Video Game / Automation

The old Kee version.
^{Click here to see a photo from the Unreal Engine version} 

Automation is a Simulation Game by Camshaft Software, a group of independent developers from New Zealand, that was released on Steam Early Access in March 2015. The basic premise is that you are starting a new automotive company and have to produce cars from 1946 through 2020. The game puts much of the focus on car designing freedom and realism. At the time of the Steam release, the only modes available were the Sandbox mode, which allows freeform design of cars and engines, and Scenarios, short challenges where the player must meet certain requirements within certain restrictions using the engine and car designer, but a Light Campaign mode has since been added.

Development was moved from the Kee Engine to Unreal Engine 4 in 2017, with a campaign and scenarios yet to be fleshed out.

This game provides examples of:

• Absurdly-Long Limousine:
  • The GMC TopKick mod has a "mega limo" variant with a wheelbase of 23.5 metres and an overall length of around 25 metres.
  • An (outdated) mod stretch limo SUV body is available with a wheelbase of 7.2 metres. Granted, it's not as long as other examples of this trope, but seeing as it's the longest body the game had ever seen until recently, it was quite a challenge to put one together that didn't break in BeamNG.^note The above example takes this even further—post-export modification is practically required for builds on that body to work at all. Also, the longest wheelbase on a vanilla Automation body (that being a late-'70s Hummer Dinger) is "only" 3.8 metres.
• Alcohol Is Gasoline: Averted. However, E85 and E100 ethanol fuels are available to use in engines.
• The Alleged Car: Easily made with cheap steel, primitive postwar-era tech, and a negative quality factor on everything.
  • Some mods invoke this trope (or its opposite) deliberately, such as faux rust materials and decals.
• An Entrepreneur Is You: The ultimate intention for the Campaign mode. The developers plan to have a simulated marketplace of car buyers and competing car manufacturers, with your sales for a given car determined by a combination of brand reputation, marketing spending, and how well it satisfies the preferences of different buyer demographics.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Although the game is quite rough around the edges, thought has still been put into streamlining some parts of the experience.
  • Autosave: Any changes to a car or engine in the UE4 version within the last few seconds will be automatically saved, which proves useful when you're playing in the open beta and it crashes.
  • Reset buttons exist for both advanced trim settings and photoscene camera settings, for when you're not sure what the default settings were previously, or have fiddled with too many of them to even consider resetting them all one by one.
  • For community challenges, a button was added that clones a car model and trim (as well as its engine family and variant), and gives them *all* new backend IDs so that the resulting car and engine don't conflict with others when the challenge host imports it into their car library.
  • As of Light Campaign 4.2, the game can detect missing or uninstalled mods on cars, reducing the risk of parts of a livery being erased or builds going belly up thanks to missing mod bodies.^note Almost literally, in fact, since a car loaded without a body will appear as a chassis that points towards the sky.
  • Unsatisfied with the placement of a car's firewall, engine, or axles? In addition to allowing players to turn otherwise normal cars into monster trucks or silhouette racers, the advanced trim settings can also be used to tweak the chassis proportions, tire shape, engine position, and other things in small amounts to one's liking. They also don't affect stats (with the exception of the chassis track width setting, which can be exploited to give a car fatter tires than would normally be allowed).
  • 4.2 also allows for the copying of all fixtures on a build, which is particularly useful for salvaging cars made on deprecated bodies.
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign: The "Mahiyitsu" sign at the top edge of a building facade in the Overpass photoscene.^note "Yi" as a Japanese syllable is nonexistent, even in non-native loanwords (unlike, say, "vu" or "fo").
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • You can build massive engines with loads of power, but they'll be pretty unreliable, expensive and inefficient—not to mention heavy.
  • Three words: 21-litre V16.
  • Turbo setups aimed for maximum power definitely count. Of course, they give you enormous amounts of power, but turbo lag makes said power difficult to use, and heat problems can reduce the engine's reliability a lot.
    • Similarly, you can make high-revving naturally-aspirated engines approaching F1 levels of performance, but they chug fuel and tend to take several years to develop as a result of how advanced they are.
  • Dual-clutch gearboxes are capable of lightning-fast shifts, and can run in both automatic and semi-automatic modes, but are quite complex and less reliable than manuals or automatics.
• Big Badass Rig: Since the focus of Automation is on passenger cars as opposed to ten-ton rigs, said "car" bodies are limited to two axles and only available as Steam Workshop mods.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • One scenario has the goal of building an engine for the ASCC Trans-Am Series (as opposed to the SCCA).
