Difficulty modes (Not years) Maybe even Sandbox?

Game Dev Tycoon ideas
#1

There could be a difficulty setting like Easy, Medium and Hard for some inexperienced players Easy might be a place where you start off and get used to the game maybe even finish it (25-35 years) Then if they are comfortable they go onto Medium then Hard. I am suggesting this because I personally had not played a Tycoon game in years and on this only one setting my company failed again and again in the same place. I would like the chance to experiment in a real situation and see which combos are good and which games are for which age groups. This would really help many players develope from Newbies to Pros faster. There could also be a sandbox mode where you give the player 1 billion dollars (Example) or a set amount by the player for their own convinience. This would be a training ground for players and help them learn about the game instead of consistantly having to work their way up the ladder and only being able to play some areas because they could no progress.

Here is a cat as a reward for reading this huge paragraph! And Thanks for all of the comments and likes :smile:

2 Likes
#2

Meow

#3

Lets not turn this into a cat page where its only filled with cat photos :stuck_out_tongue:

#4

<<<<<------------- Bigger cat = win

1 Like
#5

I like the idea of difficulty modes. Setting the years to 35 at the beginning does help for me, at least because I’m not dealing with a new console landing in my lap while I’m finishing out the game I was making.

However, for those of us who haven’t played a tycoon game in years, or for those of us who have never played one, but picked it up cause it looked fun, it’d be nice to tone down the difficulty a little.

I’d actually propose the idea of what it’s currently at being “medium”, and adding an easier mode (or two) and a harder mode (or two) to give a nice range of difficulty. I personally found it a bit easy once I figured out my own personal strategy: I left my garage with 10M under my belt (easy enough to do, get a good combo or two and keep making 'em), then left my new office with 75M weighing me down. My first round I flunked miserably, but I’d tried to expand too far, too fast.

As for Sandbox mode, do so kinda like the old Roller Coaster Tycoon games. Unlimited funds, on the fly time speed adjustment (so you can set Hardware and R&D to max, then advance time to 4x speed, and bingo, done, new console in 30 seconds), difficulty set to medium/easy so that it’s tougher to fail.

1 Like
#6

Main problem is that you’re only competing against yourself.
The only goal in the game is not to go bankrupt.

The only way to implement difficulties would be to make it easier or harder to get good ratings = sales = money.

I think the game needs more randomness before anything else.
Game Dev Tycoon has sure-fire recipes for good games, but in real life you can do everything right and still fail miserably because you marketed it wrong, caught the wrong timing, simply isn’t well-known, and a million other factors.

Competing for market shares would bring a lot to the game in terms of having goals, but I don’t see this happening until they decide to make a sequel or expansion.

#7

My idea of hardness levels where that Easy had less random events that are high risk or that could hurt you. The review standards could be eaisier. Also as the game progresses during the current version you can see the review standards getting higher. For example if you do not have Good Graphics your rewievs go down. I was thinking of making it so that the game has lower standards saying “oh you only need text games for high reviews at this time” Then slowly increasing to 2D graphics. Instead of You need 2D graphics for high reviews and if you have text games your reviews will be low. The standards and ramdom events are the game basics if you make them more oppropriate to the game in a way that makes it eaisier to play, that will be the difficultiy levels.

#8

The game is too easy at the moment, I got all features and extensions in round about 60 years on my second try. But I vote for more advanced, optional features to make the game more challeging, e.g. opponents with different levels to generate different processes of the market share developement and different types of attacs by opponents, spy attacs or sabotage and so on.
The idea of other companies and sabotage exists in the game already, but by the player only and I don’t know if it has any influence on the game mechanics at the moment.
To make these extensions not to frustrating, there should be a way to make a new studio with the existing experience (of the main character) if the money goes out, that make game devolpers in real life too sometimes. And the existing game titles of the old company should have a hype impact on titles in the new studio, because the developer has a name. That makes it easier to get the bigger offices again and to regain market share.
Maybe it is not so easy to implement the second point, because the experience is related to researched items and so on.

#9

Yes I agree we should have much more advanced ideas as you mentioned. But for me myself I have not played these game types for a long time and it has taken me 3 days to get used to and star making 5 million maximum. I suggest for begginers who want to experiment more, and learn.

