Thursday 20 February 2014

Post of the day: small game Thursday - Game Dev Tycoon

A little bit about the developers. Greenheart Games was founded in July 2012 by brothers Patrick and Daniel Klug with a mission to develop games that are fun to play. They attracted a lot of attention after making a fake version of their own first game - Game Dev Tycoon, releasing it on pirate sites and having pirating gamers go bankrupt in their game from rampant piracy.



Let's jump to the good part - the game itself!
The gameplay is very simple. You start a new game and create a character. You start in the 80s and aim to become a successful game making company by around 2020s when you will be retiring. At first all you have to do is click on your character and select what they should do. Later in game there are two menus - things that people can do individually and things that you would be working on as a whole company.



(company menu on the left and personal menu on the right)

The goal is to make games that would be as profitable as possible. That is achieved by keeping with state of the art technology by researching the newest things and putting them into your new engines, by generating game reports of the games that you made to understand your audience better. For perfection you should match topic with genre, topic target audience with selected platform target audience and the genre with the interest in it on a specific platform. Lots of variables to take into the account. You are likely to end up experimenting, but then again that's what this game is about! While making the game you'll have 3 development cycles. In each one you'll have to decide what to invest most time into.



Afterwards you wait for reviews and hope that they're positive.



(obviously my game is not as perfect as it could have been)

Then you have the extra management to think about. See that blue number in the previous picture? That's my research points. You get some research points for generating game reviews, fulfilling contracts, making games and making engines. Making engines however is pretty expensive. I never managed to have enough research points to research everything as it comes up, therefore careful research points management is a must!

Other things include such tasks as staff hiring. The better your workers are the better games you'll produce, however you have to invest quite a hefty sum in order to be able to hire a person and there's no guarantee that the people suggested to you will be good at anything.


(I invested the maximum amount, but the results were not impressive)

Then there's small chance cards that will be coming up. Opportunities to have Interviews, cards asking you how you will deal with piracy and chance cards suggesting to release your old engines to the public.



Whatever decisions you'll make the game will not try to change your view on things. Unless, of course, you pirated the game.

Besides all of that there are a bunch of secret achievements and hidden Easter eggs. The game is easy to learn, however the amount of combinations that you can make will likely overwhelm you. It's a small game, but it is very well made. If you're into simulation games you're likely to lose hours playing this game.

As far as the quality goes I would give this game 10/10. However be mindful that what I shown you here is all the game is. If you're not into these kind of games, you probably won't love this one as much as I do.

You can get this game from the developer website or steam. I just can't stress enough how good this game is. If you don't feel like getting it, at least look into it. Knowing it is most definitely worth it!


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