  • Another scenario, set in 1962, has you squaring off against "Maniscalco" ^note Italian for "farrier" with an engine powerful enough "to frighten un toro de lidia".^note Spanish for "a fighting bull" Essentially, your opponent is an older, alternate-universe version of Lamborghini (a company that was formed in 1963, whose only official motorsports activities were from 1989 to 1992 and 2015 onward).
  • Likewise, the Top Mule^note (Top Fuel) dragster series.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Automatic gearboxes. They can be sluggish, but not every driver can be bothered to upshift and downshift during commutes, and they're smoother than automanuals or dual-clutches.
  • Harder tire compounds (harder rubber lasts longer, but doesn't have as much grip) and semi-slicks. With the latter, fewer treads on the tire mean more contact area and thus more grip—in dry weather only. Without as many grooves in the tire tread to channel away water, driving in rain is even more risky with semi-slicks.
  • Front-wheel drive. It's less responsive when driven hard (and weight transfer puts it at quite the disadvantage under hard acceleration), but much less prone to oversteer than rear-wheel drive and less complex than all-wheel drive.
• Car Porn: The animatics.
• Commie Land:
  • One of the engine design scenarios has you build an engine for a "Kazakh sports car" that runs on "crappy fuel".
  • Another has you make an engine for the Polish Prime Minister's son's rally car in 1978.
  "As he is the most equal of all, your state-controlled company decided to make a "standard" people's car with a new engine in it. Not only does it need lots of power, the authorities say that it would make for good propaganda if the engine is produced in the same factory as the normal cars, which rules out the use of forged internals and other decadent imperialist inventions."
• Context-Sensitive Button: Depending on what's selected, the "clone trim" button in the Car Designer menu can also be used to clone entire models and all of their respective trim levels. This can be used to make cars that have the same exterior but different chassis or engine layout (such as race cars adapted from road cars).
• Cool, but Inefficient:
  • V16 engines. Note that in this case, it's less a matter of fuel economy and more of complexity and size—many real-world automakers prefer V12s over V16s for both performance and luxury applications.^note Aside from the Cizeta-Moroder V16T, V16s haven't been used in production cars since the early '30s, but automotive V16s have persisted in the form of prototype designs, concept car engines, and even racing engines. Today, such engines are instead mostly used in trains or boats, where the sheer size of such engines necessitates more cylinders in order to reduce vibration to an acceptable level.
  • Nitromethane fuel. You know, the stuff they use in Top Fuel dragsters. Despite its octane rating only being a little above E100, it'll give any engine an insane power density^note as in "450 hp from a naturally aspirated 1000 cc engine" insane... and an absolutely abysmal thermal efficiency. It also works surprisingly well with non-intercooled turbo setups.
• Cool Car: Popular car bodies around which to design said Cool Cars include those of supercars like the McLaren GT and Koenigsegg CCX, sports cars like the Mitsubishi 3000GT^note (sometimes mistaken for a Mazda RX-7 FD) and Jaguar E-Type, and even race car-derived road cars like the Dauer 962.
• Corporate Warfare: One scenario, set in 1978, has an engineer for a German automaker bribed with a comfy retirement package by a rival Russian automaker in exchange for a professionally-designed engine. Said engineer takes the bribe, but decides to build a shitty engine to undermine the rival company—the catch is that it has to make it past factory inspection.
• Creator Provincialism: The Automation Test Track is located in an indeterminate area of New Zealand (at least as far as Beam is concerned). This applies to the fictional Light Campaign world as well, though, with the ATT being located near the town of Wairua^note whose name is Māori for "spirit" in Gasmea (a country that serves as an amalgamation of North America, Australia, and NZ, among others).
• Crippling Overspecialization: The old Toyota C-HR body, due to its unique shape (and an awkward rear end that didn't quite match that of the real car).
  • In a similar vein, it's difficult to make something using a 911 body that doesn't outright resemble, well, a 911.
• Crossover: With BeamNG.drive, allowing you to export designs from this game into the latter. Vehicle detail^note that is, unless you're willing to pour hours into custom interiors and engine bays and deformation will be of lower quality compared to Beam's native vehicles, but it's fun nonetheless to drive your own designs.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: The "The Lady Bug" scenario, which takes place in 1958 and has the player design an engine for a woman's car.
  "After all, what is that gearbox thing for anyway?"
