Game gev tycoon game creation table. Game Dev Tycoon: bad good simulator. What awaits the player

While creating quality game many factors must be taken into account. This article will guide you on how to achieve this.

Typically, the goal of game development is to get a high score (preferably 9.5+). However, during development, your actions do not directly affect this score, more on your game score. The game score (a hidden value that you won't see. Don't confuse it with so-called game reviews) is the sum of Design and Technology divided by the game size modifier (this compensates for the fact that big game takes longer to develop and accumulates more points) and multiplied by several quality modifiers. All these modifiers, as a rule, lie in the range from 0.6 to 1. Thus, reducing at least one factor reduces the total game score very significantly. The game score does not directly affect the game score, but is compared with the previous game score to calculate the game score (details in the next paragraph).

You can influence the amount of Design and Technology points outside of game development by researching new areas (allows your employees to score more points by developing in these areas) and training employees, or hiring new ones (this will increase the contribution to the common cause), while how during game development you can influence all quality modifiers. Good quality ≠ Good review!
First, you need to understand that a well-made game does not guarantee a good review (review score - it is also a table with reviews of publications).

In this game, you compete exclusively with yourself, i.e. with your previous high scores (with the exception of the very beginning of the game while you are competing with the game presets (base game high records)). Your game score is compared to your best game score (adjusted for gains of around 10%-20%) and this is your final game review (aka "review score") (before the review score changes slightly randomly). Therefore, in order to get a good review, you need to increase your previous game score a little.

This is VERY IMPORTANT to understand:

To obtain good reviews ONCE ONCE, you just have to keep playing and no matter what you do, you will eventually get a game rating of 9.5+.

In order to get good reviews every time, you have to develop games consistently improving them, but not making them perfect. Each new one needs to be done a little better than the previous one.

Why would you care about making high-quality games then? Then, it's easier to make a high-quality game (with maximum quality checks) than to make games of not the highest quality of the same lousyness

For example, in order to get a game best quality based on slider work, you can't set it to less than 20% during development (~3-6 per genre), never go above 20% (0-3 per genre), and at least twice apply more than 40% (~3-6 per genre).

However, in order to make a game of worse quality, you need to do the opposite, set less than 20% for certain topics (~3-6 per genre), more than 20% for certain topics (~0-3 in genre). So if you're aiming for the best quality, you have 60% freedom (slider value 60% of 100%, no others) in 2 sliders, 80% in ~1-4 sliders, 20% in ~0-3 sliders, and 100% freedom in the remaining ~0-6 sliders, and if you're aiming for the worst quality, you have 20% freedom in the ~3-6 sliders, 80% freedom in the ~0-3 sliders, and 100% freedom in the remaining 0-6 sliders. So you have 500%-800% (out of a total of 900%) freedom in the first case and 360%-660% in the second case. So if you stick to the "best quality" rules, you have more creative freedom than if you stick to the "worst quality" rules.

For those who did not understand anything from the two paragraphs above, I will explain. Each game has three stages of development where you move the sliders up/down. At each stage, it is IMPORTANT to set the sliders in the correct percentage, because this is a future GOOD REVIEW modifier. So, for example, Action takes precedence in development time over such parameters as Engine and Gameplay (and the engine is the most important of them). The History/Quests parameter here has a "negative" modifier. Thus, the time devoted to the Engine and Gameplay is set high (100 percent for the Engine, which has a modifier of 1, and 80% for the Gameplay, since it has a modifier of 0.9), and 0% is set for Stories / Quests (because the modifier is 0.7 ). And we see from the bottom of the progress bar that we have more than 40% of the time spent on the engine and gameplay, and less than 20% on the Story / Quests - this is exactly what is said in the paragraphs above: "Bad" modifier has little time for development, and "good" (with a coefficient >= 0.9) more than 40% (on the progress bar, not on the sliders).

Even more radical rules in genre/theme combination. There are great combos (which have a quality modifier of 1) and there are strange combos (with quality damage by a minimum modifier of 0.6). Therefore, if you need to get a weird combo, you will be very limited in what genre/theme you should choose (not to mention creating multi-genre games). However, if you are focused on creating Great Combinations, you have more freedom.

