Game Development Based on Experience/1.6.11

In Game Dev Tycoon there are a lot of factors that go into creating a high quality game. This article aims to provide the information needed to create good quality games. Typically, the goal of game development is to get a high review score (preferably 9.5+). However, during the game development your actions do not influence your review score directly, but rather, your game score.

The Game score is a hidden value you can only see by Modding (do not confuse it with the review score you see), is basically the sum of your Design + Tech, divided by a modifier based on game size (this compensates for the fact that bigger games take longer to develop and accumulate more points) and then multiplied by several quality modifiers. All those modifiers are usually capped at a value of around 1, and have lowest values of around 0.6. Therefore, failing even one quality check can lower your game score significantly. This game score does not translate into review score directly, but rather is compared to your previous high score (read next paragraph for details) to calculate your review score.

You can influence the sum of Design + Tech you receive mainly outside game development, by researching more features (allows your employees to contribute more points while developing the field that feature belongs to) and training your employees / hiring additional employees (increases point contribution total), while during game development, you can mostly influence all those quality modifiers of your game.

Before we start (step 1/3)
In v1.6.11 the game added new pirate mode, considering the fact that in the pirate mode the sales is significantly decreased, this page focused on strategies in PIRATE mode, and most of it should also be applicable in non-pirate mode. The remaining part is based on the PIRATE mode if not specified explicitly.

REMEMBER to SAVE before starting making every game, it's essential especially in the early stage because bad games have huge penalties on sales and it's really easy to go bankrupt. If the review score is not good, load the game and change the topic/genre/platform or sliders during the development.

The very beginning (step 2/3)
The sales of games which has no DRM will be reduced by over 70%, so it's very hard to maintain the balance without DRM, most of the time you will need to make 3 games and generate all 3 reports to gain the 65 RP required to research Custom Game Engine and copy protection v1, it's strongly recommended to start with some topics that have good compatibility with PC (e.g. Airplane, Mad Science, Pirate, etc...), because making a game using the same topic/genre too often will also have great penalty on the sales, and it's not wise to spend precious RP on new topics too early.

Now you need to make 3 games and generate 3 reports, due to the pirate penalty, it's almost impossible to earn profit, so you need to cut the cost to the extreme, which means PC, text based, no sound needed, I will recommend to use the topic/genre that is good combo, not great, since profit is not likely in the first 3 games, but don't use too bad combo because it will probably make the financial situation worse.

You start with 80K cash, during the process of developing the 3 games and generate reports, your money should go below 0, the game will now offer cash for 20% or 30% of the shares of your company, don't hesitate to accept the 30% (20% or decline if you have confidence in the financial situation), and start to create your first Custom Game Engine if you gain 65RP (if RP is not enough, you can either restart or make 1 more game, that will generate enough RP for sure) to research Custom Game Engine and copy protection v1, I will recommend to add copy protection v1 only to the first engine, to save money.

Having the first Custom Game Engine with copy protection v1, you can now make games with great topic/genre (platform also, if possible) combo, and you will have some spare RP now, I will strongly recommend to research new topics that are great in casual genre (e.g. Airplane, Racing, Sports, ...), because the next several consoles that are going to publish are fitted to casual genre extremely good, if there is no such new topic available in research, maybe you should restart.

Also, do NOT use all your RP to research new topics, because you'll need to research Casual Game and Target Audience in Year3, and more importantly, the copy protection v1 will soon be outdated (about the middle of Y3) and the pirate penalty will rise from 25% to 50%, it's better to develop the game first and do the report generating later when the penalty rises (or not having enough RP), you should be able to develop not so bad a game with the topic/genre/platform/audience compatibility in this page. You may also make some new Custom Game Engine with copy protection v1 and some new features if the financial situation turns better.

By the way, new copy protection research (e.g. copy protection v2) will be available when the last copy protection (copy protection v1 in this case) reaches level 3, the copy protection has 6 levels in all so get prepared to research it a.s.a.p.

If things goes smoothly, you will have some good topic prepared and enough RP for Casual Game and Target Audience in Year3, if not or you don't have copy protection v2 yet, develop games to gain copy protection v1 experience and generate reports to gain RP, make sure you have a good engine with copy protection v2 and other features.

Now TES, Master V and Gameling should be released, if you have enough cash and topics fitted to casual genre, you can develop casual game when TES is released, if not, you can wait Gameling to release, because it has the largest market share and you will pay extra money for different licenses.

