Questions about development room and other things

[Ekud]

Hello guys,
I'm in the middle of my first playthrough, in legendary (marathon speed) difficulty, and I think I'm gonna restart cause I can't make money anymore and there are things I can't understand, so I hope you could help me.

The first thing that came to my mind is, in development room, must I put in only programmers ? Or should I make a more versatile team with game designer, graphic and sound ?

I know there are room for those skills, so there is my next question. When should I use those rooms ? As soon as possible ? Must I check all box for improve my game for every game I made ? Are they useful even for B game ?

And just to be sure. I have a save before it start to get worse in 1984. My best "IP" is 1. And I have 61.500 Fans. Is my game screwd or can I come back ? x) I learn to late the importance of getting a high IP, and I think that's why I'm starting to struggle

Thank you

[Padelboot]

Going for legendary difficulty in your first game is quite the thing. Generally I would suggest to start on lower difficulties to get acquanted with the game mechanics and have more wiggle-room to try things.

That said, I will try to answer your questions as best as I can. At the start, where you don't have specialized rooms, it can be an option to have graphics and sound artists in your dev room, in order to push sound and graphics points up. The points your employees create are ABSOLUTELY key in gaining good ratings. Specialized employees gain more points in their respective area, even if they are just in the dev room. You can also change the priority focus later in development to catch up in an area you are lacking.

Once you have access to specialized rooms: get them! Not only will your employees be much more efficient, you can also add further details which greatly increase the points you get. For example the graphics studio allows you to add better UI and cutscenes (provided you have the cutscenes feature). The specialized rooms should ONLY be staffed by specialists. So graphic artists go to the graphics studio, sound artists to the sound studio, programmers to the motion capture studio... and also the dev room. Once you have the specialized rooms, don't put anyone but programmers into the dev room! (the one exception being game designers, but you only technically need one of them). A mixed team is only useful in the earliest stages, after that the room is better used for professionals with the exact skill you need for that room: programming. (and perhaps game design).
One mistake I made is to not expand soon enough. By the 1990s the "cute little game studio with 10 employees" will get crushed by the competition and they won't be able to rack up enough points. At least not with incredibly long development time (which costs a ton of money).

Just throwing any and all features into a game won't do much for you. Ideally you should add the ones, which give you the most points. You can see that hovering over the feature. Depending on genre some features fit much better and thus give more points, while others don't fit at all and get you just something above 0. You can have quite some leeway here on normal difficulty. I still use "useless" features like a pause function for my games, despite it giving negligible number of points in gameplay. Mostly for roleplaying purposes. But in legendary you would fare much better to always pick the ones, which give you the most benefit. Don't rush to make AAA titles either. You can do pretty well with smaller games, even in later stages, as long, as you pick high-wielding features to add.

You recognized the importance of IPs. Good! They not only sell better, they also add a ton of fans, which will increase game sales even further. Fans sell games. And the most prudent way to get them is to make excellent games in known IPs and winning awards with them. (You can also do, like, studio tours I guess, but this becomes a moot point once you have a game factory rolling).

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Originally posted by Ekud:

legendary (marathon speed) difficulty

I know your pain. I may play almost exclusively on Legendary and Very Hard, but that's because I learnt how to play the game in lower difficulties, after Legendary very thoroughly kicked my ass on my first playthrough.

As for your questions:

- Programmers and Game Designers have the fastest development speed of all employees you could put in the development room. You effectively only need one (but will need one) game designer in that room, and the rest could be anything you want, but putting graphics/sound employees will both decrease the number of gameplay/tech points you get (which are the ones you'll need the most of at first,) and development speed, which are two things you don't want to happen in early game (before 1985 or so.)

- "Speciallized" rooms have two functions: One is to produce much more points than the development room, but of only one specific stat. The second is "improvements" which basically let those rooms work at the same speed as the development room works during development, and also negate a hidden debuff to your review score later on. As for "when" to add them? That varies with difficulty, but generally you will not need QA until after 1977, and you won't need graphics or sound rooms before 1980.

Improvements can help you get stat points for your game. Stat points are one of many different mechanics that your reviews are scored on, and having too few points* will negatively impact your review score, but having more points than you need will do absolutely nothing positive. So it depends. If your games already have enough sounds/graphics points without improvements, you would only be improving your review score slightly, at the cost of a relative lot of money.

I have a save before it start to get worse in 1984. My best "IP" is 1. And I have 61.500 Fans. Is my game screwd or can I come back?

An IP rating of 1 in 1984 is quite low for Legendary, and the number of fans you have would be low for Medium. Unless you can churn out one 95%+ game per month you're pretty much stuck into a death spiral - a thing that, I've learn, can already be happening before you notice anything is wrong. It's not a thing that "happens" at a point in time, but a consequence of things going wrong over time, coupled with, probably a relative lack of profit.

