I’m sure this has happened to others. You make a game and it’s a huge hit. It has great reviews and sales. You make your next game that’s also a good combination and it even has better design and technology points than the last one. It scores low 2-3s. Eventually you realize the quality standards have changed and you must now output even higher quality to reach the same scores as before.
I understand that it’s a gameplay element that’s supposed to keep you on your toes, but it’s a weak gameplay element. There’s no way to foresee the oncoming speed bump. It’s a speed bump for the sake of a speed bump.
This is very much unlike actual game development and instantly jolts me out of the game. Because in actual game development, you have the pleasure of seeing the quality your competition is putting out. How about every once in a while there is a non-game-stopping panel that shows on the left side of the screen that mentions your competition’s actions and quality coming from them. This way if you don’t pay attention you can hit the speed bump, but if you are attentive, you can prepare for the quality change.
One measure of when the standards change is by counting how many hits you have. Every time you score highly the bar is raised ever so slightly, so you have to keep improving and inventing to get better scores. A quick tip is to always research a new topic in the period where you’re waiting for the reviews popup to appear. Then you will always have a new, never-seen-before topic combo to try.That should make you life a little easier.
I’m not posting for help. I work on games, just something my trained eye noticed. It’s also not just when you release a title, that does change standards slightly, but there are times where it jumps considerably too. I’m thinking probably preset times when standards jump in a big way. It could be random but I’d have to do more play throughs to be sure. It’s those that should have some sort of foreboding of some kind.
It’s what we call in the business faked difficulty, it’s nothing to be ashamed of since all of us devs do it to a degree but this one I found a bit annoying at times.
Sorry for gravedigging but I want to say this before people read something wrong:
There’s no “speed bump”. The review mechanism uses an algorithm that takes into account your previous highest score and a second effect, that depends not only on your last game but on more of your history, which is approximately another 10% of your highest score.
So when you release a great game, the next game will be more difficult to do. In addition, you have to keep the same quality in slider settings, etc., which may make it appear like “the bar was raised”, when you actually didn’t meet GDT’s idea of a well-designed/developed game. Also, not all genres work equally well on each platform, and so on. Check this page if you want to understand why this happens: http://gamedevtycoon.wikia.com/wiki/Success_Guide
Again, I assure you, there are no speedbumps that arbitrarily rack up the difficulty.