For example, Dungeon (Dungeon), Airplane (Airplane), Fantasy (Fantasy) and many other themes can create not only one worst Strange Combo (see the table with + and -, there are only 2 minuses), but also 4 Great Combos (4 pros). ). In general, there are a lot of themes that give more Weird Combos than Great Combos (Game Dev (game development), Superheroes (Superheroes) with three Weird vs. one Great, Romance, Startups, Hospital and Surgery with a score of 2 to 1), then how most of them give more Great than Strange combos.

Therefore, this page will not help you develop a game that will get a good game review(the same page with four numbers from gaming magazines / publications). She will tell you how to make better quality games, which in turn will help you get good reviews. If you are developing games of consistent quality (Great Combos, tech/design balance, no bugs), your game score will be based almost entirely on the sum of the Design/Tech scores you see during development (orange and blue balls on top), and, this way, it will be easier for you to judge how well you have done (before you see the review). Mistakes
First of all, avoid the following things: Developing two games in a row with exactly the same theme/genre/second genre.
Development of a sequel or add-on (extension) less than 40 weeks after the release of the previous version.
Development of a sequel on the same engine (does not apply to addons).
Development big game without using 2D graphics V4 (version 4) or higher/3D graphics V3 (version 3) or higher.
AAA game development without using 3D graphics V5 or higher
Developing a AAA game without assigning at least three experts in relevant fields deemed important to the genre.
As stated above, the quality of the game is calculated as a combination of various modifiers, each of which is applied as a multiplier to the sum of Design and Technology. Leaving aside those mentioned above, the following modifiers remain that affect the quality of your games:

Technology/Design
Slider offset (percentage of time)
Genre/Game Theme Combinations
Trends (trend)
Errors (Bugs)
So, in order to guarantee a high quality game (apart from the trend, which is somewhat of a random modifier), during development you should:

Get the right final score balance between Design and Technology
Choose a great combo of genre and theme
Choose a platform that matches your genre (or both genres in the case of a multi-genre game)
Identify and remove errors (bugs).
The process of creating a game can be divided into two main parts: pre-production and development. Preparation for production.
During pre-production, when the main questions about the game are being resolved, the following options are available:

Name of the game
The size. It affects the amount of time spent on development and its cost. It is hard for small games to score average 10 points.
The target audience
Topic. General theme of the game (Military, Fantasy, Sci-fi, etc.)
Genre
Platform.
Game engine.
The choice of genre is the most important in the preparation process. Genre influences most of the decisions that will be made during the development process. Theme / Genre Combinations
An important part of preparing for production is the choice of theme and genre. Their combination can result in either a Great Combo or a Strange Combo.

Multi genre combination
The only way to get a Great Combo for multi-genre games is to use two genres, each of which will get a "Great Combo" according to the theme. This means that a theme like Surgery cannot get a "Great Combo" in multi-genre games (see the table above, surgery only has one great combo combination).

Genre/Platform Combination
Each genre has its own popularity on each platform. Your choice of genre in relation to the platform has little effect on game reviews. It has more impact on game sales. The higher the selling modifier of the selected platform, the more you will earn.

This table is based on raw data. (++) - Excellent fit, (+) - Normal fit, (-) - Avoid these combinations.

Combinations of platform and target audience.
You will from time to time receive messages about the compliance / non-compliance of the target audience and the selected platform. Your choice of audience has little effect on Game Reviews. First of all, it affects the number of sales of your game. The higher the sales modifier of a given platform, the more you will earn from that audience.

Based on original game data.

Fits good

Great fit

Avoid these combinations

Table on PC modified by latest version games and written according to the records from there.

What awaits the player?

Game Dev Tycoon refers to simulators made with high quality and on high level. The main task for the player is to create his own own game to eventually become the leader of the gaming business. As expected, you will start creating from a small garage in the distant 80s, but you will not have much money, so you will have to save on lunches and, in parallel with learning the art of game design, you will also need to bring comfort to the room that you rented. Now it will be necessary to master new technologies, train new employees and develop the most popular games.

