Ratings are getting worse and worse

[BigAl]

In my first save game, I have been trapped in a spiral of death. Each game gets worse and worse ratings. Even if I put good design settings, my review ratings are just 30%-60% everywhere.

How do you improve ratings over the board? Do I need more developers? I tried that and it looked like game quality went down, because I had lots of untrained people. Are a few specialists better than many noobs?

How does game size work? Bigger games are more expensive, they get a lot more points in gameplay, graphics, sound, technical. Do reviewers have higher standards for bigger games?

How does the current game time matter? It seems like people demand better games year by year. Can I not release "B" games in 1985, because everyone will laugh about the missing gameplay features?

Game Dev Tycoon is a much simpler game, but I liked how you could always see if your team worked or not. Sometimes you would fail because your team was good, but they didn't match the genre. You could decide between risky AAA games or solid smaller games and both could work. This is not clear in Mad Games Tycoon 2, arguably the main game mechanic is not explained: How to make good games.

[Dragoon]

"How does the current game time matter? It seems like people demand better games year by year. Can I not release "B" games in 1985, because everyone will laugh about the missing gameplay features?"
You still can. I have done so and have managed to get ratings around 80 to 90% still.

"How do you improve ratings over the board? Do I need more developers? I tried that and it looked like game quality went down, because I had lots of untrained people. Are a few specialists better than many noobs?"
Try hiring some more developers while also changing the values of the game itself. A great development team, alone, can not make a great game. You need good design choices as well.

"Game Dev Tycoon is a much simpler game," but also a lot more boring because of such.

[yutterh]

What difficulty are you on? Are you using the newest tech for your engine? Are you changing the settings according to the fan letters? Have you done Quality assurance to see if your using the right gameplay graphics, sounds, tech settings? Is your QA room improving the the gameplay of your games? Have you unlocked the second building and got a graphics and music studio up to improve graphics and music?

Edit: I am simply asking so I know what your doing or not doing.

[BigAl]

Originally posted by yutterh:

What difficulty are you on? Are you using the newest tech for your engine? Are you changing the settings according to the fan letters? Have you done Quality assurance to see if your using the right gameplay graphics, sounds, tech settings? Is your QA room improving the the gameplay of your games? Have you unlocked the second building and got a graphics and music studio up to improve graphics and music?

Edit: I am simply asking so I know what your doing or not doing.

I started on hard right away, which maybe was not the best idea. I did fairly okay the first five years, but then I started to get worse ratings and making losses on the games. So something changed over time that made the game harder.

I built Support, Hardware and Marketing before the Quality assurance, which was a big mistake. I also had the issue that I couldn't get graphics and musics to fit in the second building, so I tried buying the third one, which bankrupted me.

The most important thing that I still don't understand is how to choose Team Size for Development. I had a dev room of 7 with two star devs in it aswell. I also tried to have a second small dev room with only 3 in it for contract work and small games. Is that a good idea?

[BigAl]

Originally posted by r.wardy:

Here are two good reads on how to improve your scores:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1342330/discussions/0/3052860266933982373/
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1342330/discussions/0/3052860266936726900/

Thanks! The second link answers a lot of my questions

[yutterh]

Gotchas, yeah the first thing you want is a QA room, then support, graphics, music, then go for marketing followed by hardware or arcades. I personally don't use arcades so that's up to you.

For dev rooms size, I start at 4. When I unlock the second building I make a 6x6 room for 8 developers, then when I get the third I make a room big enough for 16 peeps until I can unlock the 5th building and I make an huge 36 man room.

Anyways for development rooms it is a mix. I personally do 50/50 designers and programmers. Other suggest designer, programmer, graphics and music until you unlock the required rooms then they do 2:1 designer programmer. I just keep it 50/50 until the motion capture studio then put all game designers in the development room.

This is a video I made for legendary and it's pretty outdated but it may help as well. I need to really make a new one cause I don't use the same strategy anymore. In the second building where the lounge and toilet I jsut make my new dev room there and the old dev room you can put training, marketing or arcade room there.

https://youtu.be/WikdQVNGQZs

Hope this helps.

[Sol]

Game Dev Tycoon is fun but it sucks goose nuts because when you release a console, it tags your "least used genre" as the console special genre. It's a method to block people from using their favorite genre. So new players always get screwed but vets know to not release special genre until they release a console first, so it's their least used genre. Then when the next console is gearing up, release every genre outside of yours to drive it to the bottom again and rinse-repeat. So it only impacts SOME players (newbies) and does not achieve any game balance, because vets just play around it.

