So, my first time as a discussion starter, please forgive me if I did something horribly wrong. I searched the forum and only topic I might've used has apparently been abandoned (Steam Greenlight, last post was 2014).
MY SUMMER CAR is a car building simulator from a Finnish indie dev. First, I'd like to show you the Greenlight trailer for this game:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=XBitEX-8IcM
Here is a quote from the Steam Page:
MY SUMMER CAR is the ultimate car owning, building, fixing, tuning, maintenance AND permadeath life survival simulator. You start the game with hundreds of loose parts and assemble both car and engine. Not only you need to maintain your car, but yourself as well. Sausages, beer and sleeping will do just fine.
If everything goes well, you have a working car which you can use for various 1990's Finnish countryside summer activities. Basically doing various stupid things under influence of alcohol. After you have gathered extra money from various random jobs, you can start to tune and upgrade the car with parts orderer via snail mail. You can turn the car into a obnoxious bass-boom disco machine.... or into a rally car to participate rally competitions... or just fix it into perfect factory condition. Of course car also needs to pass the inspection or you might get into trouble with police.
___
Warning, this game is not for fainted heart. Severe car fever is required to play this properly due to it's autistic approach on car building.
Full car assembly with over hundred parts
Detailed driving and engine simulation
Various other vehicles, cars and boat to use and drive
Dozens of kilometers worth of dirt and paved roads with AI traffic
Random paying jobs to cover food, beverage and fuel expenses
Rally events to participate in
Permanent death
90's Finnish summer!
Support for steering wheel and shifter controllers
Much, much more!
This game gathered quite a cult following last year, when this video was posted:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=r0IZ_TEzg7M
I think that at least Kotaku wrote a piece about the game.
Game has come a long way since then, and the maker originally intended to sell the game from his website (glorious, glorious thing that site...) but some locust came and stole a test build from his servers (or something) and now he is trying to get the game to Steam Greenlight.
He wants to do a game about Finnish car building in the 90's. We have this thing called ammattikoulu (or amis), where you can go after junior high school to learn a vocation. Like a plumber, welder, cook, nurse etc (ooh, it is apparently called a vocational school in English). Stereotypical amis is a guy who wears dirty sneakers, snapback cap, is slighly ignorant about, well everything and loves cars and mopeds and stuff like that. Of course there is a lot of people who engage in amis activities like cars and all that, there is just these funky stereotypes... Nowadays it is almost like that hipster thing, it is cool to look funny and smell bad.
This game is a story about them. Fixing cars, drinking beer, going to sauna (with beer).
Some important links:
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/mysummercargame
Steam Greenlight:
steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=651939391
Steam Community:
steamcommunity.com/groups/mysummercar?l=finnish
Official website (really, this is it):
amistech.com/msc/
Again, please lock this thread and don't punish me too severely if there's something I did wrong. I thought that this would gather some kind of interest in here, realistic car building simulators are after all quite rare.
Game is more finished than unfinished, that is the reason for Steam Greenlight and maybe even Early Access. The guy would love to make things differently, apparently he doesn't like Early Access thing so much...
Oh, and one more thing. Of you see a downloadable version of this game (1.72 I think), please do not download that. That was never supposed to be public and the file may contain viruses and stuff from those bad men who stole it...
If you have any questions, please ask and I try to answer.
Posts
The game is a little bit weird, and I like that. It's almost like it's subtly trolling you at times, but it might just be cultural differences. I'm really excited to see where he goes with it, but so far I'm having a lot of fun. It's basically what I wanted from Jalopy.
I love that it already has custom soundtrack support. I loaded it up with 100 90's songs and have my boombox cranking in my garage while I work. I turned 16 and got my first car in 1995, which I believe is when this game takes place, so it's hitting a lot of right notes with me in a way I can't quite explain. I want to frost the tips of my hair and wear some ridiculously wide-legged jeans for some reason.
I never bought Jalopy or this, but I love the idea of both and have kind of been on the fence about getting one of them for a while now. Out of curiosity, what does this do well that Jalopy missed the mark on for you?
Jalopy is, at least so far, about taking a less than spectacular car through Eastern Europe and repairing it along the way to finish the trip. It kind of deals with the experience of that. My Summer Car is about drinking beer, building a car and tuning it (seriously, you do your own alignments, carburetor mix, and gear ratios with your tools), racing, flipping dudes off, customizing your car, doing odd jobs for money, swearing in Finnish, and avoiding death.
