Game Dev Tycoon - Anyone else playing it?

[Allen]

What do you think of this little gem:

http://www.greenheartgames.com/

Very basic game, but quite in depth and very addictive. Started off, made some good games, worked up to a nice new office, hired a load of staff and then went downhill quickly (my expenses were too high and I kept getting fined by publishers for not producing good enough games), so have to start again. This time take it a little slower I think.

The only thing I am struggling with is management, when you have people with high technology skills but low design skills and vice versa, which jobs do you give them (like Engine, Story, Graphics etc)? I don't think that was explained well enough. Nor the training, there's 5 types but 4 skills they increase, and it's not like there is only one training for each skills as far as I can tell.

Other than that, it's a fantastic game for ~£6, well worth trying it out IMO.

Anyone got any game development tips? So far I have found that Military Strategy, Fantasy RPG and Space Simulator are all very popular choices, never seem to get below 8 in ratings for those. Also, what platforms do you develop for?

[jim]

Is it particularly different to Game Dev Story? I did enjoy that on Android, although it got very samey after a while.

[Allen]

I never played it, but they said the following about it:

Game Dev Tycoon was inspired by Game Dev Story (by Kairosoft), which was the first ‘tycoon’ game we enjoyed playing on the iPhone; however, from the start, we wished the game would work and look differently. We wanted a game development simulation which would be less random, more about your choices and a little more realistic.

[capt_cornflake]

http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/...use-of-piracy/

[Marenghi]

can't stop playing it for your stated reasons allen. what's the most you made out of a game? i managed to get just over 50m on a medium size game, i'm working my way to get more/better staff before taking anything bigger on

[Allen]

LOL, nowhere near that, I only played it for a few hours last night, didn't look anything up, wasn't really doing a great job. Did release quite a few high review scoring games but the most I made was about 2 million on a hospital simulator, almost all the medium games I tried to make failed and I went bankrupt. Gonna try again tonight, thinking a bit more about the options I mentioned earlier and trying to find out exactly how to make a good game!

[Marenghi]

yeah i think looking up what to do would ruin the game. the game does say when you get 100k fans then you should self publish medium games but i started way before that and was doing ok. i have to say it's very tricky getting the right combination to make a top game (there's a surprise) sometimes i can get a good run going and even had 3 10's and a 9 but then i cock it up and the sales drop. thankfully i never seem to make a game below 4 so generally i can make a very small profit. really hope they update this, i'd be delighted with new content for things to do but first i'd like to see the ui have more information displayed, especially when it comes to game history

edit

it's so hard to find the balance for 2 genre games!

[Marc_92]

I saw total biscuit playing it on stream, looks cool so might pick it up when it comes on steam.

[Pob255]

I missed tb's stream of it, but I did watch wowcrendor's and spis (from the yogcast) videos on it, does look great and a lovely chunk of nostalgia at the same time.
I'm really tempted by this one.

[Pob255]

One thing I don't like it it doesn't seem to keep a record, well you cannot see it, of your failed games.
I want to look back over what I did, but I cannot

I think my best game was a Romance+Adventure on PC for maturer audience called Boobiez

[melon]

Im surprised there arent any music biz simulators , there was on amiga yrs ago I quite liked called , " rockstar ate my hamster "

[Pob255]

Didn't someone do a club tycoon type game? I seem to remember it getting in a lot of media hot water hype because you had problems with drunks, gangs and drugs to deal with.

[Output]

Im surprised there arent any music biz simulators , there was on amiga yrs ago I quite liked called , " rockstar ate my hamster "

I always found the freeware game Chart Wars 3 engrossing, but unfortunately it is rather old now and riddled with bugs causing random crashes. I believe that there was originally a plan to make another Chart Wars game, but then the developer went to work for Sports Interactive.

[Akdude110]

Seems like a good game. I always get a nogalistic feeling when playing these Tycoon games so I'm gonna have to pick this up it seems.

[melon]

Pity it didnt use multiplayer / realtime players to rate your games ..

that would be interesting MMORPG now wouldnt it ?

And the better you get , the better / more things you can do including stealing others ideas hacking etc

[Pob255]

TB has done a WTF is of game dev tycoon now http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ytti44AUGWQ
And damn his hide, yet again I find myself agreeing with him, esp as I looked at the printouts I've made from the wiki as I was having such trouble trying to figure out how to make good games.

One thing I don't like much is all the little tech features you research and add to an engine do nothing specific.
What I mean here is all they do is give a boost, based off their cost, to the design&tech points mad in that phase of development.
So for example,
Joystick, gameplay 10k
Mouse, gameplay 10k
Steering Wheel, gameplay 10k
Game Pad, gameplay 10k
All of these give the same effect regardless on what they are used, so if you're developing an RPG on the gameling (aka gameboy) then including steering wheel will be just as good as gamepad or including mouse and steering wheel support is actually twice as good as gamepad
In the same way you could develop every pc game without mouse support and it will just lose you 10k of feature bonus

The way game dev tycoon presents itself you'd expect that different features would be dependent on the platform and time, like the way topic and genera do better on some platforms.

But the game never hints at this so you don't know.

The total lack of feedback is a major problem, the way you cannot look back at games you've made to see their total design & tech points or slider positions makes the whole thing a bit too random, unless you play with a pen & paper and take your own notes all the time.

The way the system works, you don't want to make games that are a massive leap forward, you just want to churn out games that are just slightly better than the last one, as long as you make slightly more design&tech points while keeping in a good ratio for the topic.