Production Line - Cliff Harris takes on car manufacturing

Man I hate the indecision. I WANT to play this right now soooo bad, but on the other hand want to wait for the full experience.

In that case play any of the 200+ games in your backlog!

Hey, how does logic enter into the equation? LOL.

Another EA game I picked up recently to dabble in, because I couldn’t resist. The engine is pretty great, tiny and fast. I love where the game looks to be headed, it just needs the inevitable interface polish and content. Hoping for less campaign and more sand box, but with goals.

I promise I’m not her personal promoter, but Katherine of Sky has a Let’s Play of this going for those interested in checking it out vicariously (seriously, she’s the best YT’er though).

I watched her series thanks to this thread, which is what made me purchase the game right away instead of waiting. She has a bright, happy patter minus the overly sweet that is much appreciated.

I have been fiddling around with the latest build.

The hardest thing for me is resource management. The biggest problem is not knowing all the parts that each station needs. This makes it difficult to try to arrange general supply depots where you can select to store the more used parts (such as 4 tires, 8 valves, and so on). People are currently using written lists to know what to select.

I have worked on production lines in real life and the game has one part travelling over a separate resource conveyor. A car needs 4 tires but they are sent 1 tire at a time. In my experience supplies usually are sent on pallets so I would think that you would get 4 at a time. I am hoping that this part of the sim improves (the biggest complaint right now is that what holds up the main car production is the lack of supplies). This is of course a part of the game and its logistics and what makes it interesting. Cliffski is very involved in player feedback and actually rewriting code (resource & resource conveyor issues being the biggest priority at the moment). I am very impressed with Cliffski’s presence on the official forums. I am certain that the resource aspect will improve.

As the game progresses you can choose to research actual car add ons (safety items, brake systems, etc) or put your research into more efficiency (such as breaking down each station into smaller tasks thus speeding up the line). There are a lot of choices and I can see people trying a myriad of options repeatedly trying to build a car efficiently and still producing a profit.

I think the game is going to be great as the actual simulation gets ironed out and QoL helps get added.

How different is this from Big Pharma?

Very. Big Pharma is (for me) much more a puzzle—it’s all about fitting machines into a certain space in the best way. Production Line is all about finding the next 5% or 10% in efficiency by making sure materials get somewhere faster, or by doing things in parallel.

Cool. For $11 I’ll definitely give it a go.

ARISE! For it is I, cliffski, after losing my account details and then being busy… making this game :D Anyway, we are heading to an early access release on steam next week (18th) with any luck, and thats build 1.18 which is now the exorbitant rip-off price of $13. (It will be $15.99 once we enter EA).
Anyway… we did a teaser trailer here:

And I blogged on video (yikes) about it here:

If you want to know anything about the games development, just ask :D
We will also keep selling direct using the humble widget and be on GoG in early access too. I dont think Humble store does early access. I really should ask. I am so slack.
Also, hello again all :D

Apologies if these are answered in the videos, but I’m at work:

What’s the timeframe to 1.0?
How systems complete is the initial EA build?
Compared to Big Pharma, how big/what type of role do things like research, market dynamics and staff play?

I imagine I will be at final release at the end of the year, although thats very variable.

The current build has a LOT of stuff in, but its lacking marketing, some further complexity in the economics model, defect & quality stuff, mod support, cross platform support & non-english languages. We also only have placeholder sound effects. There are some future techs still to go in such as hybrid/electric engines, diesel vs petrol, catalytic convertors and a bunch of engine related tech stuff. We will probably make the tech tree quite a a bit bigger (its already big :D)

Research is a big part of the game. its currently divided between process-related (factory) research, and tech research such as GPS, Anti-lock brakes, heated seats etc.

Staff are less of a concern, although I do plan eventually to support upgrading staff to be robots. Currently each production slot has 2 robots, and you can research upgrades to 4, 6 or 8 robots. Better robot quality/speed and reliability will come eventually, as will robot breakdowns and maintenance.

The economic model is relatively basic at the moment. The sale price depends partly on your output volume, and partly on the novelty of your tech vs the established AI competitors. A more complex economic model which has different market for bidy styles (ie compact vs sedan vs SUV…) is in planning.

If we already bought it a few months ago via humble we’ll be getting a steam key, right?

Oof, nevermind. It’s already in my library. Duh. :) I think, at least. I’m not at my gaming PC.

Edit: I was wrong, I just downloaded it off of humble. So we’re getting steam keys, right?

Edit 2: if anyone is wondering, it wasn’t finished enough for me to comment on my opinions of it yet. :)

yup, just waiting for someone at humble to respond to my email about steam keys… but yup pre-order customers will get them!

Thanks!

Spoke to humble, and all the steam keys are uploaded now, although they shouldn’t work until Thursday as far as I know :D

Just updating to point out we released in Early Access today. Woohoo!

I went to my Humble order page and was able to get a Steam key.

Boughterated.

Looking forward to frustrated shouting at my robots.