Successful completion

If you can't get good reviews, go bankrupt all the time and can't fix your mistakes, then let's take a closer look at the walkthrough:

1. If you haven't made your own custom engine yet, it's best to use features like Basic Sound and 2D Graphics V1.
2. To get started, try developing an action sports game. Set the sliders to 1, 2, and 3 steps as follows - 100/50/0, 0/50/100, 0/100/50.
3. Now start developing the genre military strategy with the sliders set at the marks indicated above.
4. If everything is done properly, then you already have enough to start developing your own engine (custom) and approximately 100,000 game currency for expenses. After creating the engine, include in it 2D graphics V2.
5. After such manipulations, you should still have enough points left to start exploring the Racing genre.
6. Now you will use only V2 2D graphics and forget about all other programs, including basic sound.
7. When developing Races and Space Sims, leave the sliders in their original positions.
8. Proceed to the study of Fantasy, and then to the subsequent development (the sliders have not changed).
9. Now is the time to move on to RPG genre design and set the sliders to 0/100/100, 100/100/50 and 100/100/100 respectively. It will be possible to produce one game after another - medieval RPG or fantasy, but you should never release the same theme in a row. If you want variety, then try creating Adventures, but note that this topic is more difficult due to the balance of d / t. No more research in the garage will have to be done.
10. You can safely go to the office if you have V1 3D graphics available for development, as well as at least 2,000,000 on your account (if the game just went on sale, then 1,500,000 is possible).
11. Now is the time to start managing people and educate yourself to "make me think".
12. Hire 4 workers at once, preferably in quick succession. If possible, choose a candidate who has a low level of low Design / Technology, as well as more research and less speed.

Start by developing games one by one from each existing genre, this will give you access to Action and multi-genre games - this topic is considered the most difficult to balance properly. Do this before the balance starts working and you get > 30 D+T points.

Review of the game "Game Dev Tycoon"

Genre: economic simulator.

Platform: MAC, RS.

Supported OS: Windows, Mac, Linux.

Management: mouse and keyboard.

I'm sure many of you here love games. Some of these people would like to create their own, but due to a number of reasons, be it a lack of skills, knowledge, or simply time, they could not do it. Economic indie developer simulator computer games Game Dev Tycoon from the Greenheart Games studio allows us, at least a little, to be an igrodele.

By the way, the developers have fought against piracy in their game. A version of the game was published on the Internet with minor changes in the code. Thanks to these changes, at some point our studio itself became a victim of piracy and the money ran out very quickly, which led to Game Overy.

Start.

We start our game development journey in a small garage with 70K money. With due diligence, you can increase your money, and move from the garage to a spacious office.

After the name of the player and the name of our company have been thought up, we can proceed. The very first thing we are allowed to do is create our first game.

Game development.

After the player has decided on the genre of the game out of the five proposed: action, adventure, RPG, simulator and strategy, and has chosen the theme of the future project from several open ones, the development itself begins. it has 3 stages where you need to adjust the sliders depending on what we want to get. If the player has an idea about games and what is important in a particular genre, setting up the sliders correctly will not be difficult.

Review of the game "Game Dev Tycoon"

When all 3 stages are completed, it remains to wait a little more, to eliminate bugs. Nobody likes bugs, not even the virtual players of our creations.

When everything is ready, we can release or remove the game, give or change the name.

After waiting a little time, our creation is rated. The line between good scores and terrible is very thin, even with the correct distribution of runners, it is possible to create a terrible game.

Review of the game "Game Dev Tycoon"

Research

The second thing we can do in the game is research. They are needed to open new game topics, the ability to make games not on one, but on three platforms, to improve your engine. YES YES you can create your own game engine and sell or rent it out over time.

