Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Category: production line

Chrome paint effect: Production Line

I now have a new shader in Production Line that gives a pure-metal chrome-style effect to cars in the game. Here is a car in the factory:

And here is one in the car design screen:

I like the look of these cars, and definitely will be including this in the game. Because the shader is different, it cannot combine with the ‘polished paintwork’ feature (or rather… the feature has no further visual effect), and for various reasons it simplifies things if this becomes an all-or-nothing option (so you can have a car model entirely in chrome, but not red or yellow or chrome at random). I am currently musing on the best way to slot this into the game./

Right now we have car colors as a purely aesthetic choice. they make no impact on the car price or attractiveness, or the time to paint, or anything like that. In practice, car colors can be set per-model (if the player chooses to), in order to make it clearer which are which on the production line. This is very helpful. Because I like this feature, I don’t think I want to start introducing different prices or demands for colors.

The only exception to this system is ‘polished paintwork’, which sticks the car through an extra slot, makes the car more attractive to buyers, and also changes the rendering effect so the cars paint looks much brighter, which is pretty cool.  To add to everyone’s confusion, I also have a mechanic where certain car colors are LOCKED and unselect-able until the relevant achievement is beaten and unlocked, which I thought was a nice way to incentivise aiming to beat the achievements in the game.

So now I suddenly have a new thing: Chrome color! How best to incorporate this into the game? I can see a number of options:

1) Leave it as shown above. it has a special button which enables Chrome, and selecting any other color will disable it. Selecting chrome means all other colors get removed, and now your car is chrome. Yay! Simple(ish) to understand surely?

2) Make chrome paint a feature, that has to be researched (yay! more design research!) in the design studio. Its then something that gets selected like ‘Polished Paintwork’ (probably make a new paint category for this), and can be a premium feature. I could have a new upgrade for the paint shops that does this, making those cars take longer.

3) Make it just another color (like 1) but also require an achievement to unlock it anyway. We already have a UI to show color options as locked/unlocked so I can re-use that.

As I type this out I am aware that I am leaning towards 2). I want more reasons to keep the design studios around, and to be honest this would be a good point to move that ‘polished paintwork’ stuff into the design studio anyway? I can see a new design category on the design screen like I have for wheels, and power-train, that has ‘Standard paint / Polished paint / chrome’ as 3 different options. This keeps things working within existing game mechanics and should be easy to understand right?

I’m still recovering from showing the game at EGX. It was fun, and beneficial but also pretty hard on my elderly aching feet…

Showing Production Line at EGX Rezzed

Hi all. This is a reminder that on Thursday-Sunday this week, Positech Games will be at the EGX games show in Birmingham, England. I will only be there Friday-Sunday, but the booth will be manned by suitable experts :D Come say hi!

Youtubers most welcome, I am always happy to give thrilling interviews for anybodies channel. I even have a silly hat to wear while I do it.

We will have a nice happy booth with 2 PCs running the latest build of Production Line, comfy leather cube seating, a whole pile of leaflets, stickers and badges, maybe some silly little toy robots to decorate it with. Come tell me all the design decisions I have made wrong. Oh and obviously if you are from the games media, email me at cliff AT positech dot co dot uk if you want to arrange a specific time and place for an interview. We love that sort of thing.

If I look grumpy, have sympathy. Its not my natural environment. I’m more scared of you than you are of me :D

 

Glossy and not glossy car paint in Production Line

I was never convinced that the cars in Production line looked shiny enough. The average car on the average street looks…ok, but when a car is BRAND NEW, they look insanely polished and shiny, and I think that we were not achieving that in the game until recently.

Some messing around with re-rendering off images, and some adjustment of shaders and some code has allowed me to produce the following images, which I’m happy with, although I may end up toning them down ‘a bit’. (its a shader where I can easily adjust the strength downwards a bit).

Exhibit A is a car that is still being assembled. Structural bits are matte, and the final external panels are a bit shiny, because they are brand new shiny steel/aluminium:

Exhibit B is a car that has received an undercoat. Currently this is way too dark, so I’ll be adjusting that to be much lighter:

Exhibit C is a car with its final coat of colored paint. This is a standard car:

Exhibit D is a car that has had the ‘polished paintwork’ feature researched and applied to it, so it looks extra shiny:

I may adjust these a bit, depending on feedback. Interestingly I asked a lot of people for their opinions and although a lot of people on twitter preferred an unglossy look, the players of the game on my facebook page tended to prefer a more glossy look, so obviously those people are my priority. I also still intend to maintain the ‘glossy cars’ option so players can just toggle off the shader entirely if they dont like it. The cars will still look a bit glossy, because its baked into the textures, but it wwill tend towards the look of the undecorated cars (matte) rather than the glossy or super glossy.

Open top sports cars with gold plated wheels are going to look super over the top :D. (and they should be for the price).

Maintenance & breakdowns in Production Line

For a long while I have talked-the-talk about putting slot breakdowns into Production Line, but recently I’ve actually been doing the code, and I now have a working implementation in the game, ready for imminent release to the unstable build on steam, and eventually the full early-access alpha build. The implementation is fairly simple to describe. basically slots break down for a random duration between X and Y, and you can research and then place down maintenance facilities that vastly reduce that repair duration so that the line is stopped for a shorter period.  The maintenance facilities UI has two different circles that illustrate the two levels at which they can reduce repair times.
Thats all very simple, but coding it was harder than it sounds, combined with the fact that it needed some tutorial pop-ups, and it needed a GUI that looked nice and was also clear and usable. All of that is done, and I’m happy with it, so all it comes down to now is a simple case of getting the numbers right. In a game like Production Line, the numbers you set for items are basically the WHOLE game, in terms of long term playability. I can wreck the game immediately by getting these numbers wrong, or less drastically, I can make this new feature and all the work that went into it irrelevant if the numbers are wrong in the opposite direction In an ideal world, the breakdowns introduce just the right amount of complexity, and light-frustration which keeps the game interesting and something that demands the players attention, while the maintenance facilities provide just the right solution, which should come at a price, and with interesting trade-offs. To put it another way: If the breakdowns are no big deal, the maintenance is irrelevant. If they cause mayhem despite maintenance, they make the game worse. Meanwhile if maintenance is too cheap and easy to place, its irrelevant as a decision. Too expensive or difficult and its going to be annoying.
There is no real easy way to pick these numbers, they just have to be experimented with. Right mow, the chance of any slot breaking down after completing a task is 1 in 200. The time it takes (in seconds at 1x speed) to fix them is between  24 and 48 seconds. That time is reduced by either 37.5% or 75% depending how close the nearest maintenance slot is. The slot itself costs $98,800 to place, and requires 8 engineers which cost slightly more per hour than a scientist (researcher). Power draw for the slot is equivalent to most other manufacturing slots, and its footprint is 4×4. All of those numbers MIGHT be wrong. Maybe the slot is too cheap, maybe we need more (or less) engineers to adjust the ongoing cost of maintenance? Perhaps the breakdowns are too frequent and annoying? or maybe so rare, and so cheaply fixed by spamming maintenance that the mechanic becomes irrelevant? Hopefully none of the above! and I also think that the fact that maintenance requires research, and has an area-of-effect mechanic will add new interest to factory layouts, both in preventing sprawl (which works against the mechanic) and also ensuring the expert player leaves regular areas for future maintenance facilities that they cannot yet afford, or have not researched. Expect to see this in the next update for the game, and I hope people agree it makes things a bit more realistic and interesting.