I’ve played five games so far, and most of them fail and go bancrupt in year 11. It seems that all the games I produce at that point are 2-3 star games, regardless of quality.
Anyone have any tips? I try to keep the budget down, have never had more than 2 employees (even tried with only 1 employee, and then firing them to save money), use good combos, and still get horrid results.
I have no issue making blockbuster games (making 1-3 million in profit) earlier in the timeframe, but year 11 kills me.
Same problem here. I can make hits game in early years but after move out from garage and make the same formula I can’t make hit game anymore after that go bankrupt
I have the same problem. I made a game that had easily >130 Design, 9.5 Rating and it didn’t even sold half as much as my first hit game. And even Publishers are worth nothing because they make horrible type/genre combinations and market them to the wrong audiences. Even if you meet their ridiculous requirements, there is no way to make decent money out of that because of the low percentage in royalties.
Year 11 Again. Made an RPG with 196 Design and 112 Technology. Average rating 6. I’m not sure if I bother trying again if the difficulty ramps up this fiercely.
Me too! I used to play a lot of sim games in the past as a kid and perhaps I’ve been on FPS/adventures too long because I can’t seem to work out a strategy as opposed to just relying on luck!
Most games I make have terrible ratings and sell badly, then every now and again I get ratings of 8 for no reason I can tell… and the game tends to sell badly anyway.
I’ve got myself in a situation where there is 1 mill in the bank, I have 3 employees and everything I try as the next game fails and I go bankrupt (aka save scrubbing).
I read separately you shouldn’t leave the garage immediately but should wait till you get 5 million, so I will try that; because currently the cuteness factor of the game is winning me over.
If I have a criticism of the game so far it’s that it appears very random and if there is a strategy to make a good game I don’t feel it’s been explained during the tutorial stages. Hopefully I won’t give up, but at least I bought it eh
Finally found a solution. I paced my Engine building to build a maximum of 2 Engines per Level. Noticed that having loads of features is only important for later consoles - I guess the ability to make stereoscopic 3D for a Gameboy is more than it can handle.
Choose and plan your games carefully. Games with a major cult following (like Pokemon) tend to do well, but mass market games like CoD-clones don’t really work out until you have the resources available at the 3rd office.
Don’t move out of your garage until you have at least 5m in cash. Office space and salaries eat through your funds VERY fast.
Don’t be stingy when hiring. I always hire 2 staff immediately; 1 Designer & 1 Programmer (Tech). I can then work easily on medium sized games, with the 3 characters taking one slider each at each stage. Spend at least 200k each time you hire.
Hire strategically, and don’t fire unless you absolutely must. It actually costs more to search for decent staff regularly than it does to simply pay salaries. A skilled staff member more than pays back their salary in game sales, if you don’t screw up.
Don’t trust Publishers. Whilst they can sometimes be a necessary evil, you’re far more likely to survive in GDT if you go it alone. The only publisher contracts worth pursuing are the ‘Any Topic/Any Genre’ contracts that only demand a score of 6 or less. These contracts will keep a mediocre game afloat longer than without the contract. Any other contract will more often than not gain you a penalty for failing. Without a publisher contract, a mediocre game will sell less copies, but you will never have to pay the publisher for making a game that’s not good enough.
Carefully set the sliders according to the game you’re trying to make. If you’re making an RPG game for the Gameling, you don’t need to put a lot of effort into the graphics or sound, but Story/Quests and World Design are a must. OTOH, a Sports game needs a lot of work on the Engine (to simulate the physics) as well as the AI opponents.
These rules have served me well thus far, with one game ending with nothing of importance left to research, and 8 BILLION in cash reserves.
I disagree with Point 5. Only with the Publishers I finally managed to build a sizeable fanbase. The fines they impose on you are slim, you still make profit with your crapshoot games they force down your throat. Probably the advantage of working for companies like EA
Well my next attempt went better. Waiting to have 5million before moving was a big help for sure. The problem is the medium games cost so much that they eat through your reserves making them if you don’t have a big fat kitty!
I’m now failing to break 10mill, but having not used a publisher at all tried it and ended up with over 100,000 fans and got the message I could self publish now (whoops) so I guess I should have paid more attention to publisher deals which were worth while as my fans went from 50k to 100k in two games.
I read elsewhere who you assign to each slider really matters too, I may have missed the pop up but that wasn’t immediately obvious to me (which skill matters to which slider I mean)
Once you can see what a specialist needs it’s easy to figure how much of each stat you need for a category. Also, you don’t need 5M in the second office, if your engine is cheap enough.
Assigning staff to sliders is quite easy… just think about what each one represents. For example, World Design is clearly Design, so should be given to your Design expert; whereas Graphics and Sound are both Tech. Since good Graphics will usually sell more games than good Sound, you should put your Tech expert on Graphics, and your own character (the all-rounder on the team) on Sound.
Graphics needs an equal amount of Design and Tech and Sound needs slightly more Design. Generally, there are 2 Design Categories and 1 Tech Category in Stage 1, 1 Design C. and 2 Tech Cs in Stage 2 and in Stage 3 they’re all about equal. So it’s best to use your two experts in the first two stages and keep your player character to work on the stage 3 of the game.
Actually having a hefty bank account before changing office is really helpful.
On my first play trough i went to 2nd office when i had around 2m and i ended up strugling
Made a new game and played untill Y5M3 when i had 12M in cash.
Changed office and used 3M to hire 3 new staff members.
