Putting more features of a given category into a game?

Game Dev Tycoon
#1

I understand that you get an efficiency penalty (the percentages on the right side) when you put too many features into a game and the sliders for a given category aren’t high enough.

What I’m curious about is if there is a way to up the maximum amount of features you can put into a category without incurring that efficiency penalty.

I’ve noticed that large games can “hold” more features than medium games, but I mean within a game size.

The perfect example for this is sound: put stereo sound with a soundtrack (pretty basic stuff for a game, IMHO), and you need to put the Sound slider pretty high. Forget about surround sound with a soundtrack, unless you want to drop world design and graphics pretty low.

What I find especially strange about this is for games that “shouldn’t have a lot of sound”. Take RPGs for example.

You load up World Design with as many features as you can (makes sense), graphics are moderately important (okay, why not), but then you’re not left with much at all for sound, which doesn’t make much sense to me. Shouldn’t sound be more important for an RPG than graphics?

Who here has played Chrono Trigger? By many accounts a genre-defining game, and a classic by any standard. What do you remember most of that game… the graphics or the incredible soundtrack?

Anyway, I’m diverging - this is becoming a discussion of balance instead of what I originally meant this topic to be about. So let’s get back to that.

I understand that not all medium games will have surround sound with an orchestral soundtrack, but it seems to me that pretty much -any- game made after 2000 (maybe even earlier) should have at least stereo sound with a soundtrack.

Is this just a balancing oversight on the devs’ part (perhaps they should have had more categories for soundtrack, starting with “basic soundtrack” or something), or is there something I’m missing?

At first, I thought that the skill level for the relevant categoryof an assigned worker would allow you to use more features for that category (if someone’s better at something, maybe he can squeeze in more relevant features, being more efficient), but this doesn’t seem to be the case.

Thoughts?

#2

I can’t find a way to increase the number of features in my categories either.

Though I’m not even really sure I understand the “efficiency penalty” as you call it. Does it increase the overall time it takes to complete a given development stage or will I just get less tech and design points for that stage or something else entirely different?

#3

I’m not sure of the exact effects, in terms of game mechanics, but as I understand it, it makes that category less effective overall.

For example, say you load up a category with more features than you can “handle” and your efficiency percentage is at 70% or whatever, then this will have a negative impact on that aspect of your game, probably making it less good overall. But what this “negative effect” will be, exactly, I’m not sure.

One thing I’m wondering about this, though, is might the benefits of adding certain features (say, Online Play in a military/action game, for example) outweigh the penalty, if it’s small enough.

Like say your efficiency penalty’s only 98% for whatever… are you better off going for it, or removing one of the features so you don’t suffer a penalty.

If so, what’s the cutoff point? 90%? 80%? I have no idea.

As for my initial question, it seems there’s nothing you can do.

Bigger games let you load up more features, but that’s about it.

So going with my original example of Sound, if I want fancier sound in a game type that doesn’t “need” a lot of sound, I need to make a bigger game.

#4

One of the thinks I wonder about is do more advanced platforms let you add more features? Example if I can add can 3DV3 on the Mbox could I use 3DV4 with out changing the slider in the final step?

#5

That percentage isn’t a penalty. It’s how many bonus points you’re getting.

Every feature provides bonus points, but there is a cap on how many you can get determined by game size and slider position. If you select too many features, the percentage will appear to tell you how many points you’re getting. You’re paying for all of those features, but you’re only getting x% of the points they provide.

You can add as many features as you want without affecting efficiency or dev time, but there’s a limit on how many points you’ll get for features.