Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-71.194.113.190-20130512234750/@comment-6771347-20130720215318

It's super complicated when you look at it how game scores are calculated. If you don't plan on using the gamescore calculator, you have to follow some basic rules, as well as the gamedev guide's suggestions. (You HAVE to follow good target audience + good topic/genre combo + slider placements)

Garage: 1. Start small, i.e. text based games, no features, ect. 2. Slowly improve, i.e. 2nd game, same as last with 1 extra feature. 3. Never make the same topic/genre game right after each other, i.e. fantasy/rpg followed by fantasy/rpg is bad, fantasy/rpg followed by medieval/rpg followed by fantasy/rpg followed by medieval/rpg is PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE. (And a surefire way to win, make the same thing slightly better and the money just flows in.) 4. Research between each game, make a new engine when you run out of new features to add to your next game. 5. Do not go the office without having around 10 million saved up. You want to have a good buffer so you can hire new employees, train them, and waste time until they are fully accustomed to working together before making a game. Having your new employees all work together on a new big engine is a good use of time, as well as farming contract work. Office: 6. Hire only balanced T/D employees, and train them so they stay balanced. It seems like a good idea to hire tech and design specialists to min/max your T/D gains, but it eventually completely skews your T/D ratios and makes the slider placement guides completely wrong. Games need to have a certain specific T/D ratio based on genre, the game dev slider guide is based on employees having equal T/D stats. Without using the game score calculator your T/D ratio starts to get really out of whack even with the same slider placements as your specialized employees get better, you have to reduce the design adding sliders for an RPG to make sure your T/D ratio stays correct. 6.1. I like hiring all my employees at the same time so they all go on vacation at the same time. If you want to hire your employees slowly as you go along, make sure to hire them when your other employees are on vacation so all their vacation schedules are linked up and are easy to track. 7. Do not self publish medium games until you have 100k fans. It's perfectly acceptable to keep making small games without a publisher. When you have 100k+ fans, self publish all the medium games you want. 8. '''Sequels. Make sequels. Make sequels of sequels.''' By being a sequel it generates free hype and sells more than a new game. Do not make a sequel of a game if it was released in the past 40 weeks/9 months., this is easy if you didn't "make sequels" before you could actually make them legitimately, just think up new names for games until you can make sequels. (Using single word game titles like "Shooter" will make releasing "Shooter 2" when you can legitimately make sequels easier. Old Atari and Commodore games were actually like this anyways) 9. Don't self-publish large games without 500k+ fans.