What an awesome game! I did not intend to spend about 75% of my two days off by playing Game Dev Tycoon ceaselessly right after purchasing it for PC, but…I did.
I love the pace of the game, and the way that the player’s attention has to be increasingly managed and rotated among various concerns as the game progresses. The mix of these two factors makes for highly addictive gameplay–this is, simply put, the best of what a tycoon-type stragetic simulation should be, a great effort from a small startup.
There are some things, though, that drive me fairly nuts about the PC interface. Oftentimes I get used to interface issues or peculiarities as I spend more time with a game, but I feel like the overall interface to GDT lags seriously behind the rest of the game in quality (possibly an artifact of its incarnation for mobile devices?) and there are a few things that drive me more bitter and crazy as I play the game:
- The constant barrage of pop-up messages (with tutorial off, also, I mean) greatly impedes the flow of gameplay. Would it be possible to implement a scrolling marquee with messages and news, reserving pop-up windows for only the most important events and notices?
- A lot of screen real estate is taken up for absolutely no discernible purpose. Yeah, the office view looks nice and all, but it doesn’t contribute to the functionality of the game in any way–other than clicking on one person or another to issue orders, and even that mechanic is a little wobbly because I often find myself clicking people when I thought I was clicking the office itself, and vice-versa. There could be toolbars or panes for research, marketing, and so forth, instead of having to bring up and close out dialogs for these areas. I feel like use of the screen was not very well thought out.
- For an extra touch of fun and finesse, I think it would be nice to have the game interface sort of visually/artistically reflect the period of technology that the company is living through in the simulation, possibly on a per-decade basis. As the game progresses through different eras of gaming technology, have the look of the interface reflect that in much the same way that the office setting does.
- I would suggest making some improvements and enrichments to the game history dialog–a list-type view rather scrolling cards, perhaps, so that the entire history could be seen at one glance and possibly sorted by various stats.
My only pressing suggestion for gameplay is that it might be worth considering a game speed that decreases as time goes by–fast-paced in the early years, say, up into the late '90s, and then slower-paced to allow a little (if not a lot) more time for human resources and training, research, marketing, and so forth. This is similar to how, say, the Civilization series works; though GDT is of course not turn-based, it might be a more rewarding gaming experience for players if the pace were slightly slower at the end to allow for the proliferation of more options that occurs in that time period. As it is, for me it toes the line between exciting and unpleasantly frantic when you get past year 20-25 or so.
Thanks!