By the way, while playing at a lower difficulty can help you learn things, a lot of the game's mechanics have a very stunted influence over your success in difficulties above Hard, and it's only in Legendary where the game actually goes "no, I don't want you to win and I'll do everything I can to make sure you don't win." Unlike the Fallout 4 enemies, it's not just called "Legendary" because it sounded cool. ;)

* Stat points required will grow over time, are weighed on a per-stat basis (so each stat needs to be "at least" the required number, no matter how much the sum of all stats is,) and will start off higher and grow relatively faster the higher your difficulty is, they stop growing around 2026 but the numbers go from a few dozens (Very Easy)/a hundred and a half (Legendary) to several thousands (Very Easy)/more than thirty thousand points.

[Ekud]

Thank you both of you.

I started on legendary because I've already done 100% MGT1, so I though naively that I could play on max difficulty directly x)
But they are not the same game, so That's why I came here ^^

So I learned a lot, and I think I will restart a fresh game, but still in legendary (I'm stubborn)
I don't think I undestood everything with IP and delay between games of the same IP, but now that I could do a good start, It will be easier with lots of save to learning by myself.

Thank you again !

[Kyouko Tsukino]

IPs: Games of the same IP suffer an IP growth penalty if released too soon after the last one. For sequels it's more than one year (so if you release a game in January you may want to wait until January next year before releasing its sequel) and for spin-offs it's six months (IIRC) between spin-offs of the same IP.

However, one of my findings due to my completely unrealistic way to play (one game per month or every two months) is that you can actually throttle through IP growth penalties if you're releasing your games quickly enough (and with good enough quality, as in, 90%+ review score.) How quickly? "one game per month or every two months." Three months may be good enough, too, but I'm not sure.

Another thing I learnt lately: In early game (before 1980) sound and graphics point matter a lot less than gameplay and controls. I can hit 90%+ on a game that has the amount of points of gameplay/controls but only ~50% of the points needed for graphics and sound, but a game with 75% on everything will usually not hit 90%. It's another point in favor of "sound and graphics go in sound and graphics" much despite how the tooltip tells you it's fine to have sound and graphics people in your dev room.

Taken from actual numbers that I've tested enough* to know they are there and work: Need Gameplay 131, Graphics 131, Sound 131 and Controls 147 in November 1976 to reach the stats threshold for a "perfect" game, along with full experience on all its elements, suitable sub-genre and topics, and perfect slider positions. This is all doable at normal speed if you're puking out games at my usual speed, and already know the slider settings by memory.

Anyhow, if I were to get 150/60/55/162 stat points on a game with everything else perfect, compared to the numbers above? 90%-93% review ratings. An otherwise perfect game with a stat spread of 100/100/100/110? "Hello there, 80-85%."

* "Get a life?" I had a lot of those in old NES/SNES games, I think.

[Ekud]

That's good to know.
So you let your team polish your game before 1980 to hit the right amount of gameplay, control etc.. ?
But what after 1980 ? Is it still a good thing to let them polish the game after all bugs have been corrected ?

About IP, I read one of your post here when you said that you make 12 spin-off of a game, so after you can only make sequel of each spin off. (And that make 1 game per month)
Does that still work or do I misunderstood what you said ?

[Kyouko Tsukino]

The only good number of bugs to release a game with is zero.

Any bugs will lower your sales and hurt your review scores. And releasing games with too many bugs ("too many" varies depending on year and number of fans, from what I've seen) will cause your fans to get progressively angrier with you, lowering your sales, not generating new fans, and all that nice stuff.

Polishing is always good, and if your games aren't getting enough stat points to get 98%, or improvements cost you a small (or large) fortune, they'll help you get higher review scores. Higher review scores = more sales, higher IP and studio rating growth. More fans/IP rating/studio rating = more future sales. Future you will thank you for not releasing crappy games.

About IP, the debuff for sequels happen if a game's released before one full year has passed, so yes, doing 12 spin-offs in-between can help. If you don't want to make spin-offs, cycling through twelve or more IPs with three or more cycling genres (or just your special genre,) also helps avoiding that debuff. This applies for making one game per month. Making games less often, you can get away with a smaller cycle, as long as the time elapsed between sequel and sequel is one year or more.

In either case, sequels will compete against their prequels. Releasing a sequel will reduce the sales of the prequel, but after one year, your games will probably be already in their final stretch anyways, so taking a hit on a game that sells, let's say, five hundred copies per week by releasing a new game that sells three thousand copies a week (just for being newer and benefiting from a higher IP rating from the start,) is a net gain.

[Ekud]

I'm not sure about one thing.
So i make a game in janurary. Then i make a spin off in march.
If I make a sequel one year later of my first game and then, 2 month later i make a sequel of my spin off, did I get the debuff?

(sorry, english is not my native language so I'm not sure to understand everything :x)

[Kyouko Tsukino]

The sequels of different game will all get debuffs if made less than one year after its prequel, not just any game of the IP. So in that case you mention you shouldn't be getting any debuffs other than the small sales reduction that happens to the old games of an IP when a sequel to them is released.

[Ekud]

Alright, I got it.
Thank you for your patience! It's nice to have you on this forum :)