Form early stage to the middle (step 3/3)
By starting to make casual game, you may find that in late Year3 or early Year4, the sales of some games rises extremely high and you gain over 500K or even 1M cash now, the first thing you need to do is to buy back the shares when possible, and the second thing is: do NOT pay 150K to move to new office if you're asked.

The reason is that if you stay at the garage office, your monthly cost is 8K, and with so many games you've developed, you should have enough fans to support the game and earn profit even with outdated copy protection, but if you move to the new office, you will need to hire people, making the monthly cost to about 100K, and the sales of your games will be reduced since you don't have 100K fans needed to develop a medium game with no penalty, you can find some publishing deal, but most of it will offer terrible topic/genre/platform combination, and if you want to make small game, why not stay at the garage with 10% of the monthly cost?

Also the copy protection is outdated very quick, develop medium games won't give you huge enough copy protection experience comparing to the small games, which means you probably won't have enough profit to keep the company running. So it's recommended to stay in the garage until having about 15M-20M cash and 150K-250K fans.

Now if you stay in the garage, theoretically you can finish the game without bankrupt if you have 4M cash (8K/month for 500 months, about 42 years), but if you're interested in this, you can move on to the next part.

During this stage, because your monthly cost is 8K, you can focus on the copy protection, and sometimes develop some game with good topic/genre for copy protection experience to make the copy protection level to 3 and start to research the next copy protection version and implement it in Custom Game Engine. You can also research other features, you shouldn't be bothered by the financial situation anymore at this stage as long as you stay in the garage.

After having about 15M-20M cash and 150K-250K fans (not that strict, make your own decision), along with a good copy protection version, you can now choose to the new office, and the game after this will be the same as the normal mode.

Since the game developing strategy is not changed, the remaining part will be similar to older versions.

Good quality ≠ Good reviews!
First thing everybody needs to understand: Good quality game DOES NOT MEAN good reviews

In this game, you compete exclusively against your own previous high score (except in the very beginning of the game, where you compete against a pre-set top score value, until you can beat it and set your first high score). Your game score is compared to your high score (with an added increment of about 10%-20%), and that is your final review score (before it gets randomized a bit and you get to see it). Therefore, in order to get a good review score, you need to perform slightly better than your previous score.

This is very important to understand:


 * To get a good review score once you can just keep on playing and eventually, no matter what you do, you will get a 9.5+ game (if you don't lose before) !' 


 * In order to keep getting good review scores every time, you need to be consistent, not good. You need to perform just like you performed last time, but a bit better.

Why would you care to make high quality games then? Because it is easier to make a top-quality game (game with all quality checks maxed) than it is to make a non-top-quality game of the same level of (non)quality.

For example, in order to get best quality based on allocation of sliders, you only need to never apply less than 20% to certain topics (~3-6 per genre), never apply more than 20% to certain topics (~0-3 per genre) and at least twice apply more than 40% to certain topics (~3-6 per genre). However, in order to make a worst quality game, you need to invert all of that - always apply less than 20% to certain topics (~3-6 per genre), always apply more than 20% to certain topics (~0-3 per genre).

Therefore, if you go for best quality, you have 60% freedom (meaning 60% of 100% of the slider is okay, remaining is not) in 2 sliders, 80% freedom in ~1-4 sliders, 20% freedom in ~0-3 sliders and 100% freedom in remaining ~0-6 sliders, and if you go for worst quality, you have 20% freedom in 3-6 sliders, 80% freedom in 0-3 sliders and 100% freedom in remaining ~0-6 sliders. If you compare that, you see that you have ~500%-800% (out of total 900%) freedom in the first case, and 360%-660% in the second case. Therefore, if you adhere to "best quality" rule set, you have more creative freedom than if you adhere to "worst quality" rule set.

This is even more radical for, say, genre/topic combo. There are way more Great Combos (quality modifier of 1) out there than Strange ones with lowest possible quality modifier of 0.6. Therefore, if you focus on making only worst strange combos, you will be very limited in what genre/topic combo you can choose (not to mention you will hardly have any multi genre games to do). However, if you focus on making only great combos, you have much more freedom.

For example, Dungeon, Airplane, Fantasy, and many other topics can produce only 1 worst Strange Combo but 4 Great Combos. Overall, there are very few topics that give more strange combos than great combos (Game Dev and Superheroes with 3 strange vs 1 great, Romance, Startups, Hospital and Surgery with 2:1), while most of them produce way more great combos than strange combos.

