In no particular order, I think that some improvements on this list will do the game much good:
Game Engine development: a feature that explained quite poorly in the game. What’s the use of it? What’s pros and cons? There’s very little information on the matter.
Game Engines management. After dozens of games and projects, your Game Engine list starts to look terribly cluttered, and there’s no way to clean it up. Hell, there’s no way to even look at it aside from when you start a new project (see next point).
Information accessibility. There should be a way to look up Platforms information (very important!) and Game Engine information aside from “setting up a new project” menu. You already have a staff screen, so it should probably go somewhere along that.
3b) Financial information presentation. A historical event list (stuff displayed in the top-right corner: how much money gained/lost) will do the game much good. More detailed stuff is probably not needed, but the ability to look at your financial history is pretty important.
Platforms implementation is quite underwhelming: arguably, the most prominent issue of game development for different platforms is their (sometimes rather unique!) limitations. Which are totally not reflected in the game. Making a project with a steering wheel support for a Gameboy? Easy! Making a console project without gamepad support? Again, totally nice! Hell, I made a 9/10 game like that – guess they just stared at the TV, hypnotized and overwhelmed.
PS: The game is very nice, though. I laughed so hard after my Space/RPG project “Vast Defect” was declared a 10/10 game.
This thread goes into the same direction as I was about to post, so I’ll just add it here:
I feel there’s a lack of feedback WHY some games turn out bad and others don’t, i.e. was it because the graphics weren’t appropriate for the genre? Does that even matter? I guess the game has an internal model for quality that’s apparently more differentiated than just the little dots that sum up - because games with equal Design- und Technology dots ratings get different scores and sales - why not give it as feedback to players and make the game magazine ratings a bit more verbose?
Similar thing for for the game development tasks which are somewhat ambiguous: gameplay - does that mean gameplay design, gameplay programming? Comes down to the question: which skill levels (apart from the obvious specialisations) go into a development task and determine the quality of the outcome?
As far as my experience goes, there is no point of going for publisher deals. For some reason they always turn out to be badly rated - but sell well anyway - and I have to pay the penalty. I found to sell enough games without a publisher even in the early game stages. Shouldn’t it be the other way round?
Minor thing: the pace seems a bit too fast, and I make my team do more than one thing simultaneously. That means that some years and systems pass by, that I didn’t publish a single game on. Is that intentional?
All in all a nice little game, but it’s lacking some transparency.
I really want to echo the idea of examining game engines. As far as I can tell now, there isn’t a way to see what features an engine has after its made. After making a few engines and a bunch of games, I forget which ones have which features. I wish I could click on an engine and see, “okay, this one has joystick support” or w/e
Also it would be nice to have a glossary of the research tech and the unlock conditions for each one. I assume research topics are unlocked based on skill ups, but it doesn’t say in the help. So I don’t know what to focus on to learn the features to build the engine I want.
Say I want to build an engine for Starcraft. How would I know Level Editor tech even existed until it became available? Do I have to try and remember all these different research techs?