After playing through for a few days I have a couple of suggestions, mostly minor
- Add percentage labels to the horizontal bar that breaks down how time is divided up in a particulr stage
- Give some kind of indicator as to what each part of a dev stage is for, AI is obviously more suited to a technical developer but is graphics and sound a purely design aspect or would it benefit from a more balanced developer
- Make it more obvious if a staff member has an efficiency bar that’s empty or nearly empty, red border on the bar, maybe pulsating gently. It’s currently quite easy for it to blend into the desk in certain offices.
- Make it more obvious if an efficiency bar is present because of a new team member or exhaustion, perhaps shade the difference between the two in the bar
- When training, the stat sheet hides most of the progress bar
- Consider spacing out and/or repricing the new engine features, there’s a good 11 features released very close to each other in two groups, they’re pretty expensive and take forever to unlock all the while more features are unlocking
- You can import your genre hints from previous games but not the results of each type of training, the two should probably go hand in hand
-Let users see research features that haven’t unlocked yet, both normal research and R&D, perhaps also display the prerequisites to unlock them. Perhaps a checkbox “show unavailable research items” in the dialogs - Have the game tell the user if it thinks the user is falling behind where they should be in certain training departments, it’s very easy to leave it alone until suddenly you need a lot of skill points for say the R&D lab
- Don’t describe an engine as ‘old’ and offer to release or license it if it’s the most recent engine to be created, save it up for when the next engine is built.
- The grPhone and grPad are in reality the same platform, perhaps change one to be Robot Phones or something, also the platform license costs are pretty extreme for these devices
- Add a confirmation dialog before releasing games that have bugs, it’s too easy to hit the ‘finish’ button just as a bug pops up from one of the developers
- It’s easy to hit the rename button on the release game screen and then forget to hit the accept button on the new name, perhaps make the rename into a modal dialog so you HAVE to accept/reject before you can release the game, or assume the user wants to rename if the field is open for editing when they say to release.
Thoughts for the sequel/expansion - More offices with space for more staff, let us work on more than one game at once. Give us a more realistic development cycle, perhaps include Alpha/Beta testing and maybe even the latest trend of selling alpha/beta access.
Finally a question - why do MMO costs increase over time? The quantity of server resources required should be relative to the number of paying subscribers, surely? I also find the time it takes to make an expansion is more than it takes for an MMO to stop being profitable which means you can’t feasibly maintain an MMO and have other games or a second MMO going
That’s all I can think of for now, though I’m probably going to remember a few items i wanted to include as soon as i hit post.
Edit: remembered one already - game renaming, added above.