After creating a few games, a journalist suddenly visits us and asks for an interview about the game we are developing. Also, a journalist can ask what is more important in a game of this theme and genre. Some time after the interview, the media will report on our game, plans, and the like, and after this moment, the "Hurry" counter appears. It shows how much people are waiting for our next masterpiece. After the necessary research, we have the opportunity to raise the level of excitement ourselves by investing in different kind advertising, from small investments in magazine advertising to large advertising campaigns.

Review of the game "Game Dev Tycoon"

With the further passage of the game, the player begins to be invited to exhibitions, where, depending on the money paid, we will be given small, medium and large stands. Exhibitions like this are a great way to raise the hype for an upcoming game. As well as with marketing, after the right research, the player will be able to create their own exhibitions.

Development

By creating successful projects, the player has the opportunity to move into a spacious office and hire the first workers. From now on, our character and hired workers can be trained for research points. Make them specialists in design or masters in technical terms, it's up to the player. Research points drop during game development, when working under a contract, when creating an engine.

Fans, publishers and money

Well, the player and employees are trained and all the runners are correctly placed, but sales are not high. Fans play a big role here. In general, they appear immediately after the release of the very first game, but we understand their meaning later, more fans -> more potential buyers, more buyers -> more profit. But what if there are few fans and you want money? This is where publishers come in.

By setting certain conditions, the publishers give money for the development of the game, take most of the proceeds, but the sale of the game with the help of the publisher is 10 times more independent work without a publisher. But if some conditions are not met, the publisher may take some of the money from you in the form of a fine.

Review of the game "Game Dev Tycoon"

We have to resort to the help of a publisher until our small company is strong and does not gain a sufficient number of fans and earns a lot of money. But what to do if the money runs out and new ones will not be earned soon. The first time a player has a negative balance, the toy makes concessions and the bank gives us some kind of credit. The bank can give a loan several times, but at one not very pleasant moment this does not happen and the game ends. The absence of the opportunity to take out a loan whenever you want and for any amount is a little upsetting, but with the right passage, you can never encounter such a situation.

By the way, regarding the conditions from the publisher, there can be 6 of them: platform, genre, game theme, target audience, game size and minimum rating. By the way, the penalty from the publisher will depend on the minimum rating that you will receive after creating the game to order. There may be no conditions other than the minimum score to give the player more freedom to be creative.

Review of the game "Game Dev Tycoon"

New opportunities

Here the player explores new opportunities, releases games, advertises himself at exhibitions and, not only in general, finds new opportunities where to spend hard-earned money. And if a couple of conditions are met, we are given two more eaters of our money: a technical laboratory and a research laboratory. If everything is clear with the second one, research is new and useful, then in the first one the player can create his own console. But it’s worth approaching this business with a very thick wallet, since the creation of the console will eat our savings and will not choke, but if the console is created and sold, if the player stimulates its sales by issuing exclusive games, then all costs will pay off in full

Review of the game "Game Dev Tycoon"

Another of the possibilities presented by the game is the creation of your own online masterpiece. Such games can be withdrawn from sale by the player himself, unlike offline games. Before a certain moment the income from the MMO exceeds the cost of maintaining it and the profit flows into our hands, but then the moment comes and it becomes unprofitable to maintain such a monster, and he eats more and more money. Along with closing the project, the player can create an add-on that will allow a little more income from our MMO.

Conclusion

Wow, we've reached the conclusion. Summing up all of the above, we have the opportunity to create games that are analogues of existing masterpieces, or you can create at least here what many are looking forward to. Pro this game You can tell more and more, but let the players themselves find everything that is not described in the review. Unfortunately, this toy cannot last more than a couple of evenings due to the monotony of what comes in the last stages of the game, and even if the game is successfully completed, repeating your success in the second or third playthrough is not as interesting as discovering everything new for the first time.

Replay gaming history. Create best selling games. Research new technologies. Become the leader of the market and gain worldwide fans.

Game Dev Tycoon is a game developer simulator from Greenheart Games, which consists of only two people, two brothers, Patrick and Daniel Klug. At first, the game was planned to be made for iOS, then they decided to make it for Windows (moreover, it was for the Windiws Store and Win8, mysterious people).