Therefore, this page will not tell you how to make games that get good review scores. It will tell you how to make top quality games, which will in turn help you be consistent in your score, which will in turn help you get good reviews. If you develop games of consistent quality (great combo, tech/design balance upheld, no bugs etc.) your game score will be almost exclusively based on the sum of Design and Tech points you see, and thus you will have an easier time judging how well you did (before you see the reviews).

In the end it's all up to you, free your mind, think of what you want to make/train or research next, and always keep your cool. The World is waiting for only one thing, and that thing, is you.

For more information on how the quality of a game is assessed, and how it is reviewed, see Review Algorithm.

Introduction
First of all, things to always avoid: As stated above, game quality is calculated as a combination of different modifiers that all are applied as multipliers to your sum of Design + Tech. Setting aside those outlined above as things to avoid, you have the following modifiers influencing your game quality: Therefore, in order to make a guaranteed perfect game (aside from trending, which is random), over the whole development process you have to
 * Developing two games in a row with exactly the same Topic/Genre or Topic/Genre/Second Genre
 * Developing a sequel or expansion less than 40 weeks after the previous version
 * Developing a sequel using the same engine. (Does not apply to expansions)
 * Developing a large game without using 2D Graphics V4 or higher / 3D Graphics V3 or higher
 * Developing an AAA game without using 3D Graphics V5 or higher
 * Developing an AAA game without assigning at least 3 specialists to respective fields that are considered important for the genre.
 * Tech/Design balance
 * Slider (time percentage) allocation
 * Game genre/topic combination
 * Game genre/platform combination
 * Trending
 * Bugs


 * Get a correct final balance between Design and Tech points


 * Conform to all slider allocation rules


 * Choose a "great combination" of genre and topic


 * Choose a platform that fits your genre (or both of your genres in case of multi-genre)

The process of creating a game can be divided into two major parts: Pre-production and Development.
 * Have no bugs.

Pre-production phase
During pre-production is when the major decisions for the game are made. The choices available during pre-production are:


 * Game Title. The game's name.
 * Size. This affects the amount of time it takes to develop the game it also alters the cost of development. Small games are almost impossible to reach an average score of 10. Therefore, if you wish to receive a perfect score it would be ideal to produce larger games.
 * Topic.
 * Genre.
 * Platform.
 * Engine. If you are creating a sequel, developing it on a new engine will yield better results.

Multi-Genre combinations
The only way to get a "Great Combo" for multi-genre games is to use two genres that when used on their own with the chosen topic result in a "Great Combo". This means that topics like Surgery can not get "Great Combo" on multi-genre games. -source

Topic/Audience combinations
You will occasionally get messages about matches or mismatches of target audience and platform you have chosen. Your choice of audience primarily affects the number of sales your game will generate. The higher the sales modifier of the selected Topic is, the more sales you will get with that target audience. You can read more about it here. These combinations are covered in the table above.

Platform/Genre combinations
Each genre has its own popularity on each platform. Your choice of genre, relative to platform, slightly affects the review scores. The higher the sales modifier of the selected platform, the more sales you will get with that genre.

When you develop a Custom Console, the genre and audience combinations are generated based on your list of previously released games; they aren't predetermined like the standard consoles. They are therefore different between one play-through and another, and even potentially different between one custom console and another within the same play-through.

For genres, your two most frequently used genres will be +++ (Great), your third most frequently used genre will be ++ (Good), fourth and fifth will be + (Okay), and sixth/least frequently used &minus;&minus; (Bad).

For audiences, your most frequently used audience will be +++ (Great), second most frequently used ++ (Good), and least frequently used + (Okay).

Platform/Audience combinations
You will occasionally get messages about matches or mismatches of target audience and platform you have chosen. Your choice of audience primarily affects the number of sales your game will generate. The higher the sales modifier of the selected platform is, the more sales you will get with that target audience. -source

These combinations are covered in the table above.

Development phase
Design sliders allow the player to control the time allocation for the various aspects of the project. The higher a slider is set to with respect to others, the more allocated time it will receive during development, which can be previewed at the bottom bar of the game development screen.

Important: Development has a large influence on your review score.

This means that, for example, if you assign 50% development time of Stage 2 to Dialogues, 30% to Level Design and 20% to AI, then during 50% of the time spent on the phase, 90% of bubbles generated by your employees will be design bubbles and 10% tech bubbles, then during 30% of the time spent, 40% of the bubbles will be design and 60% will be tech, and during last 20% of the time spent, 20% of the bubbles will be design and 80% will be tech.

