It’s the age-old story: make a project in your shed, form a company, go multi-national, sign a military contract and doom the world to an eternal cycle of war. Good Company is a tycoon/production-line game where you lead an eighties start-up tech company from dream to dominance.
Good Company’s presence at Gamescom was admirable. With four playable machines and a large TV running a trailer, it stood out among the Indie Megabooth and even won an award for the stand while at the event. The playable build wasn’t short, that said, instead being a very good slice of the early game — functional, although not feature- or content-complete.
You start your time with Good Company working from your shed — workbenches and a delivery area giving you the capability to design and assemble robots from modules, and modules from raw resources. Early projects are things like calculators, which you can tinker with, making more complex by revising components. In time, things like drones and flat robots appear, and after that, function.
It’s not just the scale and scope of your project that grows, though. As your projects grow in complexity and you start taking on bigger and bigger contracts, you’ll need to expand your team and facilities, as well as outsource more and more. Soon enough, you’re creating the groundwork for a production line, with managers and storage littered along the routes. My time with it was very enjoyable, and I especially enjoyed the pace of the game. Its pace was paired with a spiralling scope reminiscent of the likes of Factorio, wherein you look away from somebody else’s game for two hours and come back to a web of interconnected machinery.
Although the build was solid, it was clearly very early. There were not many things to build, although as I said earlier there were a couple of materials that could be built in and quite a few formulas to compile from them. It was an interesting slice, although things like the contracts system (which will be one of the better ways to advance through the company’s growth plan) was extremely wireframe at the time.
Personally, I’m very excited to watch Good Company develop further; as a slice of the gameplay, it was extremely promising, and there’s a mass of potential for a tycoon-style management game complete with a ‘craft’ or design system similar to this.
Good Company is currently being developed for PC platforms. The developers do not have a targeted release date as of yet. You can sign up for a newsletter on the game’s site.
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