Since Game Dev Tycoon is about software development, I decided to review it and put it on this blog.

Game Dev Tycoon is a simulation game with a game development theme. You start off as a solo developer in your garage, making simple games in order to raise money to expand. Once you have accumulated enough wealth, you can purchase a new office which allows you to hire more developers and work on more complicated games. Later, a larger office is available which allows you to hire even more staff, and even have a Research, and Hardware labs (as long as you have a Design and Technology specialist).

When you start to make a game, you choose the game’s name, pick the Size (you start off with Small, then unlock further sizes as you progress), Topic (theme), Genre and Platform. A later upgrade allows you to choose the target audience; Young, Everyone, Mature. Then there’s 3 stages of development where you move sliders and choose extra features. 

1. Engine, Gameplay, Story
2. Dialogues, Level design, AI
3. World Design, Graphic, Sound.

You move the sliders based on your assumption of the genre (RPGs have an emphasis on Story, Simulation requires Engine), and by the results and feedback of your released games. After release, you can then generate a game report which will give you hints on which aspects are important, and if the target audience and platform fit the style of game and theme.

For medium sized projects and above, you have to assign a developer to lead the development for each aspect. Adding additional features (e.g. Soundtrack, Surround Sound) and using game engines comes at a cost, but the more features usually means a better quality game. It’s not clear how random a lot of these elements are though, or if certain tech affects the genres differently.

Once you have created your game, you can wait a bit longer to put the finishing touches. The number of bugs will decrease and you can add extra points to Design, Technology. When you click “Release”, you will be given a review score and your staff experience within all aspects will increase. 

Money will come in from the sales with declining sales over time, and then the game is removed from the market. Your staff wages increase as they level up, and the general cost of development means it’s a good idea to have a large surplus of money if you can. If you do drop into negative figures you can get offered a short term loan but with extremely high interest. If you can’t afford that, then you are bankrupt. You are allowed to restart from your last save, the last office move, or you can just start again. The game can be tricky if you don’t land those big revenues at the right time.

As time progresses, games take longer to develop, require more staff and cost way more money. This is like real life when early computer games were developed by tiny teams over a few months. Those games may have been text only, or had primitive graphics with colours, but that was what the consoles could handle back then. Today’s “AAA” games take years to develop but have cutting-edge graphics and sound. So in this game you need to hire more staff, keep training their skills, and make sure you have the staff in the right areas. You can only have 1 game in development at any time.

As time progresses, new technologies become available for research, and Platforms are released or removed from the market. After a new Platform has been released, you can then buy a Development Licence to make games on that Platform (it would have been a nice idea to be able to work on games for the actual console launch though, then you would have the challenge of rushing your game out). The names and images of the consoles are slight variations to avoid copyright issues (or add humour to the game) but it’s easy to recognise what they are supposed to be. Each console is biassed towards certain genres and audiences. You start with the PC and Commodore, and it progresses to modern day with the Xbox Series and PS5.

You can take on simple contract work which gives you a small amount of money for a small amount of your time. The main advantage is to acquire more Research points. You can also develop games for Publishers but must create the game at a certain quality in order to receive the full amount. These contracts are more beneficial when you haven’t accumulated enough fans. Later on when you do have many fans, even mediocre games seem to sell themselves.

With your Research points, you can send your employees on training courses. You can Research new topics (which seems like a randomly ordered large list which is unlocked in batches), and technology. Once you have researched some more technology (mainly the improved graphics), it’s often beneficial to create a new Game Engine so you can use these features.

The Research room takes a lot of money to use. Even moving the slider slightly will cost $300k or so per month. You can research a Steam-like platform, the ability to make your own console in the Hardware Lab, create MMOs and a few other options. It’s quite hard to acquire these aspects before the game “ends”. You can carry on playing but new consoles won’t be released and there’s no “events” that trigger. 

There’s not many Genres but there are loads of Topics. However, I think some of the Topics should be classed as Genres such as “Racing” or “Sports”. Two other Genres that seem obvious to include would be Platforming and Puzzle.

I also wondered how the developer interpreted the genres especially when you unlock the ability to choose 2 genres (you cannot have multiple topics though). For example: what does “Adventure” mean? My assumption would be a point-and-click adventure such as Monkey Island, but then what does RPG-Adventure combo mean? Is such a combo doomed to fail, or do the developers have a different idea what this actually means? Maybe a certain Topic could fit this genre well? Casual is also down as a Genre, but I’d say this is closely tied to the size of a game. You don’t get major budget Casual games, although something mid-range like Animal Crossing. For the most part, the decisions seemed logical, but there’s probably some Topic-Genre combos that you won’t agree with because it is fairly subjective.

Just like most simulation games, I found myself playing for hours at a time and found it hard to put it down. It’s simplistic and definitely not for everyone, but I found it addictive and satisfying watching those number-bubbles float to the top and increment those total counts as your developers work on the game.

8/10

Zaccaria Pinball is a pinball game you can buy on Steam. User Breeze posted this screenshot of his score: –1,947,658,906. A negative score!

 What happened is that he has reached the maximum score, then it suddenly becomes negative.

I don’t know what language Zaccaria Pinball is programmed in, but in C#, the maximum value of an “int” type is 2,147,483,647. So I imagine he has surpassed the current record, then suddenly it flipped to the record low score. He must be furious.

It is important you choose the correct datatype to store data correctly. Often on pinball games, people amass some crazy scores that you don’t think are possible, so it would probably make sense to go for the “long” type which has a max of 9,223,372,036,854,775,807. Hopefully the developers change this before annoying more players.