I have stopped playing game since this summer (LeagueOfLegends) of 2018 and I thought I’d try getting myself back in the gaming world between my 2 week Christmas break. This game sorta caught my eye and wasn’t too expensive, so I went for it.
It had a great premise and a start, especially for an aspiring coder who is stuck with IT job atm. I like how how success mechanism was more realistic and the requirements of making a good game was not static, which makes the game dull faster like in many other games. You are in an arms-race against yourself like pyramid scheme on crack [possible game idea FYI albeit twisted lol 
]. Constantly spending R&D, your own coding skills and recruiting/training new staffs to add additional manpower to make bigger games and with better quality was just awesome.
But I stopped playing after year 167 because after you do all the research to build the fattest game engine, all your 6 staffs with max stats, and the juicest game console you can possibly build… there’s no where to go but down. It’s kinda funny and a terrible business model (as it ruins how much developer can milk suckers like us), but I found it a bit fitting. All good things come to an end.
But I think they should increase more features so that the game can be more dynamic and allow the challenge to last longer. And I think the key is to keep the challenge cyclical, not linear that eventually hits the end.
Rather than peaking the stats and make it impossible for your developer team to make worse games overall, why not reset skills due to different technology/trend? That way you can always improve continuously. The game tried showing that with different console evolutions/game engines, but that linear progression comes to an end eventually… hence suggesting that the environment should change in cyclic fashion. Maybe consumers suddenly prefer retro gaming and staffs have to remember and re-train themselves to develop old forgotten skills. Or maybe staffs/developers will eventually age and die, and forcing you to recruit different staffs and train them again. Rinse and repeat.
I suck at essays so I’ll be lazy and make a list.
- Owner and Staffs will age and die, forcing the company to force the staffs to retire and recruit new blood in good timing fashion. (If all staffs die/retire at the same time, company will go back to dark age without any support). How you train staffs will become investment dilemma. This is appropriate as that is a real issue in actual gaming industry.
- Put personalities/human aspects to the staffs. Some will not get along with others. Some will be brilliant but have personal issues getting in their own ways. Some staffs will have to be allocated to specific development stages to max. synergy. Some staffs should be hired as contractors as they may be brilliant but they have personal issues that gets them burnt up easily. This will force the company to hire them at their very best, and bounce they they burn out. This may also force moral dilemma potentially, and fans may react as well if such person is famous.
-Game engine requires more complexity. Rather than making it linear and go from V1 - > end, it should be more about how the components come together. Maybe put limitation so you can’t have game console/game engine that has it all. And that custom build has to be carefully tailored based on the mood of the industry/consumers. For example. crazy strong game engine with intense graphics may not be what people want as world economy takes a toil and it’s suddenly more popular to game cheaper retro games on phones/cheap consoles. In other phase, there’s tech bubble/hysteria and suddenly everyone wants the best spec as possible. Demographic shift now changes the market so there’s more elderly people than young folks, so it’s more strategic to make games that suits them instead. Point is, it should not be linear. It should be like chess where best move is not necessarily more beefy stats, it’s how you deploy them. - More interactions with competitors/staffs. Some companies will try to steal your competent staffs you worked so hard to train. How will you keep them from defecting? More salary, sure… but again avoid linear progression. Different corporate culture. Popularity of your company. How well staff’s personalities fit with the games you are making/launching. Language barrier. Country’s visa laws.
- Recruitment of staffs. Make it more interesting. You can hire from Ivy League schools that will generally have better avg stats, but they are more expensive and competition will be fierce. If you hire elsewhere, avg stat will be worse but there are some hidden gems you can find and snag them. Recruitment will be also more complex… age? Demographics? Language? How much time/money can you afford to recruit? Again, avoid linear progression. You should also start internship where you can get all sorts of recruits cheap, but you will have harder time keeping them there when internship is over so is it worth it?
- More PR features. Selling good games is not the only way to keep the company on edge. Not releasing certain game elements (like airplane games during 9/11 but depending on the mood of the audience, it may be seen as bold risk-taking than causing controversy). Aggressively lobby the government to change national visa policies, but government admins change ever so often and sometimes you can’t play ball with them so you gotta adapt differently. Encourage people to make babies. Offer scholarships/internships. Charity events. Competitions (risky as which team wins is not certain) and host your own teams (which comes with its own recruitment/keeping them dilemma like original development staffs)
- more visual features like how you can decorate your office (like Sims). Where the staffs are. What office environment works best (again, more expense does not mean better result). Where to put the staffs? How to segregate/integrate different staffs/teams? Or just non-related custom build that just appeals the folks who just wanna add personal touch to their offices.
- More control/features for MMO. Not just build and release. MMO support team should be created to decide its support budget, or release source code/mod so fans can do the heavy lifting build loyalty fans but that may cost you and risk being stolen by competitors.
- Concept of patents to give research incentives rather than just stealing from public resources/competitor sources.
- corporate security (spies, thieves, hackers, etc)
- Skill should be more specific. ex. for 2D game engines, it would have its own design/tech skills so you have to force staffs to train when using different/upgraded engines. It will question whether it’s worth training the staffs, or just lay them off and hire someone with previous experiences.
- More feedback/data on the market. Customer feedbacks, who has bigger market share, their tech/strategy/staff, etc.
Cool game though. I’ll probably stop playing when I start working again after holidays but it was fun while it lasted 