#10

I know a feature out of my real life career, it’s called investors. It’s helped in a startup project, to create a feature rich project and to gain a lot of experience. That might by interesting for a new startup in GDT.
GDT has a light version of an investor implemented, it’s the bank and it’s credit. But this type of credit limits the possibilities, because you get the money after you have no money left. And the conditions to pay it back are not easy to manage in all cases.
But maybe this feature can be extended or slightly modified by options to get better/cheaper conditions and/or more sources to get (cheaper) investments from. To extend the available amount of money directly. By this the player can make more mistakes with a smaler risk, depending on the investor options or something like that. This might be easier to implement than different difficulty levels. Maybe a “Trust Level” option is enough to scale the possibilities to gain investements/credits with better conditions. It’s like a character quality for the player. Maybe this can visualized/implemented by a slider in the player configuration at the start of the game.
I know about the announced shareholder extension. But shareholder sounds not like a simple investor. A shareholder has much more influence and conditions in relation to a company. An investor wants a profit only and this depends on public information/trust only, as far as I know.

#11

I do not think investors should be included because the point of the game is to make your own money and from that own money you start up an empire. The begining 70k is what you have invested into your own company. From that investment upon yourself you make many super games and live on from there.

#12

Investors as a gameplay mechanic would be good as really a staple of every single game similar to this (or rather I should say the good old ones like Theme Hospital, SimCity, etc…) was that you could always take out a loan to get started.

This said another good staple of other Simulation / Strategy games is A.I. opponents rather than competing against yourself. I mean in a way it is really weird especially for this kind of game, and I’ve seen this quite a bit in many modern App style games.

Perhaps it’s just me but that style of gameplay just feels completely out of place in this type of game.
Instead it would make sense if there were several development companies you were actually competing against where the Technology you used became important rather than merely a Design/Tech bonus modifier.

When instead they could be used as a mean of “key aspects” that determine the overall design of the game against the competition. For example you might only be using Graphics V2, which the Competition is using Graphics V3 but if you have an Open World; then that could make the game more appealing to the market.

Experimentation really should be rewarded, especially with Strange / Bad Combos should have a way of Strategically making them good games that people will want. Some developers are renown for their ability to create quite quirky yet good games; while others make mediocre AAA releases each year.

Adding that layer of Depth to the game to me would really help make it better and more well rounded, especially if each of the AI you competed against had their own personalities and styles. Then it could lend itself well to interesting and challenging achievements and gameplay.

Such-as beating Ego Software (play on id software) at Sci-Fi / Action [FPS] games, or competing with Arctic Entertainment (Blizzard) in the MMO / Strategy genres.

Right now it’s more about simply beating a top score, like an Arcade game or more appropriately modern Final Fantasy games where you’re given a ranking on what you did… meet specific criteria and blam! 5 Stars. Regardless if that criteria is actually good or fun to do.

Where-as I think the game should be more about being strategic about how you play and management. I mean heck just look at your NES / SNES library (if you have one) and see how many of those games are by JLN. Seriously that group really should have gone out of business as they made nothing but horrible games for over a decade, yet somehow they kept having successful hits that they could afford movie license after movie license.

For better or worse, it was a really well managed company with a great marketing dept. While developers like Bungie, struggled to survive for several years despite having some amazingly outstanding and innovative titles.

That’s what I think the game should focus more on here as well, the Strategy of the industry from the relatively humble beginnings to the behemoth it is today. I would love the option to expand out as well to be a Game Developer, Hardware Manufacturer or even a Publisher.

Remember Electronic Arts started by making Deluxe Paint and Art Animation Software, moving in to games then finally self Publishing before becoming a the Publisher we know today. That evolution they took was pretty awesome even if they are little more than an evil corporate empire they are now, being able to retrace similar steps would be awesome.

Even something as what seems like a simple choice of “Which platform do we focus on?” should be a strategic choice rather than as it is right now where you basically go where the biggest audience is regardless if it is a big audience for the title you want to make. Still look back and count the number of Pure PC development companies today?

There are very few indeed.
Perhaps I’m just looking for a different thing in this game than what is intended by the developers… but there are already quite a few “Game Developer” casual Apps out there for various platforms; what would be awesome would be a more in-depth one that takes more than a few nods to the amazing Strategy-Sims we all grew up with that EA basically is hording the IP licenses to today.

There’s no reason it can’t have that slightly casual / humorous element to it as well… Theme Hospital and Theme Park pulled that off amazingly (well every Bullfrog Sim did really) but they didn’t lack any depth or over simplify the gameplay to achieve that.

I would love to see this game head more towards that direction and break away from the limitations that the modern casual App market seems to encourage developers to take.