Game Dev Story Review
This was my first post for a blog my friend John started, The Games We Play
Hello gentlemen (and gentleladies if applicable). I hope the day finds you well. Today, we’ll be talking about Game Dev Story. What is Game Dev Story, you ask? Well, I’ll be happy to tell you. Game Dev Story is a smartphone game (Available for both Android and iPhone users) about playing the role of the president of a game development company, thus the fairly obviously titled game. I can not begin to emphasize how enjoyable this is for a video game nerd.
Early on, the game starts you out with 4 very underskilled employees a tiny office (I think it’s actually just some dude’s apartment, but it’s a bit hard to tell since you only leave to go to a bigger office). You can take contracts to do things like develop software tools, make mini games, or a host of other contract work; or you can start developing your own game. Likely, you should invest some time in doing those contracts first, just to get some capital to spend. At the start of the game, there’s pretty much just the PC to develop for, and what I think is a Atari knockoff. You see, for what is no doubt copyright reasons, none of the systems you develop for are properly named. ‘Intendo’ releases the IES, then the Super iES and then the Gamebox, for example. At the game awards, I seem to frequently lose ‘Game of the Year’ to Resident Neutrality. Over the course of 20 game years, the various companies release their consoles, and you can develop for them, once you pay their sometimes ludicrous license fees. It helps if you know about how successful a particular system actually was, so that you don’t waste your money on development. The Virtual Boy, if you didn’t know, was an abyssmal flop. Stay away from it .
Once you’ve accepted a contract (or started development of a game) your employees will go to work. They generate one of 6 products as they work: Fun, Creativity, Sound, Graphics, Research Data, and Bugs. Contracts will only require 1 or 2 of the first 4, but games are rated on a combination of all of the first 4 (and how many bugs they have, but that can always be reduced to 0 during debugging). For a contract, completing the contract simply requires your team to generate enough of whatever stat(s) the contract requires in a certain time period. Early on, you’ll barely scrape by on ones that require 30 of 2 different stats, late game, you can finish 2 100 stat requirement contracts in a week flat. When you complete a contract, you are awarded the promised cash, and some Research Data. Research data is sort of the game’s XP, used to level up your staff and also for ‘boosts’ which are bonuses to a game (or contracts) current scores.
In order to make a decent game, you’re gonna need to hire new employees. A bit unfortunate, but training the employees you start with to be competitive with the ones you can hire is just impractical. Towards the end of the game, you’ll be hiring people who measure their stats in the hundreds, the ones you start with often have single digit stats except in their specialty. While you could, in theory, train Noob Ownerton to be a master coder the likes of which has never been seen, it’s a lot easier to just can him and replace him with one of many cleverly (or occasionally not) named people. I will admit, there are certain employees which I’ve been known to hire and keep well past what I would call their useful shelf life. Kitty Pawson managed to maintain her employment for nearly 15 years until I began rolling in so much cash that I had to fire her and find somebody who could be ridiculously overpaid.
Oh, I should talk about the pay system, which amuses me occasionally. Early on, your staff receives fairly realistic salaries for guys working at a start up company in a guy’s apartment. 20k-30k a year, commonly. Anytime you ‘level up’ a person in their job, they gain various stats (generally ones associated with their job) and their salary increases by 20%. And as long as they just work one job, this still tends to wind up with at least reasonable paygrades. However, at some point, you will want access to the advanced jobs. While you can commonly find Producers, Hackers, and Directors with your headhunting, Hardware Engineers seem to be of a trained-only variety. Hardware Engineers in Game Dev Story are also the most well paid people in the planet. My first run through, I hired Walt Sydney, noticed that he already have L5 Hardware Engineer, and decided to switch him to it. Turns out, you can’t switch to a job you don’t have the pre-reqs for, even if you’ve already mastered that job, so I had to level him up to 5 in EVERY SINGLE JOB. First, that costs about 550k per job, just to switch him back and forth. And +20% starts to really add up. The first time I did this, Walt wound up making 12 million dollars a year. By that point in the game though, while he was making 6 times what the entire rest of my staff did combined, I could pay it without even blinking (hell, I spent more on advertising each game than I did that). On my second go round of GameDev though, he had lower job levels when I hired him. Meaning I had to train him more. Which led to his salary being TWENTY EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR. He also wound up with better stats than the first time, but that is NOT the point. Game Dev Story is telling me Hardware Engineer is the career path for success.
