Thoughts and Features

Game Dev Tycoon ideas
#1

I’m not sure if you guys are planning to make any major changes in the future, but right off the bat I’d like to say I love your game and I’ve sunk many hours into it already. These are just some thoughts, open for constructive criticism from the community, of things I’d love to see added to the game and think would really benefit it.

  1. I’d love the option to “Beta Test” the game while it’s in development and go back over each of the dev. cycles to tweak the game. In real life a game company has the option to open up the game, get feedback and spend more time and money improving, and for those of us who don’t want to cheat and look up the perfect formulas for a game on google and are trying to wing it off rational thought… a little AI feedback saying things like “focus more on your engine/gameplay/story” etc… would be much appreciated.

  2. I’d really like to see more of the developers doing things that add to the immersion and benefit the gameplay rather than always sitting at their desks. Of note, you have the middle office after getting out of your garage with a tv, a console, and bean bags all set up. Why not make that a feature rather than a decoration? Perhaps part of the training or the dev. cycle is play testing your own games, or using the console when you do contract play testing. If you could playtest your own games, maybe that could work much like the beta testing idea from before.

  3. I’d love to be able to produce DLC for my games on top of just Expansion Packs for MMO’s. A great way that games revive themselves in the real world is developing a game alongside DLC, and adding DLC over the course of the games life with a fast turn-over in order to keep stimulating sales when the game is dying. DLC maybe could go quicker than the full game development?

  4. I’d like to see more developers and the concept of teams of staff. In a real game dev. cycle you’d have a team working on the core game while another works on multiplayer, another works on art, another works on animation, etc… I think it would be nice to have a basic system for this. You can assign people to the main cycle that already exists in the game, and if you added ‘Competitive Multiplayer’ as a category like MMO then you’d have a team that could be partitioned off to work on that while the rest work on the base game. And then the game would release like an MMO with a much shorter lifetime as the upkeep for the servers is higher. Games like that would be high risk with high reward. Also, DLC would work well here as a directly comparable system to expansions for MMOs

  5. I beat the game in about 4 hours and earned 2,000+ Million dollars and it just got stagnant. The competition doesn’t compete anymore, and there is little to do but the same cycles. I’d really like it if the cap on the research was removed and you could keep going pretending your company was reaching infinite realism and technology in games, and I’d like it if even though the story ended, the competition would randomly release systems that just looked much like yours and you had to basically show off against your own similar tech to keep the competition alive.

  6. I’d love to see a system where you’re fighting the market with other games and consoles. One of the biggest examples right now is Call of Duty versus Battlefield, and Micrsoft Xbox One versus Sony PlayStation 4. Maybe along with choosing your hardware features, you could also be choosing marketing plans like Xbox Live, TV deals, used games policies. It would make people react differently and make people buy differently, but would also affect your profit differently. And also, maybe adding ways for the hardware guys to be the ones to invent the headsets and virtual reality and all the cool accessories so that peripherals are part of the competition. Nintendo took a chance with the Wii U tablet controller, why not have the ability to develop controllers with all sorts of fun weird features as well as the consoles themselves?

  7. I’d love to see the Research Department also be able to organize competitions as well as Expos. Right now you can create your own conventions, but one of the big things that keeps Call of Duty alive, that keeps League of Legends alive, that keeps Starcraft 2 Alive, besides the Expansions like MMOs, is the major MLG competitive scene that streams and markets the game. It would be expensive, but a major magnet to get the market for the product open again if interest is dying off.

  8. I know that the story does mention to an extent what consoles favor mature players or what kinds of games, but I’d like to have access to some kind of statistical graph of it. A real company would have their research department looking into trends and demographics for the consoles, what games work best, what genres, and it would be helpful to be able to look into that somehow.

  9. I’d like to be able to pitch ideas to Publishers rather than just take all their contracts. A real dev company might come to a publisher with an idea and they’ll pay a little upfront, see what that gives them, invest some more and some more to see the game reach it’s potential value.

  10. More fun! I mean, it’s fun as it is already, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not a lasting fun. It’s kinda a short lived addicting fun like a game for facebook or a game on your phone. It’s awesome in short doses and when you first get it, but it wears thin after a while. One thing to fix that would be to add a little more musical variety, after too long it starts to give me a headache. Another would just be to drive up competition past the endgame 30yr mark. The whole thing that keeps the game fun during the story is the unknown, the fear, the threat of going bankrupt and gambling in a game and hoping you get good reviews. You lose that once you pass 100M and you’re basically in the clear. I think much of what I’ve said above could relieve this.

