Has no one noticed this?

Game Dev Tycoon
#1

I hear alot from users complaining about failing just after moving from the garage to the office and while ive read lots of various tips regarding this, none (as far as i know) have mentioned something i noticed and is probably the biggest reasons people find just after the move, its alot difficult…

When you move to the office and hire another person, you will notice your health bar drops about 30%.
When your (or a person you’ve employed) health bar is not at the maximum, then your skills are lowered and that affects your/their performance.

When a new person joins the team, you will notice their health bar starts at the bottom and works its way up. If they are put to work on anything, while with their health bar is so low, they too will be totally less productive.

So if you hired 1 person and decided to work on a game straight away, because there was no “getting to know you period” between yourself and the person you employed, you low health bars will mean any game you make, will be not very good and so wont sell well, meaning you go bankrupt.

Now, if after hiring 1 person you then hire another straight after, when you hire the 2nd person, your health bar drops another 30% and so do any of the other employees health bar and so on.

If you dont believe me, hire 1 or 2 people in quick succession, then try and take on a contract,you will struggle to complete even the smallest ones, on time.

To get round this, i hire just 1 person at a time, so i dont totally use up the whole of my health bar in one go. Then either do some research or take on contracts just for the RP, if i can afford the penalty of not completing them, until both our bars are totally full.

I will employ another one, just after sending my first employee off on vacation. If you do this, the new arrival of the staff member, wont affect your other employees bar when they are on holiday. That way i only effect my own health bar.

2 Likes
An Alternative Strategy - That Works!
#2

I thought the new employee productivity bar was made clear in the tutorial. But the vacation tip is something that might prove useful, have you noticed any change in the time that a new employee becomes most productive if you have more or less other employees present? Or do you send your employees on vacation to solely avoid negative productivity.

#3

Im not sure how important it is. The productivity indeed drops for all, but it rises again after welcome training. And in worst scenerio that means one avarage game,
I suppose its more important to: do welcome training, do medium games, create at some custom engine if you havent yet, use publisher deals.

Maybe itsbecouse i play in one bulletproof way, when i care about new employes just 3 times:
y4 when i move to office and hire to cheap balanced dudes
y8 when i fire two poor guys and buy some better
y16 when im in big office, and fire all 4 to buy new 6 for 2M each

And each time im also upgrading my engine, researching some stuff, so this is not a problem.

#4

I find the welcome training to be totally an unneeded pain in the ass, as it makes little to no difference imo and myself and whoever else is there, all suffer with health bar drop anyway

#5

I couldn’t even trigger a welcome training for my third and fourth employee -.-

#6

Transition after a hit game and you can (narrowly) get away with doing this -

  • hire all 4 employees at once
  • save their “welcome training” for after all 4 are hired (and they will recover quickly)
  • research graphics 3DV1 on “you” while your employees are hiring
  • create engine 3DV1 (with any other features you have) after you are done researching

By the time the engine is finished the employees will be close to fully recovered. If you have the money, put everyone through “make me think” training, or just do contract work until everyone is full up.

The problem with hiring one employee at a time is that using any new employee on a game applies a rating penalty to the game. You want to avoid that happening as much as possible.

1 Like
#7

Yeah, but that penalty is insignificant compared to improving your scores…

(when you move to the office and using set values of 200 T&D for ease of explanation)

Game #1 = You 300T / 300D
Game #2 = You 300T / 300D + 1 staff = 200T / 200D = 500T / 500D
Game #3 = You 300T / 300D + 1 staff = 200T / 200D + 1 staff = 200T / 200D = 700T / 700D (& thats without any training)

compared to

Game #1 = You 300T / 300D
Game #2 = You 300T / 300D + 4 staff = 800T / 800D = 1100T / 1100D
Game #3 = You 300T / 300D + 4 staff = 800T / 800D = 1100T / 1100D (& no training)

You get a big jump in stats to start with, but without continuous training, the overall rating of your team reaches a plateau after just the 2nd game & being as you need to continuously beat your previous best scores to get good reviews, hiring 4 ppl in one go, not only hinders your chances, but also puts you at risk of going bankrupt due to the low scores that will surely follow.

#8

You should be training between each game cycle anyway, but this is where you withhold parts of your feature set to make sure you don’t set too high a mark.