So…
Until now each ‘mission’ has been very simple, just a pre-set map with some expansion opportunities, importers & exporters and starting cash, with no real objectives to aim for and no achievements or difficulty settings. Obviously I want to improve on this:
Although I think its important to always support sandbox, and thus allow people to play continuously without caring about objectives, I would also like to include optional ones for each mission. here is my current thinking:
3 difficulty levels to be chosen for each mission, easy, medium and hard, which will affect a number of variables, such as the starting funds, costs of production slots and facilities, power costs and rent etc.
For each mission, a number of defined objectives such as:
Produce X cars (of any type) within Y hours.
Earn a total revenue of X in Y hours.
Achieve a consistent throughput of X cars per hour over Y hours.
Produce X cars with feature Y by date Z.
Personally I quite like achievements and objectives, although I know some people prefer a total sandbox, even without financial limitations, so I’m hoping to keep everybody happy. Any thoughts? 
I like the thoughts!
“Pickups have gotten more popular in the recent years, and we are not capable of keeping up with demand, our competitors are” … “Reduce the production of the minivans and move that capacity to the Pickup productionline”
This would be a major challenge since you can’t -or should not be able to- move all the heavy equipment. You would have to channel pickups through the minivan line and subsequently merge them again after the bottleneck has been bypassed.
This would of course require in game changes, like a “splitter” (e.g. pickups left, minivans right, sedans straight). In the BMW factory, I know, there is a machine that lifts a car up and moves it to another side of the factory. This could be a way in which overcapacity (minivan line) can be used to increase the capacity of a line that is maxed out and/or bottlenecked like in this example, the pickup production line is.
Just some thoughts! Keep up the amazing work
First days work on achievement GUI.
:), nice new things are coming
Looks great and you can just make a sandbox “mission”. Or when you click a new game you get to choose between mission mode and sandbox mode.
Right now I am just getting general ‘game-wide’ achievements working, but I also intend to track them per-mission, so you will have a string of medals for every achievement you managed in mission 1, and in mission 2 etc.
I guess they should be tracked per-difficulty level too.
