Every time I get to the 2nd office, I always go bankrupt. Can somebody give me a few tips on how to make more money?
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Definitely in the same boat, or sinking ship. I can leave the garage with 3 mill in my pocket, but I never seem to stay afloat afterwards.
Take profit of publishing deals, theyāre very important at the 2nd office if you donāt know what to do. Also donāt forget to check on the Game Dev Tycoon wiki for help.
Fill the other seats. I wanted to make it a small company. But I have found that if you stick with you an one other person it will fail. Get 3 other qualified people and you will make HUGE games.
Get to 3+ employees, medium games and take publishing deals until you have 100,000 fans. Once you are in the 2nd office small games attract a scoring penalty, and medium games sell better / generate more fans.
It will limit the freedom of what games to create for what platform (you often have to pick the least-bad publishing deal - sometimes all that is on offer is bad combos on bad platforms for the wrong audience) but its still nearly always worth doing a medium pub deal over creating more small games.
STAY IN THE GARAGE UNTIL YOU HAVE 10 MILLION! (Sorry if that looked like screaming.)
Once you get to the second office, you will hire two good designs and two good tech guys. You will then start to make awesome games.
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No. Leave the small office as soon as you pub a hit. Staying on small games is crazy!
Really? Because you will most definitely go down the water if you stayed in the office with just below 3 million.
The garage maintenance fees are way easier to pay than the second office. You also will gain enough money to get the people you need if you stay long enough.
Hereās why: If you immediately went to the second office. Like when you get the message. You can only afford one employee. You will lose money. You will make bad games. You cannot upgrade your engine as fast, since you only have 2 employees. The payments will go up. The disaster. You get a loan, and waste it on bills. You get bankrupt.
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To ācircumventā the bad publishing deals problem save before you enter the publishing deals to check what is available.
If you load afterwards and recheck the deals are generated newly.
This wonāt work if you have checked the deals beforehand, cause the deals and minor contracts are saved if the player has seen them.
The deals change from time to time.
Try not to hire new staff until you have ~4.5M sitting in the bank, then invest 2M into finding an employee. Try and even out developing games and researching. Researching usually wastes a lot of time, so be sparing with it. I usually just Research one or two thing between each game. Also, donāt be afraid to blow all of your money on a game. Obviously, it could crash and burn. But try and save before you try something new or take a risk. Then load it when/if it doesnāt work out.
You should be able to publish a āhitā game in the garage between games 6 and 12, depending on when you develop your V2 engine - that gives you the 2 million you need to get established in the middle office and start medium publishing deals.
If you havenāt delivered a hit by the time / shortly after your 3Dv1 / 2Dv3 research becomes available, youāve either gotten very unlucky or made a bit of a mess and should consider restarting. You really need that early momentum.
It is theoretically possible (if you got insanely lucky and were super aggressive) to enter the middle office after game 5 with 2 million in the bank. I donāt think you can do it in 4 - you really need your V2 engine, and you cant afford to create the V2 engine after just two games no matter how lucky you got with sales.
It is also possible to ādouble hitā on the way to middle office - I try and do this every game with maybe a 50% strike rate. What you do is make sure you start the next gameās development before the last game starts selling - that way you have the game in development when the first hit sells enough to put you into the middle office - and as soon as the next game finishes the ādo you want to moveā dialogue pops up.
If you can pull this off you can enter the middle office with about 4 million in cash as early as after game 6 (though my PB is game 7). I donāt think the game 6 double-hit entry is possible without a lot of save-load cheating though.
āTry not to hire new staff until you have ~4.5M sitting in the bank, then invest 2Mā
No. So many ways of no. You actually want the worst possible employees you can get to start. Budget 20k and pick the level 1 with the highest research base.
Why? Because you are competing against your ābest gameās scoreā each time you create a new game. So you want to start as low as you can then increase gradually. Hiring terrible employees gives you far more scope for training them gradually and slowly improving your games - increasing the number of 9+ reviews you will get.
This is true, actually. Hadnāt thought about that a whole lot. My only problem with that, is that if you want to see a really good staff-based end game, you will need to train those awful employees REALLY hard ALL THE TIME to get them anywhere. if they have ~5 in Design and ~150 in Tech, thatās still a little over 11 training sessions just to get Tech over 700 to become a specialist, and about 9 to get Boost (All very approximate numbers). I suppose as you start to actually need boost and specialists, youāll be able to just hire some level 4ās with some cash, but that means to get a decent balanced team, youāll have to fire your awful employees. Which in the long run, without any calculation, will cost more in research points and cash for training to get there anyways.
If you go straight to a full team then train your rubbish employees hard in research early (get them all to 400) youāll be able to pretty much ignore research points for the rest of the game (youāll have more than you can spend).
It makes getting them up to specialists a lot easier if you can just keep throwing 10RP then 30RP training at them without worrying about your research point budget.
Publisher deals and funbase.
Leave garage asap.
Get 2 more balanced dudes.
Research medium games.
Create custom engine with gamepad and monosound.
Start taking good publisher deals. Good deal is when it allows you to make decent game, with ok theme/genre/audience combo. The console is little less important. Better do good game for Master V than weak for gameling.
Get Marketing and at least use magazines in 3rd phase.
If all deals are just horrible then develop some medium on your own.
Repeat till you get 100k funbase when you can do whatever you want.
Dont over engine, at the begning you dont need meany features nor advanced graphic.
Thatās true. Of course, this is just for a sure-fire win tactic. I think that this is just two different playing styles trying to say which one is better. Iāll admit, your strategy is better for a straight win. I just prefer to take my own approach to this, and I suppose I handāt considered any other routes, since I havenāt used them.
I donāt believe leaving the garage ASAP is a good move, especially if you hire two people immediately afterwards. That would leave you with MAYBE 900k, and pretty high monthly costs. Thatās if you use the absolute minimum of money put into searching for employees. In my most recent playthrough, I just stayed in the Garage for two more games and was able to sell another massive profit game, and within only ten more minutes of grinding in there, have just under 9.5M. Iām not sure if it was entirely luck, but dear god am I well off right now.
No risk no fun. ;-D
But in my tries, nothing wrong happens if you go that route. Yes you buy the cheepiest dudes. 1lv and 20k for research. And your1st engine is cheap as well.
All you need is 150(office)+150(mediums)+40(dudes)+100(engine)+50(audience).
And after that money is not a problem. Since you got nice money from publisher deals. In fact you dont even need to get a lot from the deals. Just enought to survive, as long as you are gaining funbase with each release, you are closer to victory.
And yes its a little āsure fireā tactics. And everyone have their own. My aproach is to āwin as much as possible in 30yā. 
I think weāre all down to playing style at this point. 
Everyone prefers their own styles, and thatās totally cool!
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I lost a few times at that stage and i am pretty sure it was about the employees salary increase that ruins me + some bad balanced games and i was out.
I didnāt tried, but iām thinking to hire and fire when the dudes become expensives, searching for better ones instead of putting lots of RP/money/time training low skilled money-suck*rsā¦
Donāt know if this could workā¦