Game quality and correct Tech/Design balance (exact value you must aim for is based on the chosen genre) is very important during rating calculation.

Single genre focus
When reading the tables below, remember, it is the bottom composite bar consisting of three parts (located under the sliders) that is important, not how much percentage you assign to each slider individually. All those 40%'s and 20%'s refer to the relative size of the field's part on the bottom bar.

Multi-Genre Focus
The point of multi-genres is to eliminate a genre's requirements, giving you more flexibility with what features to cram in. For example, Strategy/Adventure and Strategy/RPG has only 3 "+" fields and everything else is not bound by rules, while if you'd be making Strategy or RPG, you'd have 6 "+" fields and 1 "-" field to worry about, therefore, multi-genre gives you more creative freedom when you combine genres properly.
 * 1) For multi-genre combinations, the values are weighted with the first chosen genre being twice as important as the second one. Refer to the Review Algorithm for more information on how the following values were calculated.

The downside to using a multi-genre with less than 2 desired fields in a stage is that your game quality will not be increased as much as a multi-ged fields. -source

Employee allocation
Starting with medium sized games and up, you can assign certain employees to certain fields. You must assign an employee to each of the nine fields, and only one can be assigned to each field.

Based on the size of the game, employee will get "used up" in the project at different rate. For medium projects, the rate is 1, for large it is 5/3 and for AAA it is 2. This means that for each percent of time allocated to a certain field, employee assigned to it will receive that many usage percent. Therefore, medium game will require a total of 3 people to complete, large will require 5 and AAA will require 6, without overloading your employees. The total amount of employee's effort used is displayed as a progress bar under employee's name on the slider allocation screen. If you do not let any employee get a serious overload, you will be awarded with a 30% experience bonus for Good Management (this does not affect review scores). Overloading an employee results in less points towards Design and Technology.

No matter who is assigned to what field, every employee keeps contributing design and tech points to the project. However, it seems that depending on who you assign, overall points contributed are slightly varied. Assigning a person that fits better to the field will make you end up with more design/tech points overall. You can refer to the table in the beginning of the article to find out who is best fit for what field.

Case study:

Late in the game (year 40) while developing a medium game assigning employees correctly (every employee has enough design and tech points to fully cover the requirements of the field) gave net result of 2536 total points (average between 2 tries), and assigning employees incorrectly (every employee has not enough points to cover at least one requirement - for example, a 300/800 employee assigned to a 810/90 field) gave net result of 2404 total points (average between 2 tries). This is only a 5% increase but maybe if the difference in stats was more drastic (like, assigning a 720/180 employee to a 180/720 field) there would be a bigger difference in net result.

Since you only compete against your own high score, having a balanced all-around team (every member with very close design and tech stats) would be much more viable because it would be easier to make consistent games. A downside would be that you would have to wait a little bit longer before you can open your R&D lab.

Development phase for dummies
If you are absolutely clueless about what to do after reading the previous paragraph and want a simpler solution, just set the sliders themselves to the percentage values provided in the table below:

Read this before using the table below!


 * Sliders are 00
 * Your 2nd employee is Tech 500, Design 100, Speed 150, and Research 200
 * 3rd Employee is Tech 400, Design 200, Speed 200, and Research 100

Your tech/design ratio will be off. Your tech would be way too high for most genres. RPG, Adventure...etc would be getting bad quality (due to you getting wrong tech/design balance), while Simulation and Strategy would be getting good quality (due to getting correct balance). If your staff would have an excess of design over tech, it would be vice versa. Therefore, if you'd to follow the table below, you would have good quality games of some genre, but bad quality of other, meaning you would keep getting very bad reviews every now and then for your inconsistency in game score.

While this will work for you at the beginning of the game, when you have one employee and a few features, later in the game, when you have multiple employees and multiple features, this table will no longer provide you with the highest possible game quality but more of a rough guide.

Specialization Training
To specialize in a specific slider you will need to be level 7 and meet required levels of design and technology. This can also serve as a guide for which employees to use for each slider (the Design/Tech requirements for specialization are proportional to the Design/Tech components of each Dev focus). Great games need employees focused on either design or technology, as well as employees with a good balance of both. Save your well balanced employees for Stage #3. Specialization costs 200 research points and 5M credits per person.

More visually explicit version:

Additional Versions
Downloadable PDF version: PDF Version 1.2

Game Dev Tycoon - Game Development Chart - Template: Spreadsheet - Spreadsheet version, includes a Combination Grid for tracking combinations across all Topics and genrese