Competitor Mod Revised
Welcome to the official forum page of the Competitor Mod Revised, a game modification for Game Dev Tycoon and continuation of the original Competitor Mod by Kristof1104 and me.
The feel of the mod is very similar to the original one, however from the original version only the UI, some data structures and name generation have stayed almost completely the same. Other than that pretty much all actions and features that were in the original mod have been reworked and extended with new functionality and features. There are features from the original mod that aren’t implemented in this one just yet, like any real way of interaction with the competitors in the form of publishing deals, sabotaging, etc. I’m planning on adding these at a later stage.
The focus right now is the behaviour of the agents themselves and trying to have them behave in a rational and plausible way, without constraining their actions too much. Right now, the behaviour of the competitors should be pretty good during the garage level of the game, but I haven’t done any testing on later stages of the game. Scaling is probably the next thing I will work on, but I’m going to have to play the game again to make some notes on how long game development takes at later stages, how costs increase and other things like that so it will take a while to implement this correctly.
It is still very much a work in progress and any suggestions and feedback is very much appreciated! Issues can either be reported here, or on the official repository page, where you can download the mod and the source code can be found.
Installation (only install if you are willing to try an experimental version, there will be bugs/errors!)
- Download the .zip file from the official repository page.
- Place the contents in the
modsfolder of the game directory (C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\Game Dev Tycoo\by default). - Activate the mod from the main menu of the game, restart.
I won’t be publishing the mod on the workshop just yet, but as soon as it is stable across the entire duration of the game it will most likely be uploaded there as well.
Current Features
- Multiple competitors, each competitor has the following actions available:
- Create a game
- Competitors will try to rationally pick a topic, genre and platform based on its knowledge.
- Simulate development costs based on the available tech of the player.
- License new platforms when applicable.
- Research a new topic
- Generate a game report
- Create a game
- Basic notification when a competitor releases a new game or a game goes off the market
- Multiple games with the same topic affect each other, applies to both the player and AI competitors
An element of randomness should ensure that not every competitor is always doing the same action, e.g. start the same action at the same time, use the same platforms, etc. but should not cause the competitors to go bankrupt very often.
Planned features
The final goal is to give the competitors access to most of the features a player has access to as well. Of course not everything will be possible (like the sliders during game creation), but other noticeable actions or features available to the player would be something I’d like to add to the competitors as well. Below is a list of features and ideas I’d like check out and see how feasible it is to implement them.
- Interactions between the player and competitors, these could be:
- Buying competitors at later stages of the game.
- Spying on competitors to gain extra knowledge and benefits.
- Providing publishing deals other competitors can apply for.
- License, buy or sell game engines.
- Interactive (random) events.
All of these ideas might apply to both the player and competitor.
- More expansive actions for the competitors:
- Forms of marketing (normal forms of marketing, events in the game like G3).
- Create engines.
- Create
- Customizability, like selecting the number of competitors on the market
Known bugs and other remarks
During development I encountered a bug where none of the competitors would load when loading a save game, reloading the same save always fixed this for me though. I’m also not sure what caused these issues, but it might be a bug you can only get when you enable the toolbar for debugging and refresh the game from there.
Final notes
As I said before, suggestions, feedback and discussions are very much appreciated. However remember that this is a project I’m doing for fun and while I have currently the time to work a lot on the mod, this might change as the work load from my study increases.
Also please keep in mind that updates to this will not always be save game compatible. Small tweaks to costs, rates, or probabilities will always be save game compatible and I will try to make updates as safe as possible, but entire new features will probably require starting a new game because of extra save/load data.
Other than that, I hope you will enjoy the mod and thank you for reading! =D