• Design-It-Yourself Equipment: The main feature of this game versus other automotive tycoon games is the wholehearted embrace of this trope. Where another game might give you a slider that runs from "Poor Performance" at one end to "High Price Tag" at the other, Automation gives you all the tools you need—choice of block material, valvetrain, compression ratio, cam profile, fuel system, octane, etc.—to produce something with both qualities at once.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Engine and suspension tuning. The latter pretty much varies from car to car.
  • A popular series of Steam Workshop mods collectively known as MDHL^note for "MoDular HeadLights" allows players to practically make headlights and taillights from scratch, with various shapes and internals like high beams and LED strips. Pulling them off well, however, requires plenty of experience.
  • Car interiors, which almost solely consist of 3D-placed fixtures.
• Double Entendre: "The Blow Job", where you make an engine to power a special-effects fan for Hollywood.
• Down L.A. Drain: The Industrial Canal photoscene.
• Driving Stick: Pretty much the standard choice for cars up until The '80s.
• Emergent Gameplay:
  • Some instances of this have led to vanilla features such as:
    • Interior pieces and 3D fixture placement.
    • Manually configurable lights.
    • "Patches" that cut away parts of car bodies, repair unwanted cuts, or add depth to otherwise flat body surfaces.
    • The ability to make body and fixture material slots (and, with the Light Campaign 4.2 update, the underlying mechanical components) invisible.
  • Even before 3D placement was introduced, players have made people, buildings, and random objects (including guns and toasters) out of fixtures.
  • Another example exists in the form of community challenges, which forgo the campaign and use sandbox-made entries instead.
• Explosive Overclocking:
  • After setting your engine's redline beyond a certain limit (determined by many factors such as piston stroke and part quality), its reliability begins to sharply decrease. Exceed the limit further and the engine fails on the dyno.
  • With turbochargers, you could make the engine powerful enough that output heat exceeds cooling capabilities—or simply starts to melt the block. With the Light Campaign 4.2 update, the turbos themselves can now also melt (as can the exhaust headers), or they can disintegrate from spinning too fast.
• Fauxrrari: Roughly 95% of car bodies,^note (a notable exception being the Soldat Raggio, which in 2005 was adapted into a real-life custom car based on a Honda NSX commissioned by Namco) whether vanilla or mods, are modelled after real-life cars, but usually have rather benign filenames. Some^note including the Koenigsegg CCX, Aston Martin V8 Vantage, McLaren GT, Chevrolet Lumina APV, Jeep Wrangler, and two generations of the 911 are more conspicuous than others.
• Fictional Country: There are five in the existing campaign and sandbox mode: Gasmea, Hetvesia, Fruinia,^note an amalgamation of Mediterranean and Western Europe Dalluha, and Archana.
• Freelook Button: Using the same camera controls as in a photo scene, the designer's toggleable free cam makes modelling interiors much less annoying.
• Game Mod: There are Steam Workshop mods available for both the original and UE4 versions. ^note Amusingly, two years after the UE4 release, mods were still being made for the legacy original build, much to the disappointment of players looking to use them in BeamNG.drive—the legacy build, having been discontinued prior to the collaboration, obviously doesn't have a BeamNG exporter.
  • Some of said Workshop mods include:
    • bodies for the Benz 600 Pullman, Bugatti Type 57, a British double-decker bus, and the Changli Freeman (the latter being titled "Wheely the Poo")
    • bull bars
    • various racing aero parts
    • formerly, glowing light strips (deprecated with the Light Campaign 4.1 update, which made glowing lights vanilla)
    • a pack of decorational superchargers (which happens to be the most popular Workshop mod for Automation of all time)
• Gameplay Automation: Not just a pun—this trope is present in the Test Track feature, where your cars can be driven around test tracks by an NPC driver.
• Heävy Mëtal Ümlaut: The "More Pöwer" and "Weirön 1000BS" scenarios.
• Informed Equipment: Everything, as far as safety equipment and interiors are concerned.
• Itasha: It's been done before.
• Jack of All Trades: The "Jack of All Motors" scenario, in which you design an engine meant to power everything from sports and luxury cars to pickup trucks and minivans.
• Loading Screen: After the Light Campaign 4.1 update, loading screens now feature custom in-game photos in addition to the usual rotating logo present beforehand.
• Made of Indestructium: Turbochargers, prior to the Light Campaign 4.2 update.
• Minmaxer's Delight:
  • The quality sliders in the Car Designer,^note being a sandbox mode, all costs and production limitations, except for unlock years, are practically ignored to the extent that abusing them is known as "quality spam" among some players.
