal Engine version.
We aim to run our development process as openly as possible, and release regular and detailed video updates explaining exactly what we're working on at the moment.
Key Planned Features for the completed game
- Extremely Deep, Technical, Creative – Experience unheard-of creative freedom in a highly technical, realistic gameplay experience revolving around building a car company from scratch. Go ahead and build your dream-car company!
- Dynamic World Markets – Master realistically modeled dynamic markets, distribution, and demand. Try to cater to the needs of over 40 different target groups and their needs, or find your safe-haven niche in a cutthroat economic environment.
- Flexible Car Designer – Design the cars you would have in your garage. Choose from diverse chassis types and materials, engine placements and drivetrain setups, gearboxes, suspensions, brakes, tyres, and finish off you design with fully customisable body types, looks and styles.
- Highly Detailed Engine Designer – Delve into endless possibilities combining different 4-stroke petrol engine configurations, internals, head types, forced induction systems, fuel systems, headers and mufflers. All based on different 4-stroke petrol engine configurations: Inline 3, 4, 5, 6, V6, 8, 10, 12, 16, Boxer 4, 6.
- Dynamic Engine Sounds - Turn up the volume and blast out the awesome adaptive, unique engine sounds that directly reflect your design choices.
- Grand Campaign, Scenarios, Sandbox – Aim to dominate the world markets with your superior design skills in the grand campaign, play a quick scenario challenge, or just tinker away in sandbox mode to create the most insane engines ever.
- Complex, yet Easy to Learn – While the game is highly technical, it is made easy to learn by means of well-illustrated in-game tutorial videos, detailed descriptive texts, as well as a multitude of tutorial scenarios.
- Network Play – Play cooperatively with your friends or take your intuition for the perfect car design and challenge up to 7 human competitors in epic, multi-session network games.
- Community – Join one of the most awesome and helpful communities out there, share stories about your exploits, talk to like-minded people, discuss your IRL car projects and engage in community challenges.