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Without the use of spreadsheets or intentionally including bugs.
When it comes time to build your new engine, include as many features as you have researched at the moment.
However⌠when you roll out that new engine for your next gameâŚdonât immediately use them all.
Make the ONLY thing that is improved with your first game using the new engine the new level of graphics.
Your next game⌠just turn on one new feature.
Keep making games, with each time turning on a single new feature.
The boost to the quality of the game from turning on new features each time is enough to consistently get you 8.0 scores when turning on small features (ones that cost around 10k) and youâll almost always get 9.0+ games when you turn on bigger, more expensive features.
Once you release a game that has ALL of your engineâs features turned on⌠research more features and build a new engine. Repeat.
A lot of people are hesitant to ever use publishers, mainly because of the negative stigma attached to them. The low % of royalties you get as a developer is also a turn-off.
However, there is a small window when using publishers can be REALLY powerful and can catapult you into self-publishing medium games quickly.
This is what I call the âPublisher Fan Slingshotâ
The strategy starts after you make your first single-person indie 9.0+ hit that gets you out of your garage.
Once you are out of your garage and into the first office, hire two employees. I normally only drop 80k for each search and try to get level 2 or level 3 employees.
Once you get your first employee, research medium games while hiring your 2nd one. Give both employees the new staff training. Wait for you and the two employees to return to maximum efficiency (The little bar refills and vanishes). You can do research while you wait for the bars to recover. Once the bars are all full, check the publisher list.
What you ideally want is a game with a high % of royalties, high score expectations and a not-bad topic/genre/system combo. Donât be shy about springing for a new game system license if you find the right publisher that happens to want a game on a new system.
When developing the game, set your sliders and distribute your workers appropriately. Release the game once finished and all the bugs squished.
If you did your sliders right, this new game will be another 9.0+ smash hit. If you can get your game to debut as the #1 game, it will sell in the millions in the first few weeks. This will not only get you more money in royalties than you would have in sales had you self-published, you will get a metric F-load of fans. After a SINGLE smash hit publisher game, I normally find myself with about 65k-70k fans. One or two more publisher games (they donât have to be, and probably wonât be smash hits) and Youâll reach the 90k-100k fan mark at which point self-published medium games will sell well on their own. At that point you can abandon the use of publishers completely. You can normally get to the 250k fan mark needed for self-pubished large games just by making lots of good self-published medium games.
While yes, you can reach the 100k fan mark with self-published games as well, it takes a LOT longer compared to this method.
I agree with you, I was wondering for 2-3 days why I always went bankrupt on Level two then I started using Publishing Contracts and made millions off games, and never failed a contract and I was extremely happy.
Yes the G64 has a higher market share in the beginning, but it also costs 20k to make compared to 5k for the PC.
Until you get your smash hit, the market share of your chosen platform is unlikely to matter enough to make up for that 15k development cost difference. Since money is tight early on, sticking to the PC is best. This is especially true if you are new and arenât sure about good topic + genre combos or good slider positions yet, as having a flop on the PC hurts much less. The primary purpose of your pre-custom engine games is to build up your character skills and generate research points⌠Making money is secondary.
Once you have made your first custom engine, then you can graduate to the G64 if you would prefer to have your smash hit on a home computer rather than the TES. In that case, the market share DOES matter enough to warrant the extra 15k development cost.
I skip the G64 altogether. I highly recommend to not develop any games for the G64. Like, ever. Unless a publisher requires you to do so, of course.
Whys that?. My only game for Garage, I only developed on the G64 and gameling, why should I skip it when I made tons of money?
The G64 has its uses. Say Iâve just researched my new engine and am pretty sure my next title will be my smash hit. If you have researched target audience at this point, I could make my would-be smash hit a mature title in order to get the free âfirst mature titleâ hype event. The PC also supports mature titles, but you want a device with a bigger market share when planning for your smash hit, as that will let you get more profits and thus more starting capital to being stage 2 with, thus making the G64 the superior choice in this one instance.
That is pretty much the only case when I use the G64. Before my custom engine I stick to the PC. Once in stage 2, My platform of choice varies depending on what the publishers want, but if given a choice Iâll either go for the PC or Gameling depending on the genres I intend to focus on. At that point, the G64 is on its way out.
