I love this game over all, but I also think there is a lot can be done to make it better. Most ideas I have are about reality. While people say “it is just a game” all the time, the most successful games are those make people forget about it. Thus I believe it is crucial to make game mechanisms as realistic (and rational) as possible.
First thing I want to propose is a different project timing mechanism. Currently system do provide some fun of strategy planning as game features are limited by the fixed develop time. But I think how real things work is that you can add as many features as you like - at your own cost - longer development time. To balance things, we can make the gain from rich-feature decreases and make the grow of development time exponential. Thus at some point you only make things worse when you try add new stuff in your project.
Number of features is not the only thing that should vary the cost of project. Content and artwork, have a even larger share a lot of times. These two are actually the things that really makes a game triple-A. So it would be nice to have control how many man-month you would like to invest into the two aspects.
The advantage of this proposed project mechanism is that, you have much more strategical decisions to make, more variables to balance. You can actually choose your style of business, to be the old day Blizzard that kept postpone release date but never fails its fans, or to be the big ‘evil’ EA that kept renew its games periodically and harvest money from players. Under current system, our game dev companies are forced to be EA-ish more or less.
More thoughts:
May be a new attribute called “management” that affects timing and productivity when more than one developer is involved. And when you go big, developers will be divided into departments whose director will have its management value in effect.
Second thing I would like to propose is different game engine system. In this system all game engines have a property called ‘performance’. You can keep updating your engine by adding modules to it instead of creating new ones from scratch, but regardless if you are doing a brand-new one or updating an old one, more features means less performance. And updating engine cause more performance hit. The actual game performance use engine performance as base value, and modify it with the actual features used in the game. Thus you will not only have better performance with less feature, but also with a perfect fit engine than selecting a few features from a rich-feature one. And in the end, of course, performance will affect your game rating.
This would obviously creates diversity in engine system. The lazy brute force way that adds all possible features in your engine would not be optimal anymore. One need to carefully plan the road-map of its engine based on what type of games to develop, as modules have different rating contribution to different type of games. You may even branch your engine and maintain multiple engines for different games, as companies do in the real world.
More thoughts on engine and performance:
Programming skill of engine developer and game developer can also affect performance. And probably a new specialist track called optimizer?
Another good-to-have is a new type of component called “framework” which affects game performance (and possibly the compatibility to some engine module). Whenever you change the framework of your engine, you have to do everything from scratch.
Engine should probably be platform-bind. PC should be divided into several platforms based on year. So choice of game console is even more significant, and when you move from dos to windows 3 and then windows 95, you have to redo your engine accordingly.
I also have other things in mind which is only possible if players are to be competing against AI companies. But these are the two big thing I would really like to see if we ever have a sequel of this amazing game.