Game Dev Tycoon also doesn't let you do half the stuff this game does.

[Sol]

As for Arcades - there's a LOT of money to be made once you set it up. Best practice is to port 5 console games to arcade. Then, create one Arcade Game as your "Arcade IP". Your first arcade games will have lower sales from building experience and stuff. If you build 5 workshops, you can set 1 to commissioned work and 4 to arcade cabinet production. If you remove your worst arcade every time you release a new one, you won't have to constantly pause and change production. You can make more money on Arcades than about anything else once you get it set up and going.

My design room has a goal setup of:
6 game developers
1 game tester
1 programmer
1 graphics
1 sound

This seems to do me right most of the time, because none of the others there will displace the game devs. I don't want final products like 82/91/99/99 for a 88% game. When using the right staff could get me closer to 95/99/99/99 for a 97% game.

Every worker is a specialist of their own room and should ONLY be used outside that room in the early game where you don't have a choice.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

You can release B games and get high review score, by using "green" features (or "yellow" if no green ones are available) and choosing all the ones that cost the most (except for the ones that are required, but the game will tell you if you're missing those.) However, the bigger the game and the more features you have, the more your fans will actually care for your game, from what I've seen. Gamers like to have all the fancy blings, not just some of them (I feel sad for any game of 2022 that comes without that RTX fad...)

Also, the skill of employees affect both speed and quality of their work... But at the start of the game, in Legendary, I've managed to get 80%+ constantly with four 30-ish employees. I use the designer/programmer/sound/graphics employee balance at first, since some games do need you to have more sounds and graphics than the designers and programmers can handle. What I also do, and what seems to be mostly misunderstood by new players (I misunderstood it too, back in the early game stages) is to keep a game polishing for a relatively long time. In my newest run, I'm trying something silly (single IP run with spin-offs) and I take half a year per game. That's about six months of polishing... Sure my bank account takes a hit for a while, but after my first game, I had money to spare.

Another thing that a lot of people don't really realize at first: Employees don't need "free time." Not working makes them bored. The only employees that used to quit for me were scientists, because they'll be sitting on their thumbs for months. I start a new game/spin-off/sequel right after publishing one. The trick is to disable crunch time (put it at the max setting which is actually "no crunch time" because that slider is weird,) and set motivation to 70% - that way, unless some room design weirdness happens, you'll only get scientists resigning, which can't be avoided - they are less and less active as time goes by.

"Star" designers are a fancy money sink, but entirely optional, and usually not needed... And at the start of the game, they can actually cause you to go bankrupt faster, due to how high their salaries are. If your studio's rating goes up, you'll start seeing people with better stats, which, if you are lucky (job listing is right now 150% based on luck,) will allow you to eventually replace all your 30-ish newbies with people of 70-ish skill.

And yes, more people means faster work, but you have to also remember more people also equals faster money drain. Growing your company too fast can be a very, very bad thing, but "how fast" depends on what you're trying to do, some "routes" require having a lot of people of one type (Console development and Arcades, broken as they are, require quite a lot of workforce,) while going for MMOs and F2Ps will require you to reserve a lot of space for servers, and self-publishing will, unless you absolutely love micromanaging, require you to use quite a bit of space for stock and production rooms.

The least logistics-heavy route is using exclusivity contracts with a big company (Minisoft/Pony/Mintendu,) and not bothering with MMOs, arcades or consoles. It's also the least profitable, but with the current game's balance, even in Legendary, as long as you learn all the basics, "less profitable" means "you'll be a billionaire by the 2000s instead of by 1990s." Min-maxing is something you should only do if you have fun doing it, because the end result will not vary except for maybe one more digit in your bank account. Once you're done with the early game grind, money starts making itself, so to speak.

[r.wardy]

I don't move into the 2nd building until i unlocked sound and graphics and have some extra money. I do however start scouting for ppl with good skill/payment ratios and decent perks before that, and yes that means i pay them for doing nothing.

Once i move on to the second building, i increase the dev room from 4 to 8 workplaces.
Build a graphics and sound studio and start making my own b+ games.
Constantly looking for better employees and replacing the bad ones.
I rather replace them and take the negative mood penalty than train them this early in the game, but that's just me.

Next step would be 12 workplaces in the dev room to speed things up a little. Although i did alright with only 10 ppl on my last run on legendary, i would not recommend it.
It depends on how quick you move to A-size games, you want more than that for those. Contract A-games can get you good money quick, if you can pull it of, but for your own games you might want to wait until there are enough freatures to justify the increased cost.

