🛠 Devlog: Building a Car Dealership Simulator in Unity

I recently wrapped up a car dealership simulation game, and this devlog is a behind-the-scenes look at the systems I built, challenges I ran into, and the overall flow of development.

🧩 The Core Gameplay Loop

The idea was simple at the start: simulate the life of a dealership assistant. But as with most game dev projects, the depth kept growing.

The final gameplay loop includes:

• Customers entering the dealership, each with budget ranges and vehicle type preferences.

• Player helps them through test drives, paperwork, and finance options.

• Trade-in vehicles are handled differently and spawn in their own parking zone.
  

Every interaction is broken into micro-tasks (like grabbing keys or documents) to give players a hands-on role.

Initial Layout Design (My suggestion)

🎮 Player Task System

A major chunk of my work went into the player task system. Instead of allowing free movement, the player moves via waypoint clicks only. Each interaction (like picking up keys or returning documents) is handled as a task.

Here's how I set it up:

• A TaskManager holds all task data.

• Desks use a DeskTaskController to assign and track tasks.

• The player queues up tasks and completes them in order — almost like a mini logistics sim.
  

Bonus: I added clickable badges and LeanTween-powered visual feedback to make task points pop!

Modified By Client

🧠 Smarter Spawning & Inventory

Car spawning isn’t just random. Trade-ins and for-sale vehicles are spawned based on real inventory availability.

This ensures:

• Only unsold and unreserved cars are shown.

• Customers are matched to actual vehicles.

• Trade-in cars get moved to the sales zone once accepted.
  

This gave the game a light management sim feel.

🧍 Desk-to-Desk Interactions

I created full logic flows for Sales Desks and Finance Desks:

• After test drives, customers may go for a cash deal or finance.

• Finance staff physically walk over to the sales desk to escort the customer back to the finance office.

• Each stage has built-in timers and animations to simulate real customer service pacing.

All of this is done with clear, modular scripts — keeping things scalable and tweakable.

🔄 Lean Visuals & Clean Flow

On the visual side, I used:

• LeanTween for feedback animations (like click VFX and object scaling).

• Simple NavMesh pathing for all character movement.

• Conditional UI logic to keep everything clean and purposeful (e.g., hiding the inventory until needed).

While it wasn’t a “fancy graphics” project, the focus was tight gameplay flow and clarity.

🧼 What Didn't Make It?

There was one animation we planned but didn’t implement: the player wiping a car with a rag before putting it up for sale. It was a nice touch, but cut due to time constraints. Maybe next time 😉

Final Thoughts

This project was a great dive into simulation game logic, clean task systems, and tying multiple game systems into a single player-driven loop.

Would love to explore more game types like this — especially ones that mix strategy and simulation in fun ways.

If you’re working on something similar or want to build a modular game system in Unity, feel free to reach out!

📌 Built with: Unity, C#, LeanTween, NavMesh 🧪 Key Systems: Task Queues, Desk Logic, Inventory Management, Visual Feedback -Saif