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- The more people you hire, the better your games may be. This isn't a GDT clone, you aren't limited to a dozen people in your dev rooms, and in late game (or in cases like mine, early game,) you may end up having hundreds of employees.
- Experience in all game elements are as important, or in some difficulties more important, than sliders.
- Games need a minimal amount of points in each of their four stats to get to 90%+. If you need 2000 points minimum (not at the start of the game, but this goes up steadily,) jhaving 5000 points in Sound will not mean a thing if your Graphics are only at 300, for example, your graphics being low will harm your review scores.
- Not having a subgenre or subtopic counts at having zero experience in them, which harms your review score.
- Difficulty matters: The higher the difficulty you use, the more demanding reviewers are.
- Releasing a game without debugging is bad. Some people think it doesn't matter, but it does, your review score will be worse if you release the game with bugs, and buyers may get angry and reduce your sales further (unlike Steam's reviews, user reviews in-game reflect what the buyers think, not what meme is popular at the time.)
You don't need QA until 1979 or beyond if you know where the sliders are (they don't change unless you choose random slider settings,) but by 1983 it may be difficult to turn your save back on track.
I myself was confused and did lose the first couple runs I tried in this game, but the mechanics can be learnt and even avoided (I don't bother with MMOs or subsidiaries in most of my runs.)
From there, the sliders are only a percentage of what you need to make a good game. Also your genres need to match, your topics need to match your genres, you need the correct target group, experience in genres, topics, platforms and the features you use, the quality of your technology (engine), and the quality of your employees and how many you have working on it.
Every game has a total amount of points (gameplay, sound, graphics, technical) it needs to score higher. Improvements (from the specialized rooms) give an easier boost for this, but also you can polish your game (continue to develop it after it's 'finished') to improve your game too.
You don't need to get all of this right to get a good game, but the more you get right the better your outcome will be.
Edit - Ninja'd by KT but his advice is good too.
Have a look on Steam for FenomeN's guide as it covers those as well as settings for one of the mods.
There's a buffer which varies by difficulty level that lets you 'get away with' some missing stars. Legendary I think gives you very little room to move, but the easier levels give you a lot more leeway.
So as well as needing the right number of 'game points' when you release, you also need to not be missing too many stars from your experience.
That's why the best strat for the early game is to begin by churning out commissions. You get the star experience you need without carrying any of the risk of a poorly rated game.
Once you're getting 3, 4 stars across your key game components, you can publish your own and your reviews will be a lot higher. Ofc you still need a decent number of staff on to produce the game points you need as well.
On the easier levels, medium and below, you don't even need to bother with contracts for experience. Just hire everyone who comes along, stick them in dev rooms and keep churning your own trash games. The reviews will improve with time
Thanks for the tips. I'm having the exact same issue, and so I was getting rather frustrated. I'll try these out tomorrow.
I really don't get what I can do to improve it.
Look at the four bottom sliders, the only ones that are percentile. These tell your employees what to focus on. If you're working on a racing or adventure game, you'll need far more graphics and sound than for a skill or puzzle game. But even with a skill or puzzle game, your employees may not be getting the minimum points needed for those stats, so the solution there is to move those sliders so you get more of those stats for a while.
The other solution is one I call "throw people at problems until they stop being problems." To explain: the more people working at a game, the more points you'll produce every second. I tend to have twenty employees before 1976 ends, and may have over one hundred employees by 1978, and that lets me both release games fast (which means I make a lot of money early on) and make sure they have the highest review rates I can get. But don't forget contract work and contract games - contract games help you make better games if used right, and they can also make you some money on the side.
This game is not like Game Dev Tycoon or its many clones, you don't have a limit on how many employees you can have, other than what your CPU and GPU can handle, and the more employees you have, the better. In very late game, to release games fast enough to not have your billions slowly run dry, you'll need to have lots of people around.
But my usual playstyle needs the player to know when to stop hiring people, and even after using that method for over one year, there's times I'll go overboard and have to scramble to keep up with expenses.
There could be many things playing against you, things I used to do too when I started playing, please read all these, since none of these on their own will give you a 90%+ game every time, it's the combination of all of them that does it:
- Releasing a buggy game will cripple your review score, and releasing a game that's too buggy will cause debuffs that further decrease sales. I'm pretty sure those are a thing even in Medium, although they should not be as harsh as in Legendary.
- Having too few employees will cripple your review score.
Every employee will generate a number of "stat points" each second. Look at the four stats you see when looking at a game in development. From my testing, In 1976 you need to have at least 100 points to sound and graphics, but the game also expects you to have more of "Gameplay" since that's the easiest stat to have at the start, so you'll need at least 200 of it. If you're making a racing game, the requirements for sound and graphics go up to around 150 and 120, while gameplay still needs at least 200.
Edit: These requirements go up with time, even in 1977 the minimum stat points are almost double as much, and it keeps growing so much, in 2015 your game may need to have many thousands of points to even be average.
- Having no experience in too many game elements will cripple your review scores.
What is experience? Those "stars" you see for every item you use in a game. Topics, genres, platforms, gameplay features, engine features, they all have these 'stars' and the more stars you have, the better your game will be. Having less than three stars will negatively affect your review score.
But here's another thing: The higher the 'stars' the cheaper some things will get. Specifically gameplay and engine features will be cheaper to add to your game if they have more stars, and they'll also give your game higher stats.
Edit: How to increase experience? Contract work, or making trash games using the same genres and topics.
- And here's a huge thing that the game doesn't really make obvious (some people may think it obvious, but from a "never even looked at how game design works" POV it is not): You need at least one Game Designer. You can make an excellent game with only one of those, but not having one will make your game much worse than it could be. I generally have my CEO be a game designer since I can boost her skill in game design to 65, making her an above average game designer. Programmers get things like contract work done faster, and are in early game your main source of "Technical" points, so nowadays I'm using more programmers than developers (even having my CEO being the lone dev and having dozens of programmers early game.)
Yeah this is def not a GDT clone. Which is the reason I bought it over several different games of the same "type". Never stop growing and training your employees. At one point I had removed all my production and stock for digital games and turned it into over 100 support, who couldn't handle the fan support work load lol
What I do is create a Square in a corner with Game Design, Graphic Design, Sound, and Motion capture with some 5ish employees each. then create larger rooms elsewhere and use them to support. This keeps it uniform for me and cuts down on FPS lag once i get to 200 employees lol. I have some 500. I personally use the recruit feature and sort by the Philanthropist perk and kinda cheat the system lol
Philantropist is a nice perk, but you can't really put a lot more desks per room than the overcrowding limit tells you (even with grid clipping and rotation clipping,) anywhere but in the Training room. And in rooms like Sound or Motion Capture, there might as well not be an overcrowding limit at all, since you rarely (if ever) can put enough desks in those room to hit their overcrowd limit.