The QA gives you a good insight on the workload, but you don't have to set the %meters exactly like that. In fact, it might be better to tweak these if you see your graphics score is constantly lower than your gameplay score, just move some workload from gameplay to graphics while you look for better graphic designers. From my experience it's better when all the individual score ratings are about equal then having one or two very high and the other ones falling way behind.

Don't know what else to add ... it's like cooking ... you have to get a feeling for what works.

[BigAl]

Thanks for all the great suggestions.
One thing I just realized by reading the tool tip in game: The lead designer needs to have a high game design rating, so that each employee gets a bonus.

I got the star programmer Carmack, uhm I mean "Johnny Carmuck" and since he has a hyxpe bonus for being lead design, I put him in charge. Apparently his 12.5 Game Design rating is really, really bad

[Sol]

You want to consider the final weight of points and ask "how can the final score match what the sliders should be, with everything close to 99/99/99/99 as possible?"

[Sol]

And when you consider that, you might look at the features and think about how they line up - and your prior game scores for the same genre. If you know you're getting a bunch of tech and not enough gameplay, you can remove all programmers. If it's a genre with 50 gameplay slider and it's still happening, you can cut out features that add tech and use all features with high gameplay.

You don't need to super micromanage everything - and even if you get it perfect, RN-Gesus will have something to say about it. Which also means if you're not 100% perfect, you can still get 97-100% percent scores by coming close enough.

Have as many 90+ game devs as possible. There should be nobody else in the room unless you have a genre that skews toward graphics or sound. If so, then you can put 1 of each in the room. Usually, you will have too much "Tech" compared to everything else; which can be a symptom of gameplay features and game engine features.

I don't worry about having every special sound/graphics/quality/etc room improvement. I check gameplay report and close and reopen and when I see it as close to 99/99/99/99 as it will be AND has zero bugs, I release it. The other graphic/sound/quality/etc can be added by making a paid update and using those rooms to enhance the paid update.

[Sol]

Employee Tips: If you get someone early with good perks, pop them into the training room and keep them forever. You can also use training rooms to keep people like researchers and technicians busy in between stuff so they don't quit as often.

Technicians, when not making consoles, can slip to the workshops to make arcade cabinets. You can just port one game per Workshop and leave one more for contracts. It will take up space, but it's a great way to keep Technicians busy so they aren't quitting right before you need them to make a new console. Otherwise, they could go years at a time without work.

Always leave a few extra desks in your Support and Office,. These seats can be used to place bored employees during periods where they wouldn't have work and it won't hurt you that they are "misplaced" into the wrong role.

Create a separate 6 desk or so room for: Development, Console Development, Sound, Tech, Quality, Video - set them to auto complete all contracts and don't wait. This will give a LOT of money, better contracts, better contracted games - and contracted games can be console exclusive for your console, which is always worth doing.

Give every game one free update, one paid update (with a free update) ASAP. Then, a second free and paid (with free) update at the Week 5 mark if possible. If you release console exclusive games, this can keep them around longer. If you port that game to Arcade, it helps the IP for it a bit. Like I mentioned - paid updates can be used to add in features from the sound/graphics/quality/etc rooms.

Also, with Arcades - if you release an Arcade game and then port it, its sales will help increase the Arcade sales. Another good reason for a paid update to the port.

Note: I do not know if this works in both directions. When I port a console game to arcade, then release a paid console update on Week 4 or Week 5 (after the first 3 week rise), my Arcade sales did increase. This might just be an unrelated random increase, or a placebo effect - or, even better, it might work in both directions that the port helps the sales of the original.

[yutterh]

Not gonna lie, this topic makes me really want to make a updated video. Maybe I'll make it this weekend or next weekend. Thanks for the inspiration.

[The medic bag]

Originally posted by Old School:

Game Dev Tycoon is fun but it sucks goose nuts because when you release a console, it tags your "least used genre" as the console special genre. It's a method to block people from using their favorite genre. So new players always get screwed but vets know to not release special genre until they release a console first, so it's their least used genre. Then when the next console is gearing up, release every genre outside of yours to drive it to the bottom again and rinse-repeat. So it only impacts SOME players (newbies) and does not achieve any game balance, because vets just play around it.

Game Dev Tycoon also doesn't let you do half the stuff this game does.

oh god that is horribly designed. suppose I will live with that penalty then.