Long time no update post, and not because nothing was going on. As many of you following our YouTube channel AutomationGame will have seen already, a few development hurdles had to be tackled in recent weeks and months. This has led to delays in our gameplay implementation pipeline and caused an overall delay to releasing LCV4.2. On the other hand this means LCV4.2 will be released with added content that was developed in the meantime.
So what happened? Our lead programmer, who is - among many other things - responsible for the implementation of new game mechanics, has suffered from deteriorating health for a while and in July could no longer work on the game. Since then, recovery has been pretty good and the role’s work has partially resumed. Kicked in the butt by this situation, we decided to restructure and bolster our team moving forward to become more resilient and productive in the long run.
This Little Dev Update video goes into much more depth on this issue. You should check it out, it does have a summary (in timestamps) for those who prefer that, too.
Important to note is that this has changed our development outlook and there will be a bit of a feature reshuffle beyond LCV4.2. There will be an LCV4.3 which pulls forward the superchargers from 5.0, while 5.0 will be made more campaign heavy in terms of features. This is shown in detail in the above-linked video.
That was about a month ago and since then not only have we made the first big steps towards the team upgrades and restructure, but development has picked up again too. So in this recent LDU we have some things to show you:
- Massive amounts of additional sandbox visual customization of cars which exports to Beam.
- The new markets tab which will be available in campaign as well as in sandbox
- A first look at the WIP turbo calculations with procedural compressor and turbine maps.
Warning, the latter is for proper nerds only. ;)
Our new target for a release of LCV4.2 with heaps of new content now sits at December 2021, with an open beta likely to hit before then.
We’re sorry for the delays this has caused and hope the awesome content coming with LCV4.2 will be well worth the wait.
Cheers!