Another Tip: Do one round of training for all of your employees in between each game you produce; focus on training their design/tech (whichever is appropriate for their skills/role). When you go to make your next title, their raw skills will be slightly higher and thus you are more likely to make gradual progress compared to your last game. Even if you donât do anything else to innovate and stick with the same sliders in the same genre (different topic to avoid a penalty) youâll probably get better scores.
This serves two more purposes: Training becomes less effective the more you do it in rapid succession. By waiting in between games to train, you get more bang for your buck.
Lastly, if you finish a game and your employees are getting close to needing their vacations, better for that bar to show up in the middle of a training session than in the middle of a game development.
When you are upgrading your engine, you donât need to train design/tech, as the engine upgrades are likely to boost the quality of your next game on its own. You can instead focus on research/speed training instead.
Doing a round of research training for yourself and brand new employees really early in stage 2 can be very powerful, as those extra research skills will increase the total research points generated for all future games. Once everyone has their efficiency bar up to full, I like to fire off a round of research training before making my first game.
Early in the game, while in the garage before making your first custom engine, make one game with an extremely bad topic/genre combination. Donât do this with your very first game or you might go bankrupt. Make it for the PC to minimize your costs.
The game will likely get crap reviews, but youâll still get much needed experience for making it. At this stage of the game, the garbage sales and the loss of a few fans wonât hurt you.
Why go through the trouble?
Later in the game, once youâre in the 2nd office and have a new game engine, if the âStrange Combinationsâ Trend ever fires, make a sequel to your strange game. The bonus from making a proper sequel combined with the bonus for following the âstrange trendâ properly should actually cause the game to do well, and do better than a brand new game with a strange combo would. You can continue doing this with more sequels if the trend fires again (Just make sure youâre on a new engine between sequels). You can turn the game series into your companyâs pet black sheep IP and actually have it do well. Just make sure you ONLY make a sequel when the âstrange combinationâ trend is active, and if you think you can finish the game in time to release it before the trend ends.
Tip:
When developing games in the garage, always use a brand new topic with each game. When youâve used your 4 starters, research a new topic for each new game until you get your smash hit. Not only will this give you an important bonus to your xp gain for each title you produce, it will give you a snapshot of future topics that will be available to you. Based on the available topics, this can help you decide what genre you ultimately want to focus on when you get out of the garage and get ready to decide what kind of employees to hire.
Seeing Hospital/Virtual Pet/Airplane/Evolution as your next four will probably mean that focusing on simulation games will be very beneficial for you, for example.
Researching Racing also unlocks the steering wheel, allowing you to add it to a future engine.
It can also help guide decisions as to what platforms you might want to start developing for and how early (if at all) you want to invest in the casual genre once it unlocks.
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Want some cheats in the game? Yes!
Having trouble changing with the save game? Yes!
Then this is the link for you!
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http://forum.greenheartgames.com/t/save-game-for-players-who-want-to-cheat/4771
I am a trusted player.
When you are in the garage stage, it is important to make a variety of games of different genres. Or, if you are planning on focusing on one or two specific genres later in the game, make games of that genre in the garage. They will be important later.
The moment the âSequelsâ research becomes available in stage 2, research it. It is, IMO,THE most powerful thing you can use in the game and can double the life of your engines.
Here is how you properly use sequels.
For demonstration purposes, Iâm going to explain it assuming you have JUST researched a brand new engine and have included all the features researched thus far into it.
Using your new engine, create a brand new, non-sequel game. Ideally use a brand new category with a âgoodâ topic/genre combination, ideally with a genre your team is familiar with, and good at making. Make the ONLY new thing about your engine be the upgrade to the graphics. Leave ALL the other new bells and whistles of your engine unused (if you had features that were used by an older engine, keep using those).
If you did your sliders right, your new game should be a hit, if not at least a very well scored 8.0+ game.
Afterwards⌠make another game. This time make a sequel. Remember those games I told you to make back in the garage era? This is where they become important. They are sequel fodder. Using the EXACT same engine, with the EXACT same features as your last game, and the EXACT same slider positions and genre⌠make your sequel.
Youâll find that, despite the fact that you failed to innovate at all from your previous game, this game will do just as well. This is because of the âproper sequelâ bonus. Your score is boosted by 20% for sequels that are made from games that had an older engine and that were more than 40 weeks ago. Your garage-era PC and G64 titles are perfect for that.
