Tips (Game Dev Story)

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This page consists of tips / a walthrough that is subject to opinion. While content is still required to be factual, tips are simply a possible route one may decide to pursue. Click here to add a new tip

Beginner Tips

• Try to hire new staff when you have more money. (The more staff you have, the faster your game will be completed).
• Continue to create games (make sure you choose quality or budget), even if a game is on sale.
• The game direction (you may focus on the Realism & Polish) but the direction depends on the game.

Walkthrough / Strategy

First thing you should do is hire more staff so you can finish tasks faster. So hire two extra staff members using "Word of Mouth". Your staff of four ideally should have at least a graphics designer, a writer, and a sound engineer. Even if you do not have all of those, this is more or less irrelevant at this point. Any research points you do get use them to level up the writer, graphics designer, and sound engineer in roughly that order. Do not bother leveling them up too much just one level or two each will do.

Just after you requested more workers you should do a PC game with Speed because otherwise you cannot even try to make a console game which is immensely more profitable. Finish it ASAP and release it bugs et all. By this time you should have all 4 team members. Aim for a Microx SX game next and finish it with Speed ASAP (fix all bugs this time) hopefully before the Exodus is even released. Do not bother with licensing the Exodus or the IES and go straight for the Game Kid license when it shows up. The reason is license and dev costs. When the Game Swan shows up you should license that as well.

When you have enough money for the most expensive hiring option do it and get 1 producer and 1 director to replace the mostly useless coder and writer. You can even go full hog and hire two producers and two directors which can do the writing, graphics design, sound engineer tasks as your team but this is excessive at this point.

The first games you develop should be the cheapest to develop with the highest impact possible without any initial research like Puzzle/Reversi. You can see the genres and combos in detail in the relevant section in the Wiki.

Do not bother training your initial team too much. Most of them will be replaced with better personel after your studio gets upgraded and you can hire a team of six people. Release early and often and the money will start piling up especially after you start using the boosts to improve your game quality. Make sure to advertise. Even crappy games will sell with enough advertisement.

After this you have a lot of options. I am currently playing my fastest game yet where I developed a 32-bit console with CD-ROM 2 years before the release of the Playstatus. I released a 64-bit console with BD-ROM around the time the Playstatus was released. With your own console your game licensing costs are a lot cheaper and if you are ahead of the curve you will get a lot more game sales as the market will be larger than other currently existing consoles. The loss of gamers for not releasing a game for too long can be compensated by two things: release a game immediately before starting R&D on a console and advertise (e.g. TV and/or Blimp Advertising) when releasing the first game on the new console you just developed.

Of course you cannot develop a new console without having enough skilled personel. You can develop the 32-bit console relatively easily even with the lower skilled personel i.e. without hackers but don't try doing a 64-bit console without all three hackers and quite a bit of training or it will take too long. Besides you will need all that development power to develop Game Kid or WonderSawn games in order to raise the capital required for that console which can easily go close to $100 M.

Walkthrough (alternate)

As an addendum to the walkthrough above, another way of creating your own console involves the following strategies. You need $190-million to build the ultimate console with both the Potato Chip and Punch Cards. This also requires 6 Hardware Engineers.

1. Staff: You should have, at the very minimum, the following staff to be trained as Hardware Engineers: Mister X, Sophie Kairo, Cokie Bottleson, Francoise Bloom, Stephen Jobson. Of these, get rid of Sophie Kairo after the console is completed. Cokie, on the other hand, is easily worth the $60k yearly salary you'll end up paying with all jobs maxed out.
2. Level up's: Your aim with the employees is to get them to Hardware Engineer as quickly as possible while using the least number of Career Change Manuals, with the exception for Mister X - give him all the training on every job category to unlock as many game types/genres as possible. For everyone else, remember that the only prerequisites for Hardware Engineer are both Director and Producer jobs at max level, and you do not need all four basic job types completely maxed for each employee. Example: max out the levels of Sophie Kairo's default job (Lv.1 Director). Use one Career Change Manual to change her job to Designer, level that up, and then use another Manual to change to the Lv.2 Producer you just unlocked. Max that, and you can then use a third Manual to switch to Hardware Engineer.
3. Money: You should have the $190-million to build the dream console, plus at least two years' worth of salaries. Doing so will ensure you have enough funds to finish both the console and the first game release under the new console.
4. Research Points: take a few months off between game releases to perform contracts. In terms of ROI, Tool Development is one of the better paying contracts RP-wise for relatively little work done.

