I wanted to list the ideas I had during playing the game.
Maybe some of it inspires the devs … who knows ^^
Engine:
Ingame
Allow to “upgrade” your engine to certain degrees until it really needs to be redesigned.
For example you can add some more features to it, also by means of graphic engine.
Like Egosoft was improving their engine since (I think) BTF, which was about in the Windows 98/XP age if I remember right.
They didn’t just raise the resolution, they added functions like bumpmaps shadow projection and stuff.
You generally use an engine until it is so old that people notice there has to be something that handles things easier.
As far as I feel (not know ^^) you can improve an engine and add features but somewhen the system requirements simply get too high to sell a game and that’s the point where you have to design a new one, starting over.
MMO-Management
Let players control the ammount of servers and the technology behind it to control income-outcome.
Like adding new servers, merging players from two servers to one and moving the free server to a different game, etc.
You might sell the MMO but the sales slowly drop also depending on the number of actual players.
No players means no re-hype and results in no sales.
Since the number of players also slowly drop you have to bring up addons.
You could say an addon brings as much income as a normal game and raises the player count.
After a long time the whole system starts to break down due to low technology and competition.
You cannot simply patch a new MMO engine to it, and it wouldn’t bring as many sales as just a new MMO that starts over with the whole process. While the competition, even if you are like WoW, has it easier due to more modern technology to take away your customers - that’s the point where you hopefully have developed a new game.
Team-Management
As a small company you only have a development team, but when you get bigger and start developing “just another” AAA-Blockbuster you have to get bigger …
-
You will have one or more team/s to develop the blockbusters …
Also they won’t be just one guy for one thing.
After turning your lead-developers into specialists, you could go one step further and let them lead their own mini-dev-team.
It’s easier to design a game-world, if one guy is making the “furniture”, one guy is making the buildings and one guy is putting everything together to a city - you get the idea.
That also results in higher costs and so you have to make sure you’ve got the right ammount of developers for each part of the game. -
Other teams develop minigames/apps not just to make profit on the mobile device market, but also make people aware of your presence, get people to play your games that didn’t think of playing computergames before.
Plus they work like merchandise and mini-addons.
Like the commander mode in Battlefield4 is prettymuch a mini-addon to buy separately and also gets you to think about playing it from the perspective of the PC/PS4/etc. gamers. -
You will also have to maintain a patch-team, that implement not just bugfixes but also the DLCs and Addons that have already been created during development, to give the number of sales a bump and also earn money from the actual DLC/Addon sales.
(and additionally MMOs always need a patch of some sort, there’s always something to patch, balance or just to change so the players don’t get bored - which is Blizzard’s practice)
Console-Wars
I also think that console-development could use a little more detail.
“Games sell consoles”, “consoles sell games” and such.
You could go more into detail of what your console is actually capable of.
Does it have a mouse for better action gaming?
Or does it have a gamepad for better adventure games?
Does it support motion control devices like the “kinect” or the “oculus rift” for 1st person experience and simulations?
Does it have a touch-screen on the controldevice to improve strategy games and RPGs?
Performance
To the real game itself I would have suggested to reduce the bubbles at a certain stage of the game- like when you start to maintain mini-dev-teams and replace them with “loading bars”
Game Speed
I would implement a time control + pause button
Especially at high end it gets extremely difficult to keep your eyes on the development team if every couple seconds one of the laboratories needs new orders.
maybe a queue system would also help … like just say “do a yearly convention!”