Most of us these days don't have much money to spend or much in the way of downtime to play games. There's the need for a Social life, obligations, family, work, and more. Modern life leaves very little downtime to sink your teeth into something for one to three hours let alone a marathon 8 – 12. So its good to have a casual game in your steam collection you can pop in, zone out, and kill an hour or so in idle entertainment.
One such casual game you could pick up is Game Dev Tycoon.
In GDT you take on the role of a game developer starting his/her journey to making the best games the world has ever seen. (Though lets be real most of them will be named after your favorite games). Starting off in your garage you'll take your first steps in a thirty five year journey as a developer. Develop games, make money and fans, give interviews to the wastes-of-carbon that are game journalists while building your brand and your company into a multi-million dollar mega developer... Kind of. This is a casual chill-maxing game after all so you wont be managing an army of developers. The most you'll have to deal with is about seven.
The Play Loop
The game play loop is straight forward. Develop a game by choosing the theme (military, airplane, music, etc.), your genre (action, adventure, simulation, etc) your platform of choice (PC, console) and later your game engine. Next you'll be tasked with allocating time and resources across three areas of development during three different production stages.
This is a relatively simple matter of adjusting sliders to determine how much of that development stage is devoted to a particular area. For instance development stage two encompasses balancing Dialogue, Level Design, and Artificial intelligence. Allocate more time in one area means less time spent in others. So it becomes important to plan out how to use your time wisely to put the majority of your efforts in areas that are important to your genre. For instance, making an RPG means more time spent in dialogue and story vs artificial intelligence and game engines.
Once you've created your game and smashed all the bugs you release it into the wild. Next you're game will be reviewed and unlike the real world the virtual journalists will give you a score based on how strong your development process worked for that particular theme and genre and its usability. So don't release buggy messes.
As you go along you'll be able to research new features such as new graphics, sound design, multiplayer, MMO development and more. Keep improving and you'll eventually leave your garage for your first dev studio where you can hire a staff, perform more research, take on contracts for quick funds, and seek out further training.
There are minor RPG elements for you and your team, and my minor I do mean minor. Each character has four stat blocks (tech, development, speed, and research) which determines the jobs their best suited for. These can be further advanced with various training courses your characters can take which cost research points and funds. The higher the score the better they do in certain areas as well as generating less bugs during game creation.
Like I wrote earlier, this is a casual game, and the graphic design and game loop reflect that. There's not a whole lot to manage, nor is there any sense of frantic pacing. You build your games, train your peeps, do research, upgrade your game engine, send your wage slaves... employees... on vacation, rinse and repeat. The only real challenge comes from playing the game in pirate mode which factors in people pirating your games. It's essentially a hard mode that severely limits your profits and fan growth. It also adds the ability to research DRM to help mitigate the profit losses.
What does add a level of complexity to the game itself is that your career starts at the very beginning of the gaming boom and continues on until the latest gen consoles. Periodically a gaming system loosely named after a real world system will come on the market. You'll need to get a license to develop for that particular system and learn what genres are and are not popular on it. Or research multi-platform gaming and choose to release your game on several systems. (provided you bought the license)
At the end of year 35 you'll be given a lifetime achievement award and a final score. But the game doesn't end there and you can keep developing games to your hearts content. The only thing that does end is that there are no new third party console releases (provided you don't create one yourself)
Road to 100
If you're a completionist you're not in for much of a challenge. This game is a casual game and the achievements are not hard to get. Most of them are relatively straight forward but have to be completed as certain stages along the way. Just keep an eye out on the posters on your studio's walls and develop the game it's referencing and boom easy achievement.
The only tricky achievement is “eat cake”. It's the only one that requires you to make a successful game, using the right genre and theme, to get it. Worse its one of those “this event usually happens only once in a game” type achievements. Be sure to save once the event starts so you can go back and keep trying from the original save until you get it. It happens later in the game, around year 20+, and is a general pain to have to replay the entire game up until that point.
Other than that its smooth sailing to 100% this game in a single play though.
Should you get it?
For my money this game was very much a curiosity. On the one hand it was easy to sink a few hours into developing games in a casual environment while feeling I made forward progress. Finding the right combination of genre, theme, and platform was novel and entertaining for what it was. And seeing sales and fans roll in with each successful release was satisfying.
The game was something I could pop in, kill an hour or two and turn it off without feeling like I need to DO MORE to make progress. And what progress I was making was worthwhile. All in all I sunk around 30 hours into the game all told and feel like I got my monies worth.
On the other hand, the game loop peters out after a few hours. And some of the combinations you can't make during development stand out. If I'm making “Call of not-Duty” why can't I have full orchestral soundtrack with stereo sound with cinematic voice acting and fully motion capped acting right along with it without serious negative penalties? I think a missed opportunity would be to have a player decide to lengthen development time at the cost of employee fatigue (thus having to juggle vacation time for your workers) and increase in bugs. Give the player a chance to make those choices to more customize the development process.
Plus I don't see much reason to replay the game after completing it. Unless you're like me and the game has been collecting digital dust in your back catalogue for the better part of a decade waiting for a blue steam ribbon.
But is it worth the purchase price? All in all I would say get it if you're looking for a casual game that you want to sink a few hours into. I suggest waiting until there's a sale going on to make it a little worth your while.
Game Dev Tycoon was made by Greenheart games.