I am not a big fan or connoisseur of simulators, I have not played and do not want to try all sorts of Football Manager and other dubious sims, the most I can do is 24 hours in SimCity. I stumbled upon Game Dev Tycoon thanks to a sale on Steam, I had never even heard of it before. The choice was between GDT and Papers, Please, both indie and both $4. I downloaded pirates and after half an hour of playing I decided to take the first one.On the this moment I played about 20 hours, and most likely I will not sit in it for more than 24 hours.

Short description:

Our company starts somewhere in the 80s, in a garage. The game cycle lasts 35 years, during which you need to lead your company to success and prosperity. During this time, new gaming platforms will enter the market, such as Ninvento's Gameling and Vonny's Playsystem. At the end of the 35th year, the game will count your merits and give you the final score. After that, you can continue to play, but then the in-game world stops developing and no new platforms will appear. In addition to creating the game itself, you can, and should, do research on, for example, new themes for games, or new technical bells and whistles for your engine (which you then create yourself). As you develop, you will be able to hire employees to train them and, in the future, give specialization.

Creating a game consists of 3 stages: 1) Creation of a concept. You choose the setting of the game (space, fantasy, military, etc.), the target audience (if you have already explored it), the genre (action, RPG, etc.), the platforms on which the game will be released and the engine with which you will create it. 2) Selecting the version of "graphics" available in your engine. 3) Actually, the creation of the game, which, in turn, is represented by three more stages of moving the sliders and setting workers in directions.

Now, actually, about what is good in this game. And, as it turned out, not so much.

Since this is a game development simulator, it will give an understanding of the basics of development and the problems that developers face. You will be penalized if you do not reach the required average rating from the press (if you work with a publisher). At least you will understand why multiplatform is more profitable than exclusive. In addition, the developers have a sense of humor, at least look at the names of companies and platforms (Vonny - 10/10). There are also a dozen humorous achievements, such as naming your game "Pong" while working in the garage or developing a game within a game.

What is wrong with this game.

For starters, the engine. Throughout the game, from a small garage to a huge office, we have to create our own engine. We can license our engine to other companies (for some miserable pennies), but we ourselves cannot use someone else's. Besides, old version You can't upgrade, just make a brand new one. In addition, we have a large list of features for the engine, but not even short description what they do and where to use them. How is multiplayer different from online in my action? Why, for example, advanced physics can be included with basic physics, and without (how can advanced physics exist without basic.)? And at the same time - Realistic body language do well without Simple and Advanced. One would think that the advanced version includes the previous one, but physics hints that this is something else. Further, despite the fact that the developers decided to teach the pirates a lesson and then wept that only 6.5% of all players bought their game, we cannot in any way protect ourselves from piracy in the game. Moreover, it simply does not exist. The only place you can hear about it is pirated version games.

The press is also upset. Throughout our career, our games will be reviewed by as many as 4 editions. My company is now in its 90th year, games earn billions, but they are still covered by the same four magazines. At the same time, our earnings and sales of the game directly depend on the press ratings. Despite the high technology and thoughtful design, if, according to the game, the genre does not fit well with the setting, poor ratings and a sales failure are guaranteed. In addition, the press provides incredibly important information that will help make the game better. Actually no, journalists can say a few laudatory/degrading words and something obvious about the combination of the genre with the platform or praise for focusing on a certain aspect. Considering that this is practically the only source of feedback (after all, there is no concept of a community here), it is very difficult to understand how to make the game better.

As our company grows, we get fans, which is cool. But here, too, something suspicious is going on. Fans are recruited very slowly, a game that sold 120k (think about this figure) copies brought us 600k fans. That is 0.5%. This is with an average rating of 10/10 and a huge hype at the release of the game, and with negative ratings, we lose up to 200+% of fans from the number of copies sold. There is also an exhibition where we rent a stand or we can organize our own "Blizzcon" (you can even combine). The number of visitors is growing, apparently at the same rate as the number of fans. Whether the formula for calculating the increase in visitors to the exhibition does not include the number of fans of the company, or at some point some kind of modifier appears, but in the end, when we have a hundred thousand fans, the exhibition can gain a million visitors, but now I have 14k fans , and the exhibition is attended by 4k. And another interesting thing is that the number of visitors is the same for our personal exhibition and for the general one.

