MOAR feedback, and ideas

Game Dev Tycoon ideas
#1

Hello,
First of all: Great Game i really liked it.
However there are some things which could be better, since they a little lower the playability. Some of them are serious problem, others are some features which may be nice.

The problems:

Rating system:
Dice-roller animation is not cool. It takes time, and is boring. If the review sheet just pop up with all scores ready, that would be happy.
In game history there should be a option to check your rate details.

The reviews should be more specific. Its kinda ok, that game dont tells you how to play, but should teach you. Even if we assume “try and fail” aproach there is not enought feedback (or its obscure) in game to learn what are you doing wrong good.
Idea: Divide reporters. Two of them will give some casual review, like “Best game ever/Meh” reviews, but will give on avarage higher score/more extreme. (never 4/5/6 always either 7+ or 3-) The other two will be “serious” they will avoid extreme rates, but they will always say something specific like: Action fits TES. Or “Too much design”… and they will do it ALWAYS! So after first 10 games we will have 20 hints.
Not bad.

Also something could be done with theme/genre combos. It seems that for example pirates are bad for strategy game or action. The what? I would love to play the pirate strategy simulator. (and there is a couple of them) Im not sure how exacly this works. But it would be great if every topic was suitable for any genre but for some a little more, but the difference will be slight, like ok Military is best suited for strategy and action, but if you really lie you can do military rpg (and i can see it) and that would not be so awful. The other aproach is to add some research like “beta-testing” which allows to go around genre-theme combos. Part of joy it to develop any game you like, not the one developers allows. If someone always dreamed about Surgeon Adventure let him do it.

The systematic and list of genres is not focused, but i personally feel that “platformer” and “shooter” as well as “puzzle” deserve their own genres. But then again, for others its not needed.

Sequels should be allowed (after research) earlier. Its not so innovative idea.
However when developing a sequel to a game with a publisher there should be some complication like:
You will have to pay a royalities to the publisher. Or ask him to publish it for you again. Or you can buy out the francise. Depending on the success of the prequels the price will vary.
Also when developing sequels, the game should remember the ratios.

Also you should be allowed to develop expansion pack for normal games, it is what they did.

There could be some tech limit, and tech demands for hardware. Especially for consoles.
I suppose that steering wheel and 3d v3 for gameling is a little too much. In the same time, any console should demand gamepad, while PC after some year call for mouse. So the hardware(and PC) should have some minimum and maximum requrments when it comes to engine and gameplay (and sound).
In the same time, some genres can have some needs to.

When developing own console it would be nice, to choose if its portable or not. And you could have two consoles, as well as do not need to take down the old console when you release new one.
Also you could specify the rarget audience and the prefered genres. So for example you could develop Casual Action for Kids, and then Strategy/Simulator for adults, and then portable for everyone with adventures and jRPG and blackjack with hookers.

Also it would be cool if you could port a game. Even if it worked in similar way as expansion/sequel. Or do it right in developing process, however that will prolongs the development process.

MMO - thing, as it looks like now its just broken, easy cash, unlimited money. Game breaker. Maybe there could be a rule, that if the expansion isnt really top quality and rating, the progress of sells dont really increase but costs still. Or for each next expansion need to really be “top quality” so after 5 years everyone is really fed up with this MMO and it need to die. But you can always develop a brand new.

More features, some of them may be crazy:

DLC - :smiley: when game is still running you can click on its icon to develop a DLC. You can give it for free just cost and no income but nice funbase bump. Or make them pay, which gives some money. If you release to many DLC (pay) for one tittle the funbase drops down.

Publishing games - you can order to little dudes making games, or even sequels or exapnsion. The factors are upfront payment, and royalities. And you also need to pay for marketing. However it would be more random if the game is good. (however high royalities will help) For example, when they develop the game there will be a sheet with visible some notes, like design/tech scores, or time alocation. Or extra features. And we can either accept it or order them to rework it.
There will be general tradeoff of funbase vs money, and sometimes publishing games would be just bad deal, no matter what. But some guys would love to.

Second Team - another research, with it you can develop a second programers teamt, and work on two games in the same time. And assign dudes to each fo them. Also game remembers the set upt for each, so you can specify that one will be your RPG staff, and the other will be Strategy team. And so on.

And thats is, i hope it will help in someting, or at least was fun to read.

2 Likes
#2

Some more ideas, not exacly a must, but would be nice and probably fun:

Ports - this is probably kinda important, since its very logic to release a game for everything and your toaster. It would jump the development cost high, but the probably profit will jump to.

Other Market. It feels, like we are a isle, not a competitor on real market. Ading SI could be too much for the effect, however… how about adding some predefined list of hits. (maybe add to that some semi random hits) The effect of that would be that if we repeat the same combo in next 5 years with avarage game we will be smashed for ripoff and cloning. While even with good game we will just get lesser sales. Annoying as hell, but another thing to make players think which could be good.

One more, i would add two more desk in 3rd office. That way i can assign static dudes for each part of game, which makes gameplay a little easier and less frustrating. The benefit would be that player could swap genres easly. The price would be cost of sallary of extra workers.

Also, here im not sure how it actually works, but the dudes who are not in their time should give something like 1/4 bubbles. I think that way it would be more possible to manipulate the final design/tech ratio, and there will be a reason why it last so long, and what for are phases. So if we see that ratio is goind bad, we can still manipulate it. Add to that ability to send worker to vacation till the end of project at any given time. So we can switch off this little dialogist who are altering our simulator. Maybe it would make a game too much wack-a-mole, but still could be fun as iphone thing.