NowâŚsimply make another NEW non-sequel game, turning on a few more of your engineâs features this time. This game should be a hit too. After that, follow up with another sequel using the same features/sliders.
Iâve been able to chain 8 back to back 8.5+ games this way off a SINGLE engine before I ran out of new features to turn on and had to make a new engine.
Once you make a new engine, all those games you made previously (both the sequels and the originals) are now fodder for sequels for the new engine.
When making Medium games in stage 2, you only need 3 people (Yourself + 2 employees). Any more than that is a waste of money.
Ideally, you want level 2 employees when you hire them, level 3s if you get lucky enough to get one as an applicant. Level 1s are just way too low skilled to be worth the time. You also want to be picky about not just the design/tech skills of your two employees, but also the speed and research. Ideally you want them both to be higher than 250. If they are over 300, you have a winner. Research is especially important as these employees will determine how many research bubbles you get from them, and having a healthy supply is critical to doing plenty of training and researching plenty of new engine features.
Hire both employees at the same time to minimize the effect of the group efficiency decrease. Donât make your first game with them until after everyone has fully recovered their efficiency. Because the first game made by a brand new employee will have a penalty applied⌠I actually recommend starting out with a self-published small game as your teamâs first title. It probably wonât do that well, but because it is a small game, it wonât cost much and wonât have much of an impact on your fans. The other use for this small game is to see the kind of ratio of design/tech bubbles that your new team will be putting out. This can give you an idea of what genres your team will be good at. For example, if the small game puts out twice as many tech bubbles as design, you might want to focus on action games. If the ratio is closer to being even, but still favors tech, youâll want to stick to simulation and strategy games, as they are less demanding about having a steep tech focusâŚyet are still tech oriented. The same is true for a team built for design-focused genres, with adventure games being ideal for teams that put out tons more design points than tech, and casual/rpgs being better for teams that have a more even ratio.
Once you reach 250k fans, you are ready to start making large games and ready to move into the next office. However, you wonât be offered the option to move to the next office until you have 3 employees. Just spend 20k to hire some random level 1 derp to meet the requirement. Once you move to your next office, fire the level 1 derp and start hiring to fill the rest of your seats all at once. The reason why you want to wait to be in the next office to hire the rest of your team proper is that you get a MUCH better quality of candidates in your applications when you are in the 3rd stage. Level 3s are common, and you might even get a level 4 or 5 with some insanely high stats. Once youâve filled your team of 6 (and everyoneâs rock bottom efficiency has recovered to full) You are ready to start making large games. (You donât NEED 7 people to do large games, but at this point you should have enough money for the extra headcount and it will make your transition to AAA games very easy).
If you didnât spend much time/research points/money in training your original two employees, go ahead and fire them and replace them with fresh employees that have higher base skills. This will actually save you money because your original two employees are likely a high level now and thus will be drawing a high salary, yet will lack the dev/tech/speed/research skills of the high level new hire. If you did keep up with training your initial two employees, you can keep them around, as they should have enough skills to keep up with the higher level new hires.
Iâm still kicking numbers around in my head and am not certain, but it appears that developing for particular platforms reduces market share for unused platforms. For example, if I completely ignore the G64 and develop solely for PC, the PCâs market share rises (well, âfalls more slowlyâ might be more accurate) than it does if I develop several games for G64. This seems to pay some dividends later when you can aim for the Mature audiences. On the other hand, developing for the G64, because it starts with a significantly larger market share, allows you to have a slightly larger fan base by the time you get out of the garage. Itâs a trade-off, but it seems that keeping the PCâs market share higher seems to pay larger dividends in the long run. Could be wrong, but thatâs how the situation looks at the moment.
Tip:
At a loss for good game names? Put a short character name in an early game and adopt them as your company mascot, akin to Mario and Sonic.
For any future games made with the originalâs topic and/or target audience, include your mascotâs name in the title.
For example:
Establishing Game:
Young + Virtual Pet + Simulation: âMy Miloâ
Follow ups:
Young + Pirate + Adventure: "Milo: Puppy Pirate"
Young + School + RPG: "Milo: Kindergarten"
Young + Racing + Casnual: âMilo: Grand Prixâ
Tip: When you have existing employees and are ready to hire more, wait for your existing employees to want to go on vacation. Then hire your new employee(s). This will drop your existing employeesâ efficiency bars to hit rock bottom. Then send them on vacation. The vacation time will not only restore the efficiency lost due to needing a vacation, but also the efficiency loss due to new team members; theyâll come back fully rested and able. This lets you do training with them until the rest of the team has returned to full.