The Time Traveller Cheat

To make your company a less failure one, The time traveller cheat has a way to do that. It only uses the manual save feature. There is an AutoSave but it’s quite not useful within this Cheat Method. The aim of this cheat is to replay the previous settings (the saved one) when a certain failure appears during the gameplay. To do this, you have to save the current best state of the game and when the time a failure arrives, you have to systematically restart the game program and load the saved state to have a better chance not to attain the same failure.

1. Project Development Scenario

When you are having the plan to make a new game or to take contact projects, save the game immediately. During the development there are certain things that will make the project a failure. One is, you had accidentally chosen the wrong person who will be assigned to a certain task. Other is that, there is another company that has the same genre you are producing with. And if you take contact projects there could be instances that the development cannot be done before the deadline.

2. Development Boost Scenario

When an employee goes near to the manager during a project development, possibly it will propose a boost. Before he/she gets near, try to immediately save the game.  If you think that a certain boost of element is quite not necessary to be done, like you have a high number of Fun and other elements are low and the proposal boost is for increasing the Fun, instances that that proposal will be rebuked. Try to use the cheat because it may change the element that can be boost. This scenario can conflict the Project Development Scenario because the latest saved game is not anymore the time before the creation of the project.

Another useful part is when you accepted the proposal and when the employee is done doing its thing and gradually the failure part emerges, that would be the best time to use the cheat. But make sure you have the same element to be boosted before you can agree again the proposal.

3. Hiring Scenario

If you try to apply for a hire save the game after you publish the hiring advertisement. When the secretary notifies you the applicants and when viewing them, a large scale of useless applicants, you can use the cheat to change the applicants and soon the secretary notifies you again to find useful ones.

4. Buying Scenario

When the traveling salesman arrives on the building, save the game immediately. When it reaches to the manager it will prompt a trade. If you accidentally bought a useless stuff, use the cheat. It's not quite a thing to buy from the salesman so this scenario is just optional in a sense.

5. Experimental Scenarios

When you wanted to try experimental things, like:

• To change the jobs of high ranked employees.
• To try bizarre game genre combination.
• To hire all useless employees and try to make a crappy game with them.
• To try for bankruptcy.
• And many more.

Exceptional Failure Causing Scenarios

Although not all scenarios can be redo, like:

• Blackouts other relating occurrences, because they are like to be set to a specific date and even reloading the previous state will remake the occurrence at the same time as last.
• No more access to the past, accidentally process to a save then a failure pop-ups and there is no only way but to accept the failure.
• And other possible failure causing scenarios.

How to do it on Android:

1. Save the game state you wanted to be set as the past.
2. When a failure appears, it's time to exit the game.
3. Press the Back Button into the Android Interface and it will prompt to exit the game.
4. Exit the game and restart it.
5. Load the previous manual save.
6. Try things not to acquire again the previous failure.

How to do it on iOS

1. Save the game state you wanted to be set as the past.
2. When a failure appears, it's time to exit the game.
3. Double click the "Home" button on your device (the circle button).
4. Assuming you are on iOS 7, pull / swipe the Game Dev Story section up.
   • If you are on a later version of iOS, hold down the Game Dev Story section until all the sections start jiggling, and hit the "x" on it. This does NOT delete the app, but instead just closes the program.
5. Hit the "Home" button again to return to your home screen, and restart (open) the game.
6. Load the previous manual save.
7. Retry the previous action again / a new action until you get the desired result.

Console Tips

When making a console, you should first go for 16bit, cartridge, portable. It won't sell very well, but then make 2 games for it. Its popularity will increase.  

Once your first console reaches 10% market share, make a 32bit, cartridge, console. It will sell fine, then make about 4 games for it. Leave it for a while.

Then, once you get 91,000K, make the most expensive, high quality one possible. It will cost 91,000K, so be careful. Make tons of games. Mine (the Wago Omega) has 24% marketshare. THE HIGHEST ON THE MARKET! So, that was my tip!

External Links

• http://www.gamefaqs.com/iphone/610758-game-dev-story/faqs