Your impact to market. Each time you score a 9+ game on console or something it gains +.1% of market. So that could even postpone the death of it. That way if we want, we can save G64, or DreamVast. Or just stick to PC. For example for each year there is a table of changes in percantages, as +/- % number. And once console hit 5% its dead. Also at some point in history each console will be loosing -.05% a year. But if we are steady with supplying games for it, we can change the history. ;-D

Late Start - instead of starting always in 80’ we can start in 90 or even 2000 since why not. STarting late will gives us some free tech, like lets say 2D v2, or mouse/pad or savegame. But thats it. That could increase a replayability. It could also atract some score beaters who would love to see “how dar can i go with just 10 last years”.

Another thing is… maybe some world-wide scoreboard, once you beat the game without bancrucy, you can send your score to the homepage, with some pregenerated note with company name, CEO name, most favored genre and theme, a couple of best sellers, a couple of best games (highest ratio), most popylar developer and hardware. Own hardware, MMOs which break some player base, AAA games which break over some ratios in sales. Some way to make our efforts ethernal, and visible for whole world. Im not sure if anyone will be interested to seeing others effort (more like show off own achievments) but… that is some idea to.

Moreoever, it woudl be nice to check my annual report, or even reports of all time. It would be nice to be able to chech how exacly good deal is a grind, or own hardware. Or how much i got from all sources, and all expences.

#3

Hey. Heres an great idea. Put in multiplayer. I think tons of people would love to play with each other. I think its a great idea. Maybe next update?

#4

I think the thing i’d like to change the most is the amount of games that can sell for a console. For example i made a action/military game, triple A, got over 1500 points in both tech and design, it sold over 50 million on my own console, but there were only 7 million units of my console that kinda ruined it a bit for me.

What i think they can do here is add a certain percentage of games you can sell more, like if you have a console that has 5 million units you should be able to surpass that number by maybe 10-15% Some players might loose their game or the disc breakes or whatever that can cause a person to buy a second copy, that would make it more realistic espacially on the MMO side, MMO’s are completely broken in this game.

I would like much more customization when it comes to creating your own console. I would like to be able to decide whether it is 8/16/32/64 - bit, if it is cartridge, cd, dvd, blu-ray or digitally based, low-end, medium-end or high-end hardware, things that would affect the cost of creating it but also affecting the price for the consumers, which could affect sales.

I would also really like if there were more than three locations your company can be in (garage, office and headquarters), and maybe make different variations of these locations, variations that has different benefits and downsides.

#5

If multiplayer ever comes for this game, i think it’s going to be a bit further down the line, but i think it would make for some interesting gameplay.

#6

I agree with the sold console/sold game copies. Its kinda weird that i have more MMO sells than console units. Or anything else. It seems more dependend of funbase. I also experience this 50m sold games on 8m console.

What i think (some weird idea):
Lets put in game some hiden Gamers Population counter which will start from 100M at y0 and will rise to lets say over 500M at year 30. To make it funnier it could be something like (1B-U)/U % per year change just for giggles.
Instead of market share the consoles will have market popularity. So the sum of all will be above 100% since some dudes have 2 or more consoles. (which will be more important in third office era)
Every console will have its life span, at 1st market popularity will be rising people will buy console, than decaying, old consoles will break up, or boxed in the garage, given to nephew and so on.
So for each console there will be a hiden number of popularity.
Next for each console genre there would a hiden, but poping sometimes in review as hints genre multiplier. Again the sum will be above 1, so for example a gameling will have 0.8 for casual, and rpg, and 0.6 for action, but just .4 for strategy.
In similar way each topic will have it table of genre. For most it will be 1, for some it will be 1.2, and for some it will be .5 like: Prison could be sim, or adv or str, but bad casual.
But still some themes may be a no, for youngs. (like horror, prison, hospital, vampires, surgeon and so on)
Then again the all console will have its audience popularity, the everyone will always around .5. But one of the other will sum to 1.

So… the result is that we can do any console/genre/theme combination and it can be good game. It will get good scores. It will just sell bad.
There will be just some limits on theme / audience.

Effect: there will be some limit how many sold copies.
For example on gameling there will be 150M units, but only half will play casual games on it, and also 80% would be yougsters. So if we made a yougster/casual games it will have a limit of. 60 copies.
After that there will be a multipliers, of how good combo/genre is, and how good we are to reaching the audience. And how good the game is.

The point is that the sells will be depending on something very logic, it would be hiden from a player. But there will be logic.
Some combos will just be better, but if player want to do something weird, there is always a option.
Also when we are selling our own console it will reach aroudn 100M sells rather than just 8M.

This could also affect the MMOs so even if PC market would be like 200M only half of that tollerate fantasy, and next half rpg.
Not to mention that we can limit the MMOs population to just 10% of total gamers. So our sample WoW clone will have 10M audience, which is near to true.

To complicate it a little more, i would add a boredom of funbase, each year the funbase will drop by 1%. Which is not much, but it will call for good games, to keep it steedy. It would also make a little harder to jump into (and stay in) publish your own games.

From the other side, while the whole concept is very interesting to think about, i wonder if it will really affect gameplay, maybe nobody will notice anyway. :wink: