I apologize in advance if some of these ideas were discussed before but I just began playing a couple days ago and I absolutely love the game and just have some ideas for a possible sequel, mod or expansion pack in the.future. Instead of focusing on adding on to engine, topic choices I’ll try to focus on features of the actual game.
- Focus on Scenarios. I felt like this was a huge missing part of the game. Since you can only go so far story wise I think having multiple scenarios can challenge the player in different aspects. I think the publisher games was a right step in this direction but once you can publish your big games without a publisher they become a little pointless. So some ideas for scenarios I thought of:
- Out of 20 games you must have a 60% average score (or out of 10 games, 80% average etc.)
- After a slew of low scoring games create your first megahit
- Develop exclusively for a companies systems and produce a certain level of quality to keep exclusivity
- Developing before, after and during the Video game crash of 1983
- Competing with a bigger developer (on a certain system, genre, market share etc.)
- Competing against piracy
- Develop a game series to over take a certain market share (like angry birds or flappy bird)
- Start off as a big company that makes traditional forms of media looking to getting into the game console industry with lots of expendable cast
- In addition to scenarios other varied modes of play. So you would have the regular mode featured in the first game but along with that a mode that puts you in the place of a console manufacturer & developer (like Nintendo or Sega) and over the years you decide what titles you develop will be the flagship products, the specs and power of the system, the marketing (weird marketing, slander marketing, comparison marketing etc.) owning 2nd parties, dealing with 3rd parties (seal of qualities, free or paid dev kits, etc) launch windows of systems, design of controllers (small, medium, big, # of analogs, d-pads, buttons, color) design of system (mix and matching parts, premade designs, colors, controller ports, what type of media is used like dvd disk, mini dvd disk, cartidge, cd-rom, blu-ray, digital only, digital plus dvd/blu-ray, cassette, game card) etc.
Another mode in which you take the role as a publisher in which you oversee a few or a lot of small or big development studios and you decide what games will get funded, whether to keep or close studios, what genres should studios focus on, how the studios or games are marketed, how studios and you deal with social media and gaming sources and websites, whether or not to venture out to other mediums and which games to venture out to those mediums and funding for it (for movies, tv shows, action figure and toys) etc.
Another mode I was thinking of was starting as an Arcade exclusive developer during the may-day of arcade gaming. This would deal with dealing with ports, whether or not to port to certain systems, staying relevant during video game crash of 1983, type of hardware to invest in, managing which arcades your games are in, a three path option of staying as an arcade only developer and trying to innovate the arcade scene, co-developing for arcade & systems including ports, managing a chain of arcade shops where you decide on food, entertainment and target demographic of said chains.
As it concerns to the main game obvious additions that seemed to be lacking in the core game like paying for dev kits before system are released so you can develop and release during launch window, have multiple staff work on aspects of the development process, multiple games at once, ability to group, finance, study games by series, longer “Story” going further than gen. 9 of consoles, more system choices obviously, like mac, linux, Atari consoles, 3DO etc but of course have them more randomized (what if the Jaguar didn’t fail and continued to produce systems? What if Nintendo sued Sony and they didn’t release the playstation etc.), more topics, more and varied genres (via research) more ways to gain research, multiplayer leaderboards of highest selling games, company worth, # of games that meet a certain criteria (score, genre, # of systems) community made scenarios, resolutions of games, types of control that your game uses (standard gamepad, keyboard+mouse, touch, motion controls, mics, plastic instruments), having other pre-made engines usable to make modded engines off of.
Sorry If these seems really random and organized but these are just some things that came up in my head while playing.