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Speaking of formulas, some people got confused and wrote a huge succes-guide in which they describe in detail how to break the system and deliberately lower the quality of the game, for a measured increase in the overall rating. Another guide is simpler and shows the ratio of platforms to audience, genres to platform, etc. (By the way, the game believes that on the PlayStation 5 adventure games will not be held in high esteem).

Continuing the topic of formulas and calculations, it is worth remembering the in-game economy. Let's start with the fact that we sell indie games for the normal price of 7 bucks. The whole game. But the lack of inflation is normal, although the site says that it is business simulation game. It's another thing to sell AAA games for $18 (on any platform) and the inability to regulate the price. In addition, if we release the game with a publisher, we will get more less money, for example, 0.85 cents per copy (~for a medium or large game, for some reason publishers do not order AAA projects. In general.). And it's worth remembering Glorious MMO who are in this game is totally broken. You see, the MMO in this simulator cannot be monetized. That's not at all. We just sell copies (like ArenaNet and NCsoft with Guild Wars 2) and pay for its content. Obviously, with the growth of sales, the cost of maintenance also increases, because all buyers play our game indefinitely and in the end the game still sells 100k copies a week, 100k people play it, but the content costs more than we make profits. According to the logic of the developers, in order to save profits, we should release Expansion Packs, but the fact is that the minimum budget for a AAA game is 20+kk dollars, and an MMO can cost as much as 70 (not counting marketing costs). But the most interesting is yet to come - the console in this beautiful world costs $ 47 (2.5 times more expensive than the game for her), and 12 million consoles = 22% of the total market. I will not voice the ridiculous amounts that our digital distribution platform and the licensing of the engine to other companies bring us (which we don’t have, we have no competitors in the game).

By the way, these same AAA games are made by a team of 7 (seven) people. Even an MMO with a budget of under 70kk.

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Outcome

Perhaps the developers themselves missed a little in the combination of the setting with the genre, because at least game industry and to some extent about money (any industry- about money), but to a large extent about "art", and simulating the reaction of people to some combination of genres or the ratio of gameplay to history is almost impossible. As a result, we have the best game development simulator, simply because it is the only one (game dev story from mobile devices does not count), but very, very unrealistic. I understand that I am scolding the two-man indie studio now, but I did not expect a GTA about game development from them, I expected at least a good business simulation game, but got something more like casual game to the phone. Verdict: worth taking with a 50-75% discount on sale if the topic is interesting and there is nothing else to buy.

Developed and published by Greenheart Games. The action of the game begins in the 1980s, when the gaming industry was just emerging.

Game process

The player starts by giving a name to himself and his future company. Further, the player can create his own games by choosing the theme of the game, genre, platform and game engine. Also, for 30 - 42 years, set-top boxes from well-known companies will be released. Sony will be represented in the game as Vonny, Microsoft as Micronoft, Nintendo as Ninvento, Sega as Vena, and so on.

Initially, the player starts developing games in his garage, but soon he can purchase 2 new offices. In the offices, the player can hire other game developers and work collaboratively with them.

In the process of creating a game, the player distributes the development time for each element (at the first stage, the player chooses between the "engine", "gameplay" and "plot / quests", at the second - between "dialogue", "level design" and " artificial intelligence", and on the third - between "world design", "graphics" and "sound"). After the development is completed, the game is assigned a rating, on which future sales depend.

During the game, the player accumulates research points, which he can spend on various researches (for example, - researching a new game theme) or developing the skills of developers. In order to use some of the enhancements for various development elements, the player can create their own game engine.

Toward the end of the game (in the very last office), the player has the option to create their own game console and open a laboratory for research.

Development