So many things can kill you, like answering the phone while it's raining or just crashing a vehicle. It's also part Finnish life sim, where you have needs like hunger, thirst, and fatigue that you have to keep an eye on (but they aren't too annoying). You bathe by using your sauna. It's very impressive what one person has done so far.
Here's a series I've been watching that does a good job of showing what the game is like:
And just to make sure the OP knows the thread is alive: @Grebnu
Yeah, this game is a pretty accurate description of what it meant to be a teenager in the 90's. My older brothers all went through the car building phase when they were 17-20 (you get you driver's licence when your are 18 in Finland). Of course they bought a "peltoauto" or field car when they were even younger. Those are shitty old cars that boys use to drive around fields and ice (winter). They have no licence plates or anything, and usually they are used until something goes caput for good. And then there were mopeds, everyone had one. Honda Monkey is one of the most iconic things from the 90's for many Finnish.
Nowadays things are different, young guys aren't that much into cars anymore, but of course the old tradition has survived in the more remote places. It's sad that people are all gathered in big cities, it denies you so many good things.
This game has the same weird sense of humour as Finnish people in general. Often it includes doing or saying utterly ridiculous things with a straight face. Like in this game, it takes it very seriously but there's things like "Press button to swear" or you can pee where you want and all that. Finns love to shock foreigners with this humour, it's always hilarious to see their reaction! Of course a proper Finn wouldn't show how much he or she enjoys the situation...
The maker of the game, Johannes Rojola, has made some pretty awesome(-ly weird) Youtube videos too. He has very unique sense of humour even for a Finnish. Here's a music video from him, and really drives home the point I made earlier:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4ABgSzsPGDc
MSC plays with Finnish stereotypes well, one can instantly recognize all the elements from their own life. This is really a quite unique peek to what it meant to be a Finnish small town guy in the 90's.
If you really want to feel like an authentic Finn, you should load your game with 90's Euro-Dance like Cascada, E-type, E-rotic, Haddaway, Eiffel 65... Oh, so much memories! My brothers took me cruising local hotspots, I was like in elementary school and they were hitting girls and blasting their huge sound systems... I spent many great evenings with them, jumping in the back seat because of the bass. And the girls were always so sweet, they used to give me gum and candy. I am sure that my brothers used me as a bait to get girls, but it was a win-win situation.
I think that it's quite accurate thing to say that Finns have motoroil running in their veins. It is a part of our DNA. We've had our share of rally and formula drivers...
If you have any questions about the life in Finland in the 90's, please ask. Or if you need some translation help, I think that everything in the game is in Finnish?
I'm more partial to stuff like Amorphis and Korpiklaani, but I do plan to make a Finnish playlist. Sitting on the shore in the rain while drinking beer and eating sausage with Tales From the Thousand Lakes blaring from the stereo is pretty much how I picture Finland.
The game has English subtitles, so I haven't had much trouble knowing what's going on. The swears are... interesting.
There are some great tips for the game on the subreddit, specifically here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MySummerCar/comments/5axz72/tips_and_tricks_megathread/
If you drive the van, I would recommend staying in second gear on the dirt roads and staying around 100kph on the highway. That thing will kill you.
I am using my Xbox One controller for driving, and I recommend using something like joy2key to bind the right stick to mouse movement so you can look around while driving. You don't want to blindly pull out onto a road. Hopefully he adds better controller support in the future, but otherwise it works pretty well.
Only problem is I missed a nut on the brake line (I hunted forever when I put it in knowing there were 7, but I ended up mistaking a different nut for one of them) so my brake fluid all drained out. I fixed it, but I'll need to make another run to the store to get more fluid. It's close, though.
Like it pulls to the passenger side but it doesn't feel like steering alignment necessarily, but instead it's like you have to gradually turn the wheel further and further off center to keep it moving straight
I tried taking off the wheel and then the steering column itself and put them back on but it's still doing it
I'm mystified
What are you using to control it? If using a gamepad, be sure you set a deadzone for the sticks. If it's the keyboard, I'm assuming you did an alignment on your car? Straight seems to be 60 clicks, on each wheel. Otherwise, something could be loose or just the physics being wonky. It could be anything in the suspension.