Now why would I retain such a ridiculously paid employee? Sure, he has over 500 in multiple stats, but that can’t be worth having to put out one game a year whose ENTIRE profit margin is dedicated to paying for this guy’s continued employment. Well, it’s to make my own console. Yep, you too can enter the console wars. Your console can be a fairly varied beast on what technology level it is, but obviously, bigger is better as far as it’s success goes. And once you have your own console, you never need pay licensing fees again (Though apparently, either no one else develops for your console, or you have no licensing fees for it). However, consoles are time and effort consuming to make. The most basic console requires about 300 of each of the 4 main points, and the most advanced one requires 600 of each. Even with these coding deity’s that I’d hired, that still represents a fairly considerable amount of time in development.
As you make games and consoles, you’ll accumulate fans, which I assume factors into how many people are buying your game to begin with. You’ll also attend what is more or less E3 and some kind of video game awards ceremony, which I still have yet to win Game of the Year in, despite releasing a game with over 300 fun and 200 in every other stat. Apparently, though, I still outsell every other game on the market. My first game, where I played as Team Wizard, the last iteration of our amazing Ninja RPG series, Shinobi Omega, we sold 33 million copies of a game where the console had only shipped 16 million units. So apparently, people like some games so much, they’ll buy them 2 or 3 times.
At the end of the 20 year main game, it gives you high score rankings for most units sold of a game, and cash on hand at that time. I think my best seller was my MMO at 34.5 million units, but I should be able to do better this time around. Anyway, if you have like 2.50 to spare (the game is currently on sale, as of Friday), I’d recommenced trying out Game Dev Story.
Hello gentlemen (and gentleladies if applicable). I hope the day finds you well. Today, we’ll be talking about Game Dev Story. What is Game Dev Story, you ask? Well, I’ll be happy to tell you. Game Dev Story is a smartphone game (Available for both Android and iPhone users) about playing the role of the president of a game development company, thus the fairly obviously titled game. I can not begin to emphasize how enjoyable this is for a video game nerd.
Early on, the game starts you out with 4 very underskilled employees a tiny office (I think it’s actually just some dude’s apartment, but it’s a bit hard to tell since you only leave to go to a bigger office). You can take contracts to do things like develop software tools, make mini games, or a host of other contract work; or you can start developing your own game. Likely, you should invest some time in doing those contracts first, just to get some capital to spend. At the start of the game, there’s pretty much just the PC to develop for, and what I think is a Atari knockoff. You see, for what is no doubt copyright reasons, none of the systems you develop for are properly named. ‘Intendo’ releases the IES, then the Super iES and then the Gamebox, for example. At the game awards, I seem to frequently lose ‘Game of the Year’ to Resident Neutrality. Over the course of 20 game years, the various companies release their consoles, and you can develop for them, once you pay their sometimes ludicrous license fees. It helps if you know about how successful a particular system actually was, so that you don’t waste your money on development. The Virtual Boy, if you didn’t know, was an abyssmal flop. Stay away from it .
Once you’ve accepted a contract (or started development of a game) your employees will go to work. They generate one of 6 products as they work: Fun, Creativity, Sound, Graphics, Research Data, and Bugs. Contracts will only require 1 or 2 of the first 4, but games are rated on a combination of all of the first 4 (and how many bugs they have, but that can always be reduced to 0 during debugging). For a contract, completing the contract simply requires your team to generate enough of whatever stat(s) the contract requires in a certain time period. Early on, you’ll barely scrape by on ones that require 30 of 2 different stats, late game, you can finish 2 100 stat requirement contracts in a week flat. When you complete a contract, you are awarded the promised cash, and some Research Data. Research data is sort of the game’s XP, used to level up your staff and also for ‘boosts’ which are bonuses to a game (or contracts) current scores.
