I am tentatively developing a mod to hopefully improve the core game mechanic of Game Development Tycoon. In my 40 some hours of playtesting the game, it took me something like 10-20 hours plus a visit to the gamedevtycoon.wikia.com/ to discover that the Game Dev Mechanic didn’t work the way I thought it did and should.
Entitled kind of mindset, I know; who am I after all? Nobody.
After reviewing the wiki’s breakdown of the Game Dev mechanics and comparing it to my relative success at playing the game despite my difficulties in grasping the exact game development mechanics, I came to the conclusion that the mechanics are overly complicated and largely ineffectual. The most egregious faults in my opinion are the disconnect between tech and design points with feature completion and the interval of development, the disconnect between the speed stat and almost any common sense implication of what it should do in game, the prevalence of critical but hidden or obfuscated statistics and platform mechanics, and the inability to delegate responsibilities in a scale-able way for projects.
The basic informal math of the mod that I am attempting to code is simple: Staff of S skill can develop X Features in an interval of T length; X and T should be player controllable parameters such that an increase of T should allow an increase of X for a given skill S, and a decrease of X should allow a decrease of T for a given skill S.
I think the mechanics for small one-person game projects are pretty solid in their general form and structure, but I find that large and AAA projects are not modeled well or they are modeled well for a mostly dysfunction model of game development. I am not sure if the creators meant to pass a subtle social commentary on the dysfunctional nature of game development in larger game development projects or if that is just a side-effect of their particular view of how game development should happen in larger projects or if it is just a side-effect of their particular view of game balance and an attempt to extend content while retaining some kind of escalating challenge.
I want to make major structural changes to the game design projects. Small game projects should be assignable to single staff members and completed independent of the rest of the team, but several staff should be able to be assigned to the same small game projects; generally speaking, A unit person of unit skill can complete a unit game in unit time, but several people of unit skill should complete the same unit game in far less than unit time with a term or coefficient for management overhead. Medium games should generally require more than one person but should still be assignable to fewer than the 5 or 7 maximum staff. Large games should be functionally multiple Medium game projects being conducted simultaneously and require the effort of all or almost all of your 5 to 7 staff. AAA games should be functionally multiple Large Games Projects and require the effort of all of your staff; AAA games generally should not be assignable to single staff members.
The size of a project should generally be a function of the size of the total features in that project.
I have contacted Greenheart Games about my ambitions, and they have helpfully replied with the information I requested, and they have directed me to start a thread on the forums for other modder’s benefit. I will post specific information and questions in the comments below, and I will post updates to the project maybe once a week to once a month depending on my living conditions.
Since our game is written in JavaScript it’s possible to change every aspect of the game.
If I understand you correctly you want to make game development take longer. The easiest way to achieve this is to hijack the method General.getGameSizeDurationFactor(gameSize) and simply return a different factor. Gamesize is either ‘small’, ‘medium’, ‘large’, or ‘aaa’ and the original method returns 1,2,3 and 6 respectively meaning that a AAA game takes 6 times as long as a small game.
Hope this helps. If you have any more specific questions pleas ask them on our forum in the modding category so that the general modding public can benefit from any answers too.
-Greenheart Games Support
The issue with simply modifying the game size duration factor is that it immediately cascades into undesirable side-effects. Increasing the factor for small games to 10 for instance results in XP gains scaled accordingly such that initial game development can level staff up several levels at once. I am not sure at this point whether the maximum number of features is directly related to the game size duration factor, but if it is then I will need to be able to override the relationship. I do know that the features are unrelated to the tech and design points, so a relationship will need to be defined between them and between tech and design points and game size duration factor.
Ideally, the interval of game development will decrease with either a decrease in the number of features or with an increase in the number of tech or design points up to some limit set by the weights for the tech/design proportion. So may I have access to the functions for getting and setting currentGame tech, design, feature, and development interval state? Eventually, I will need to override the XP calculation for mission completion as it is not suited for dynamically resizing game development cycles.
I’ll be leaving some of my game design notes here.
Game development can be distributed. I’ve tried out the Contractors mod which allows you to straight purchase Tech points and Design points on a project, but I found this to be most unsatisfactory not to mention it clashed with the basic mechanics; purchasing one time boosts of 1000 tech points means that all future projects have to exceed the same 1000+staff_contribution amount while providing an exceedingly low boost of quality and no real speed advantages mechanically. The better model I think is effectively hiring one or more ghost staff members who exist for the duration of a project and are paid during and at completion of the project; there’s little to no advantage to doing this for Game Dev without first adjusting the relationships between tech/design points and length of projects though there are clear advantages to using contractors during Engine Dev.
In the level 4 office, I think one of the things that will need to be added to the research roster is a project for crowd funding and crowd developing games. I’d like to extend the Mod Support feature to provide a similar mechanism benefiting long term game support and maybe even extended sales.
Real world model: Star Citizen and a myriad of Steam projects including Greenheart Games.
This is a bit hacky, but you could achieve this by causing General.getGameSizeDurationFactor(gameSize) to return 1 (or the original values) while UI._startReleaseGameDialogAnimations() is active. This is where the staff experience is actually applied.