2 Likes
#2

  1. The developers deliberately limited the player’s control over the length of the dev cycle. Working the game over repeatedly is no guarantee of a good game. For reference, see Duke Nukem Forever and Ever and Ever. Personally, I think they should loosen this up. Working the game over a little bit can improve it significantly. I’d say that as you do it more and more, you increase the odds of getting ‘negabubbles’ that harm the game’s score.

  2. I think that expansion packs should be applicable to any game, that they should be boosted in development speed, and that they should be size-capped at one size less than the original game. Small games should not get expansion packs - it would be ridiculous. Just put up a sequel for the poor thing. However, expansion packs currently need rebalancing, and that work would need to be completed before expansions/DLC could be used elsewhere. Although I apparently suck too much to make this work, people on the forum have demonstrated that you can use expansions to sell many times more copies of an MMO than there are people on the earth.

  3. I agree.

  4. Personally, I’ve never played past the end of the game. It seems a little silly. It’s hardly surprising that the game gets stagnant at that point. It’s not really balanced for that scenario… The part of the game that we should be judging it on is clearly defined.

6-10) Agreement… except I would note that of the two times I’ve gone bankrupt in the game, one of them occurred from 130M. R&D at the high levels eats up cash marvelously. You need that research done, but it’s so pricey…

#3

Yea, somethings I have thought about since…
11) I’d like to be able to develop a mobile console to compete with the grapple tablet, the micronoft tablet, the gameling, etc… Ninvento and all those companies seem to basically have a monopoly on the casual market and while you can create game engines with casual 2D graphics and features, you aren’t ever allowed to make a product. I’d love to be able to make my own console in game that looks like the nVidia Shield in real life.
12) Having an art department with it’s own room to develop the marketing rather than research. Research doesn’t seem like the logical place to promote a AAA game. Having an art department that can produce cinematic trailers, posters, box art, wallpapers, etc… seems like a much more realistic system, and it would also add to the difficulty of running a high end company and alleviate stagnation.

#4
  1. I completly agree with this one, and also what Deskairn said about it not being an guarantee for a good game. But a good game developer makes sure that they’ll release a product that at least been tested for a while :slight_smile:
    They can balance it by raising costs during the beta testing or you are working towards a release date which makes endless testing and tweaking more risky.

2-5) I agree

  1. This is something i really would like to see in the game. Of course you get your game ranking on release, but what games are you competing with.
    And perhaps there could be more insight on what the competion is working on.
    If by any chance the market will be flooded by the Genre/topic you are working on as well, maybe a “Freeze Development” is a nice function to have your game on hold or something.

7-10) Agree, nothing that i can add :slight_smile:

#5

1-2
I personally think the game development is deep enough as is, and honestly I care about gameplay more then graphics.
4
I agree, but I think employee stats and vacations should be changed in some way to make them more manageable, else anything past 50 employees sounds impossible to control.
5
Fully agree, would also be awesome if newer technology was generated by adding a version number on top of old tech, with a higher price generated as well. (IE advanced physics v2). These tech versions should be exclusive and the old ones should be replaced by the new ones, with the exception of graphics.
9
Disagree, I feel publishers as is add a little bit of needed challenge.

Fully agree with you on the other ones though. I would like to add three of my own ideas though:
13) Completely overhaul expansions and MMOs. First of all, MMO maintenance costs should go down over time. This is because servers are getting cheaper and cheaper to purchase. Secondly Expansions need to be fixed. If you make like 10 expansions one after another for a game, it will sell in the 10s of billions. This should be changed. MMOs need to sell less for expansions, and expansions should not give an MMO exponential growth. Also you should be able to see what expansions you have made for a game.
14) number of features I am able to place in my game based on the game’s hidden estimate for the amount of points I will generate in a section of a stage (EG graphics, sound, engine), instead of a fixed amount times the amount of time I put into said section. It sounds odd but basically it means that you can place more features in the late game because your workers are more skilled, and that you aren’t given the ability to put every feature you unlock into a game in the mid game.
15) Random name generator (or at least a list of like 1000 game names that the game uses) because I am totally not creative sometimes.