Don't Roll a One

I was struggling to layout vehicle stats for Outlaw Country in a catchy manner when I realized concise statblocks for old-school RPGs have a lot in common with auto classifieds. Since Outlaw Country is a love letter to an apocryphal 1970s retrofuture, it was a perfect match.

The next rabbit hole I went down was making example images for each type of vehicle in Automation. It’s one of those perpetual early-access “games” on Steam that, to my knowledge, only gets used to create custom cars for BeamNG.drive. Since I only needed car exteriors, I could skip the mind-numbing details like differentials and brake size and just use the app like a car character creator.

The results were pretty good:

I’ve always been fascinated by the not-quite-right cars in games like GTA as well as the worldbuilding exhibited by the vehicles in Cyberpunk 2077, and this was an opportunity to dip my toes into that.