If you hire two balanced employees in stage 2, you gain a huge amount of slider flexibility. If you make each person responsible for all three aspects in each stage, you can freely adjust the sliders in any stage without worrying about unbalancing the workloads.
This allows you to continue developing a wide variety of genres successfully. (Iâd still avoid action and adventure games as they require more extreme levels of focus on tech or design)
Put your more design-focused employee in stage one, the more tech focused one in stage two, and have your character handle stage 3.
This is an extremely useful trick for the publisher phase of the game, as publishers can demand a wide variety of genres as part of their contracts.
Over time, you can focus-train your employees to make your company more design focused or tech focused.
When you hire your first employees pay more attention to they research ability. Theyâll be around for a long time and that research will add up over time. Your later hires will come after a lot of research is already done so you wonât get much from them in research.
Also since research is also used for training taking a character with extra research will allow you to improve their other stats later.
Guide to your first two employees.
Once you reach the first office and are ready to start making medium games, you need to hire your first two employees. I say âfirst twoâ because at this point in the game, two employees is the ONLY logical choice. One employee is not enough to help you make medium games properly, and three employees is too much and will likely bankrupt you. You can stay with just these two employees until you are ready to start making large games (250k fans or more)
At this stage of the game, the most logical amount to pay for your employee search is 80k. 80k will give you access to three potential candidates. While the 80k wonât boost the quality of the employees much, we arenât looking for super high level employees at this point. You can easily afford 80k after your 2 million + smash hit game. The next logical stage up is 440k, which will easily bankrupt you so donât bother.
What type of employees you want depends on what genres you want to be good at.
As a reminder:
Complex Algorithms: Tech focused employee
Game Demos: Design/Tech balanced employee
Showreels: Design focused employee.
Based on the genre(s) I want to be good at, I hire as follows.
Action: Complex Algorithms x2
Strategy and/or Simulation: Complex Algorithms X1, Game Demos X1
RPG: Game Demos X2 (slanted to design a little bit)
Casual and/or Adventure: Showreels X1, Game Demos X1
Flexible: Complex Algorithm X1, Showreels X1 OR Game Demos X2 (Slanted to tech a little bit)
Why do I need to stack my team so heavily with Complex Algorithms for my tech genres? Because the game is naturally slated to favor design. If you have a perfectly neutral team, youâll generate 1.25 design bubbles for every tech bubble. Thus to properly hit the bubble ratio desired by the tech focused games, we need to more heavily stack our deck in favor of tech.
Employee Level:
This is a debated topic, but Iâm going to give you my personal advice: Level 2 is the best. Level 1 doesnât bring nearly enough skill points to the table and it will take a LOT of training before you get their skills up, which can cause problems when you want to turn them into specialists later in the game. Level 3 brings TOO many skill points, and will most likely cause you to way-over shoot your target game score early on, making the mid-game harder than it needs to be. They are also rarer and can throw off your bubble balance too easily.
Speed:
Unlike the tech/design skills, the speed skill is not tied to employee level. Ideally, we want employees that start with a LOW speed (under 200). Thatâs right, low. By starting with a low speed, you make speed trainings more powerful, thus allowing you to use them to make meaningful increases in your game quality than they would if you had employees who started with a high speed stat to begin with. Having a low speed wonât hurt their abilities to become specialists later on.
Research: Like speed, this skill isnât tied to the employeeâs starting level. Unlike speed, we want this to be as HIGH as possible. 200+ at a minimum. The higher this starts naturally, the more research bubbles youâll be getting out of the employee over time. Since having a high research skill to start with wonât cause any of their other starting stats to suffer, there is no downsides to getting employees with a high naturally starting research skill.
Be picky, but not TOO picky: Getting these first two employees right is important, but not to the point of bankrupting yourself. If you have no good candidates in your first employee search, donât be afraid to X out the box and try your search again. Youâll be out the 80k, but it is worth it if you can get a better employee in the next group of three. That being said, donât hold out for the absolute PERFECT employee or youâll end up wasting a lot of money. A possible (albeit cheap) tactic is to save your game before starting your employee search. If your searches turn up with no good employees, reload to try your search again, so you arenât out the 80k.