 Game Dev Story Guide ✍
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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. |
Walkthrough / Strategy
First thing you should do is get more workers so you can finish tasks faster. So hire two extra workers using Word of Mouth. Your team of four should hopefully have 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.