With any luck, this Production Line build will be the one that goes into Early Access next week on steam (hopefully GoG too). This is partly because doing so requires some admin, setting a build live on steam and having it approved by valve. After that we will be back to a regular update schedule :D

Here are the highlights in this new build for those of you already used to the game:

New Pop-up Message GUI

This is in the bottom right of the screen and notifies you when autosave has happened (instead of fullscreen), when the AI has researched something and when new loans are available. it will eventually also get more use for world events.

Paintwork polishing added!

A new researchable stage coming after dry finish, and allowing you to provide a higher quality paint finish for your car, complete with groovy new slot.

Balance changes to the AI research algorithm, and a number of bug fixes.

Too many things to list here, but a lot of minor bugs have been fixed, some visual, some gameplay related. This is not a bug-free build, but its better than its ever been. A number of long standing graphical anomalies finally got squashed this time.

New compact car body style!

Eventually these will be not just visual, but will have an impact on sales through different markets and demands being modelled for each body style. For now its just another cool car design. This one has less doors, so uses less door panels :D That means that if door-panel is your bottleneck, switching production to this style (or interleaving it with sedan or SUV) may be a wise move.

GUI improvements

Since initial release the GUI has been entirely coder art (and it sucks!) I have a professional GUI design now, but its going to take a while to fully implement it. This build changes the R&D screen (a bit), the slot picker, and the finance summary, and a portion of the slot details window. Over the next few builds more of the ‘pro’ GUI will go in. It needs feedback from you to make it really good, so don’t be shy!

Note that this build will be $15.99 when we go to EA on 18th May next week. its currently still $13 from humble:

And you can add it to your steam wishlist using the link below.