I'm trying to decide if I should try driving the car to the store with half a reservoir of brake fluid, or tow it with the septic truck. I'm worried towing it will damage it. I want to go ahead and get it inspected, though.
I've tried gamepad and Logitech wheel both
I contemplated just driving it with the wheel at weird angles to the inspection shop and might do that and see what he says
Visually the wheels look fairly aligned and it's the fact that it's not a consistent pull off center that mystifies me
Maybe I'll fire it up today and take it to the shop
You can also try the mechanic. Maybe there's some damage you can't see, or just have him do an alignment.
Those swear words are again one Finnish humour thing. They are literally translated, which makes them sound horrible even for a Finnish. English just can't bend to same heights as Finnish, it is a structular thing. On the other hand, English is easy to learn, whereas Finnish...
If one likes folk metal, I'd whole heartedly would suggest giving Ensiferum a go. Great band. Then there's Turisas, Finntroll (they sing in Swedish but are Finnish), Moonsorrow and Wintersun are decent too.
Verjnuarmu is great too, they sing in Savo, it's an Eastern Finnish dialect. Awesome, awesome band. Most of the Finnish heavy bands are great, even the Christian ones. Got a few on my daily playlist.
I found out that if you put the triangle down in the game, cars will actually stop. Also, don't drive on the railroad tracks, unless you like dying.
If you want to remove damage by cheating, try deleting this file: C:\Users\you\AppData\LocalLow\Amistech\My Summer Car\meshsave.txt The game will generate a clean one if it's missing, and that's where it stores your damage. Maybe just body, but possibly other stuff too.
No, but I bet you could extract the assets and replace it with a blank sound file. It looks like Unity, which is pretty easy to do that do from what I remember.
Though really, by doing a sauna once a day and using mosquito spray, I rarely hear them.
Yeah the volume slider is found by cranking up both knobs on the underside of the sauna heater
Someone on the twitch stream advised that you can just rotate the wheels to either maximum position and then rotate back 60 clicks to center which is good to know
Then I drove it and a piston blew out the bottom of the engine
This guide is pretty good, and includes tips stuff like alignment, valve-timing, and carburetor mix:
http://my-summer-car.wikia.com/wiki/MY_SUMMER_CAR_GUIDE_2:_ELECTRIC_BOOGALOO
From what I've seen, you don't want to have the mechanic do your carburetor because I think he does it too lean, which will kill your engine.
I installed the air/fuel gauge and realized it was getting up over 15.5 at temp so I will adjust the richness substantially the next time I play.
The car is slowly getting better, though!
I have mine around 14.9. IIRC, the recommended range is 14.7 to 15.1. The richer it is, the better acceleration you get, but you have to rev the engine before putting it in gear (even with auto clutch) or it will die. It'll also cause more heat, but the upgraded radiator should handle it fine. Don't even think about upgrading the carburetor before you've upgraded the radiator.
At idle in the driveway it was ~15.0 which seemed fine, but halfway to the gas station it had climbed to 15.5+ and then rapidly climbed over 16.0 and started emitting steam out the radiator
I refilled the radiator and checked the radiator hoses and they seemed fine; at first I was wondering if it was purely an overheating / radiator problem or what
So maybe it's just too rich already and that's overheating it and the problem compounds itself? I can live with stalling in first more easily than overheating.
The aftermarket radiator was definitely on my list as soon as this started happening
I still haven't touched the valve timing either hmm ...
That is a thing that can happen, so yeah, probably.
I don't remember offhand what bad can happen from it, but if your engine is ticking, it needs to be adjusted. I think you get better horsepower if it's done correctly. It's pretty easy to do, just follow that guide. Takes maybe five minutes. Just be careful putting the screws back in because I accidentally adjusted one of the valves through the rocker cover.
Adjusted the a/f to ~ 14.6 to compare with a new fan belt on at the same setting for now and it drove perfectly fine (undoubtedly this was to lure me into a false sense of confidence before it breaks again).
Then I fell into a septic tank while trying to adjust the truck hose and died
^_^ ~ * m s c * ~ ^_^
They're pricey, but you should have a banging stereo before you do any body work or interior stuff. I mean, I guess you could park on the beach with a case of beer and admire your sweet spoiler and racing steering wheel, but I'll take tunes.
I've been looking forward to the ability to brew.
https://youtu.be/ehlWriIl7Vo
(The Boys of the Summer on loop should be the whole game's soundtrack.)