  • Techpool, which serves as the game's approximation of a company's R&D expertise in specific areas, makes quality cheaper. Without at least a few points in some areas by the late 20th century, expect the build quality and price point of a vehicle to be... rather questionable, but as with quality, too much techpool in several areas is an invitation for a car to be labelled as minmax.
• Min-Maxing: Maximizing performance is the natural course of action for track-only builds, but is usually inappropriate for road-going cars, where other factors such as drivability and comfort are relevant. In Automation, though, this can be taken to the extreme; since quality usually affects weight, what's supposed to be a bleeding-edge track car can have flimsy bodywork and the crash safety of a tin can combined with impossibly sticky tires and precision engineering that would put NASA to shame.
• Neon City: The Cyberville mod photoscene.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: "Richard Bronson"^note businessman Sir Richard Branson and "Ernie Becclestone".^note former F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone
• Not the Intended Use: According to one of the lead devs, what used to be labelled as a "sequential" gearbox^note (implying a dog-clutch gearbox, or "dogbox", as used in race cars) is actually an automated manual^note (a manual transmission with a single automated clutch, which takes considerably longer to shift than a dogbox). Countless players mistook the latter for the former, but in their defense, said "sequentials" function as such in Beam exports, with blink-of-an-eye shifts befitting those of high-performance cars.
• Rice Burner: As of Light Campaign 4.2, you can now properly stance and slam cars, as well as put stretched tires on them and give them fartcan sounds and crackle tunes. Wonderful.
• Russian Reversal: The "4x4 Drives You!" scenario.
• Shout-Out:
  • A poster in the engine design room advertises "Hoischen Instruments", referring to the game's lead beta tester, designer, and YouTube advertiser, Robert "Killrob" Hoischen.
  • There's a scenario called "Daffyflyer MK-X", where you design an engine in 2019 for the 30-year anniversary of a small, lightweight roadster. Andrew "Daffyflyer" Lamb, the lead artist, drives a Mazda MX-5.
  • While unconfirmed, an animatic named "Most Gear" is likely a reference to Top Gear, given that it's a frenzied montage of quick camera pans not unlike those used for the series' car reviews.
• Stock Desert Interstate: Appears in the form of a photo scene, gas station included.
• Take That!:
  • In one scenario, you design an engine for an unnecessarily heavy car that has to make at least 1000 hp, thanks to the marketing department's hubris. Scenario name? "Weirön 1000BS".
  • In another one, the engine you design is intended to be an overpriced econobox motor, just marketed to be cool. It's called iEngine.
  "Also, it needs to be free of vibrations, as you need the driver to listen to his iAudio player, to keep thoughts from straying off to the insane price paid for this new, shiny, mediocre-performance eco-hatch."
  • An update that added car designer scenarios (in the original only) has scenarios where you make the Weirön 1200BS and the iCar.
  • This scenario, pitting the player against Not-Audi:
  "Your rival company, Ringauto, is getting on your nerves boasting about how they win rallies with their fancy four-wheel-drive system and how technology is giving them a competitive edge. To show them where and how far they can shove their technology, you decide to design a new sports coupé. [...] You need to achieve Vorsprung over their dirty Techniks by some other means. By making a CHEAP sports coupé!"
• Technology Porn: The game includes plenty of detail, in engines and otherwise.
  • You can test your engines and play with the throttle on a dyno to listen to the engine sound. Also, depending on the setup, revving an engine hard enough on the dyno causes the exhaust manifolds to glow red-hot.
    • The Light Campaign 4.1 update introduced engine customization, allowing for valve cover options and the ability to paint said valve covers, as well as airboxes and cast-iron engine blocks.
    • The block and cylinder head(s) can be made invisible, to see the cycling pistons and valves in all their explosive glory.
  • Some mod fixtures allow you to add absurd levels of detail to your cars, among them front splitter struts, intercoolers, detailed interior audio head units and gauges, windshield washer nozzles, and keyholes.
• Technophobia: One scenario has the player take over engine development from their recently retired father, the former head of engine design who put the company he worked for at risk with his disdain for "electronic wizardry". The company he used to work for? The fictional Clarkson Motors.
• Testosterone Poisoning: The "Man Van" scenario.
• V8 Engine Noises: Obviously subverted due to the level of engine customization (unless, of course, you're actually using a crossplane V8).
• Vanity License Plate: "ATOMATIN" for Gasmea and "ATMATON" for California, New York State, and Michigan.

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