I just finished your video, it was quite entertaining. You have a great personality for game play videos, I hope your channel gains a lot of subscribers (you got at least 1 new one me :p). When it comes to the game It's not your fault that you made some bad games. Unless you read the text wall there is no real guidance yet. I hope to change this very soon, but basically every game takes place in an alternate reality so matches wont necessarily make sense. You have to research and find out what makes sense then try to develop those games and hit all the positive development sliders. Using procedural weights to generate matches can give some weird results like RPG + Fantasy is a bad combo. That is why i consider it an alternate reality. This is the only way to keep the player in the game and not using website spreadsheets like players do for Game dev tycoon, mad games dev and every game dev simulation out there. I want to keep the player in the game and have to think on there feet not just read websites, but this can create some weird matches.
Hey. I played your game again, and I failed again. I could not figure out how to research sliders. It felt like I press every buttons in the game. Also, contracts do not work. They would be very useful at the beginning of the game, but it felt like you would have to be very skillful to complete even the easiest one. Also, researching is very expensive, and it felt like I was just guessing a lot.
Genre's are researched from the "Topic / genre / platforms" section in the research menu. Topics can then be matched for genres / targets in the "Topic DeepDive" section. Researching a genre from the "topic / genre / platform" will give you the information for sliders / design + tech balance. The deepdive info does get expensive if you are trying to mass learn a topic but thats ment for later in the game. At first I am more expecting you to do a few training to get research or contract work then research the genre and hope for good matches with topics then do game reports. Once you make some cash from decent games using the deep dive to learn a few genres for a new topic then making a great match isn't to cost prohibitive. You can check out my game-play vid if you want I recorded a testing session I did if your interested no pressure..
Contract work is currently broken balance wise, I reduced the gains to balance other aspects and I haven't had a chance to balance contract work properly in the new version. This will be fixed very very soon, at the moment contract work is asking for to much its imbalanced for sure. For now if you research a genre and make a game with that genre you will see the info you need to get at least 6+ even if the matches aren't the best. With good matches and good design for small games you will easily get 8/9 once researched.
The game is still very early Dev stage I hope to get some in game tutorial / information together soon I hate seeing people get confused cause I know its my fault. It's a long read but in game the help menu has a huge write up about scoring and systems, I wanted to be very transparent with how my algorithms work.
ya sorry for the confusion, that is where you get new topics but you already have all 23 genres you just research them from that menu. Then of course you can deep dive match topics to genres. Once you have researched a few genres when you go to deep dive you will see some genres listed in green these are researched genres and you can easily then check that topics match to those genres and whatever target audiences you want.
Hey. I played the game for more than 4 hours, and I still cannot get that 8.5 score. I had 8.3 and 8.4, though. At last, I researched platforms and topics with its genres relationships. I made the best engine I possible and put all the sliders as it told me to. I got a full team office. The last game that was supposed to be perfect and had Great compatibility with its platform, age, genre, and topic. This game got 5.2. I do not know why. I give up. Also, when I pressed to trash one game, all UI disappeared, and I could not continue anymore. I restarted the game and had to start from the beginning because it did not save anything.
Here is a video where I show it. It is unlisted, so that only people with this link can see it.
Ok first off with as much effort and game time that you have put in I would be more than happy to give you an alpha key when alpha launches regardless of hitting an 8.5 or higher. The one game you made right but hit a low score that was a sequel and if you make a sequel within the same year you lose points and if its same engine you lose points. You just made a sequel for that 8.4 to soon so it suffered double losses for same year same engine etc.. Had it been year 3 and new engine that sequel prob would of hit 9s a you get a boost to quality provided its new year + new engine for sequel.
There are 2 hidden factors that you need to hit that aren't shown. They are the technical minimum on your engine and a minimum for tech + design that you must pass. These values increase with years and the engine check is skipped until year 3. That is why the contest was for year 3+ as that's when the full scope of checks comes into affect. These values are 75 total bubbles per year Ie 225 in year 3 for small game.. and for tech its only 3 per year for small games so an engine with tech of 9 or more will pass that check.
You didn't show the dev of that final game in year 5 so I can not see your totals but for a year 5 medium game the requirements would be 1000 tech + design, and you were way over on the engine side so that check you def hit. Did you let any workers go to 100% workload or more cause that's also a negative on quality every time a worker is over worked and assigned to a slider.
The features empower the creation of tech / design bubbles so for example if your guy naturally makes design bubbles of say 3 each time then you use a + 12 feature they will now create design bubbles of 15. Note that during medium games the person assigned to that slider is making full powered bubbles where the other workers are only adding reduced bubbles when they aren't responsible for the section. If you empower a section with big features then do a crunch skill on that worker during that section they will pump major bubbles out and you should reach minimums np.
I have personally made many perfect games and I have had a few tweets of 8.5 or higher so I know it can be done but it's def not easy. There is also some RnG in the reviews that can lower or raise your score a bit just to make it a little dynamic.
The trash game bug you encountered is a total bug and I really appreciate you finding this for me. I never really make use of the trash game and was not aware of the bug. It is removing all widgets like the older system used to do but I have since change the rest of the game to not do that for most huds and did not fix the trash game. Sadly I am only saving the game when you hit save and quit or you swap offices, I am not auto saving so when you had to reset sadly you lost your progression but I am currently fixing the trash game bug and new ver will be uploaded tonight.
Your feedback and videos have been super helpful and I would be more than happy to have you in the alpha when the time comes as your the kind of player I want to hear from. Your input will def help me make the game the best it possibly can. I hope you keep an eye on development as I have a lot of plans for the game and I would love to hear more from you. You have already raised some great ideas and found bugs honestly I really appreciate your time and effort so thank you very much Vlad and I really hope your channel gets huge for you on YouTube, I think you deserve it.
Awesome. I overloaded my workers sometimes a little bit. :D I tried to train them so that they would be able to get more energy. The game is not overly tricky. It is a great alpha. I should not expect demo or key competitions to be easy. It was fun, and if I had more ways to progress, I would go farther and get more than 9/10 at some point. I just felt like I finished the game, and it was supposed to the endpoint of this alpha.
ya overloading workers will reduce quality, and ya you basically consumed the current content for now. Right now I am adding more systems into the game but soon I will add more rooms and Large games which are going to come with some added challenges. Eventually AAA which I plan to make you use multiple studios for but still a ways away from that point yet :)
Training endurance will reduce the workload costs.
I am really glad you enjoyed what I have already done I honestly have a lot planned and I hope you check out the new content in the future if you have the time.