I’m in a Small Office and I got Large games, you get the Option as soon as you get 4 people hired.
Right, I hate to do this… but I guess I will restart my game YET again and get more money for level 2.
Yeah I’ve done this 7-8 times already until I found the “magic formula” 
You know you’re not forced to hire guys when you reach the second office?
You can still make games alone there and make tons of money before really starting to hire guys ?
It seems unlogical to me, and I dont get great ratings.
Well, it’s not the best solution as you’ll have to pay more for the rent, but you’ll be able to train yourself…
YOu can do medium games with 2 people - yourself and one new staff member. If you look at the important sliders for each genre, you’ll find there are 2 at each development stage. You minimise the unimportant slider, literally at zero, and have your guys focus on their better area. So, at stage one put your person with best tech on the engine, and best design on the gameplay. Story/quests knock back to zero if appropriate.
And market. it’s expensive, but buy whatever marketing you can afford early on (dev stage one) to build hype.
If you wait to have 5 million to hire each staff and spend 2 million on each and then slowly start to get publisher jobs until your next 5 million, it’s not THAT hard.
You don’t need to spend $2 million on each staff member. If you set the slider at $100kyou get a choice of 3 people, that’s fine to get one with a nice balance. Your first hire needs to be a generalist, not a specialist, because they’ll be covering more than one area of game production for a while. S’kay though, they get to be your graphics or world design specialist when you’re cranking out those AAA titles.
Thanks for pointing this out - I had really missed fans’ role in sales level and it’s apparently the main thing that links all the rest together.
I only made publishing deals 3 times. Then, with those games having a good sales count and individual fan base, I made sequels of them. My fans were something like 70k, but due to the fame of those games I got good sales, a lot more money than with a publisher and fans skyrocketed. Then I could make my own medium games (not sequels) without any help. And this was pretty early in the first office.
The more money you spend on the search the better their stats though. And usually the generalist is yourself by the time you start with 300/300/300/300
Yeah, but you grow your staff as you progress, through training. You don’t want to spend all your money on expensive staff early on - their wages can bankrupt you!
But hey, there’s more than one way to play the game, if that’s what works for you! I might try it and see how I get on.
well yeah it actually worked like charm. I got a developer with 900 T and a designer with 800T which needed just 35k per month so it wasn’t that much for their skill.
Main problem is the staff you find are still random. I did a $2m search and the best person I turned up was 80 tech, 370 design, 150 speed, 150 research. I fired him after he started getting fatigue.
That doesn’t help at all. The characters are random except maybe the famous ones.
Get 3 designers, and 3 technical guys.
then train them how you wish