In order to make a decent game, you’re gonna need to hire new employees. A bit unfortunate, but training the employees you start with to be competitive with the ones you can hire is just impractical. Towards the end of the game, you’ll be hiring people who measure their stats in the hundreds, the ones you start with often have single digit stats except in their specialty. While you could, in theory, train Noob Ownerton to be a master coder the likes of which has never been seen, it’s a lot easier to just can him and replace him with one of many cleverly (or occasionally not) named people. I will admit, there are certain employees which I’ve been known to hire and keep well past what I would call their useful shelf life. Kitty Pawson managed to maintain her employment for nearly 15 years until I began rolling in so much cash that I had to fire her and find somebody who could be ridiculously overpaid.
Oh, I should talk about the pay system, which amuses me occasionally. Early on, your staff receives fairly realistic salaries for guys working at a start up company in a guy’s apartment. 20k-30k a year, commonly. Anytime you ‘level up’ a person in their job, they gain various stats (generally ones associated with their job) and their salary increases by 20%. And as long as they just work one job, this still tends to wind up with at least reasonable paygrades. However, at some point, you will want access to the advanced jobs. While you can commonly find Producers, Hackers, and Directors with your headhunting, Hardware Engineers seem to be of a trained-only variety. Hardware Engineers in Game Dev Story are also the most well paid people in the planet. My first run through, I hired Walt Sydney, noticed that he already have L5 Hardware Engineer, and decided to switch him to it. Turns out, you can’t switch to a job you don’t have the pre-reqs for, even if you’ve already mastered that job, so I had to level him up to 5 in EVERY SINGLE JOB. First, that costs about 550k per job, just to switch him back and forth. And +20% starts to really add up. The first time I did this, Walt wound up making 12 million dollars a year. By that point in the game though, while he was making 6 times what the entire rest of my staff did combined, I could pay it without even blinking (hell, I spent more on advertising each game than I did that). On my second go round of GameDev though, he had lower job levels when I hired him. Meaning I had to train him more. Which led to his salary being TWENTY EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR. He also wound up with better stats than the first time, but that is NOT the point. Game Dev Story is telling me Hardware Engineer is the career path for success.
Now why would I retain such a ridiculously paid employee? Sure, he has over 500 in multiple stats, but that can’t be worth having to put out one game a year whose ENTIRE profit margin is dedicated to paying for this guy’s continued employment. Well, it’s to make my own console. Yep, you too can enter the console wars. Your console can be a fairly varied beast on what technology level it is, but obviously, bigger is better as far as it’s success goes. And once you have your own console, you never need pay licensing fees again (Though apparently, either no one else develops for your console, or you have no licensing fees for it). However, consoles are time and effort consuming to make. The most basic console requires about 300 of each of the 4 main points, and the most advanced one requires 600 of each. Even with these coding deity’s that I’d hired, that still represents a fairly considerable amount of time in development.
As you make games and consoles, you’ll accumulate fans, which I assume factors into how many people are buying your game to begin with. You’ll also attend what is more or less E3 and some kind of video game awards ceremony, which I still have yet to win Game of the Year in, despite releasing a game with over 300 fun and 200 in every other stat. Apparently, though, I still outsell every other game on the market. My first game, where I played as Team Wizard, the last iteration of our amazing Ninja RPG series, Shinobi Omega, we sold 33 million copies of a game where the console had only shipped 16 million units. So apparently, people like some games so much, they’ll buy them 2 or 3 times.
At the end of the 20 year main game, it gives you high score rankings for most units sold of a game, and cash on hand at that time. I think my best seller was my MMO at 34.5 million units, but I should be able to do better this time around. Anyway, if you have like 2.50 to spare (the game is currently on sale, as of Friday), I’d recommenced trying out Game Dev Story.