itch.io

Hi, thanks for agreeing to my request. I ve sent the mail. Tell me if you didn't receive it.

Hey,

Thanks for the credit. Helping you with your project is a nice experience for me. I think all gamers dream of creating their ideal game, so it s nice to have a (small) hand in one. Btw, exchanging with you has given me an idea and i d like to pick your brain for it. Do you mind if we exchange by mail to talk about it ?

But i don t see any way that RH perk can be worth it early on or even later. 

You don t like the boost fans perk idea ??

Another thing : my main issue with those kind of games is that once you ve mastered the growing loop, the game lose interest to me. Mainly because the AI competition is basically non existant and thus not a challenge. Basically you re competing against yourself, the ruleset of the game and the scaling. AI companies are there in the background to "populate" but not really to compete...

You never have a though year because a couple of AI companies made blockbusters saturating the market. Or a breakthrough year because you re the blockbuster maker. Real life companies have long time trends (up or down) but have short time wild variation that can overturn a long time trend if mismanaged.

I don t know how you planned to face that. Or even if i should ask you to face that since bigger game studios can t handle it. I was just curious as it s an issue i see raised by a lot of tycoon enthusiast.

My 2cts

To be honest, it s not that hard. I failed the switch to medium twice because i m a dumbass... The 1st one, i only had 200k saved and didn't notice the medium office has to be purchased and not rented, so here goes my 200k. Add in the cost of making medium game i m -200k. 

The 2nd one, i managed to save 700+k by year 4, purchased the office. Then i tried to make the medium game and "failed" 2,3 times, so i alt tab and forced exit the game. But with how the save system works, i m forking the 200k to produce the game each time. So - 400k...

Both failure were avoidable and i was on good tracks to be sustainable.

I kinda like the hard side. And i think 700k, with level 2 engine fully functional is a good milestone in year 4, i don t know the economics of the medium game industry. But small indie is OK ish. But to be frank, i was producing games lots of games 9/10 games with gross profit averaging 120/150k. 

All that seems ok to me, but i m used to those kind of games. Maybe the setting should be sink or swim, the player has 4/5 years to make the jump to medium before drawning to the scaling. 4/5 years looks comfy enough. You ll see hardcore gamer making the jump in the 2nd year with a loan...

I might try a 3rd time to reach medium games but not tonight, cause it s night night time.

You re right. It wasn t a bug, i didn t do the thing with the sliders. Maybe a text in the UI saying what to do would help ? Like instead of workers, say "assign the following workers to the priorities" or smtg like that.

Anyway thks for the answer, my run is busted, i ll retry another day. Still can t do a medium game...

Regarding the trend thingy, i was talking about trending topics (medieval, cats and such) and not genre (RTS, MOBA etc...). I do see notification for trending genre, but i don t see for topics. 

I do agree that the trend perk seems the strongest by a mile, maybe some tempering to do there : 

The cost reduction is insignificant a the beginning when you need it most. The sales bonus is ok, i m running with it now for a change. And the RH one is useless right now with so few workers, i don t know how big you plan to make the teams so maybe stronger in the end. 

The thing is with those kind of game you want perks/bonus to be strong early on. Late game strong perks are generally useless, because you ve either snowballed into a monster and don t need it or failed to an early game over because you didn t took the early perk. So i suspect that most player will go with trend perk or sales perk.

BTW if you compare sales perk VS cost reduction. The difference is quite obvious early on. Game dev cost around 20/30k, so 10% is 3k. Sales reaches around 100/150/200k, so 5/10/20k. No brainer there...

Maybe a perk to boost marketing/fans would be good. Decent early and very strong late game since fans keeps adding on. idk

BTW, there doesn t seem to be a RPG genre, unless i missed it, that s weird.

I made another and i found a big bug. My first medium game, i go to make a sequel of a previous game, with a brand new engine, when i land on the 1st slider screen, i can t click on the begin button.

Another smallish issue is that when i make a sequel of a sequel the new title is named XXXX 2 2.

Tell me if you want the bugged save. I would join the bugged save but i can t find the save game folder.

Hello,

Thanks for the shoutout. Glad to be of help to your project.

I made another "sucessful" run. I lost after switching to the bigger office. I didn't quite get what happened, but i had more than 200k. Bought the new office, recruited 2 more workers and all of a sudden i was at -50k. I guess my cash reserve weren't enough... 

But in the meantime i managed to make a few sucessfull games. My ratings have improved and most of my games reach between 8 and 9 even after the 1st couple of years. I managed to make two 88 games in year 3.

I feel after year 3, it s almost mandatory to switch to a bigger team because of the bubble inflation. Even if you game the delay to reach the required amount, it s starting to become burdensome to delay for more than 6 weeks. 300 bubbles is a lot for a lone worker

So here comes a new batch of suggestions/comments :

- When i take trend visualiser as a starting perk, i would like to see the trends of the topics. It s nice to see the trends of all the genre and of the topics i have acquired. But it would be nice to see which topic i should acquire based on trends. I don t think it s necessary to see all the trends but maybe top 3/5 would be nice. Not a huge hindrance, but maybe a nice plus for the perk. I ran most of my games with that perk and i ll try the others if i run more tries.

- Another small hindrance that could be changed : I think  it would be nice to have the 3 starting topics and the starting genre to match. Maybe not systematically great, but good and above garanteed would be ok. 

- There s a glitch with the contracts : once the contract is done, if i go to start a new contract before the payment pop up appears, the contract becomes failed. Not a big deal if you know it s coming but sometimes you re into the game and forget it.

- I managed to use the crunch, the way to make it work is a little bit clunky, that s why i messed it up. The issue i had was that the drag and drop of the crunch icon is too precise, so i kept thinking i wasn t doing the right thing.

- I did some tries and the marketing costs are not included in the total cost of the game when you go into the previous game panel. I tried to use the max advertising option and the 25k doesn t seem to be there. I might be wrong though.

- The bank saving bug is still there. I wanted to double check. When i start i put 90k into saving due in 3 months after 3 months the pop up appears the money do not, i even let one more month run and still no money

- Last issue i have is a rather serious one : sometimes RNG fucks the player when designing the game. Let s say i have a game where optimal balance is 70 design and 30 tech, and where the sub part balance favors heavily tech, you can t finish the game with a good balance without delaying.  Sometimes it can be a good thing because you didn t reach the necessary amount of bubbles for the current year and you want to delay. Btw it would be nice to know when you start designing how many bubbles you should make to keep the pace.

-What stats determine the speed of producing green bubbles for the contracts ?

So another big long rambling post from me. I hope it s helpful and don t hesitate to ask if i m not clear. I saw the vids of the new office, they look very cool. Tell me when you plan to make a new update, i want to see if i can reach medium sized softwares without imploding...

Well, if the rising costs are a bug, maybe take everything else i said about incoming cash with a pinch of salt, because the balance will be wildly different. Hit me up when the update is done and i ll give it another try, this will sure look like i will play a different game ;)

I take no issue about the tutorial, i know the game is in early stage of production and it would be unwise of you to spend too much time documenting every little thing when you re likely changing a lot between each version. 

Hey, thanks for the answer. I managed to make it to year 4 on my last try, i was around level 10. The game looks promising, but at the moment i don t think i'll play any more until more updates trickle in.

A few more comments/advices :

- The game feels like a rogue like, or like i m trapped in a room with rising water because of the fixed cost (a little under 20000 before game over in year 4), doomed to fail sooner or later. I didn't hire another worker, the rising costs were all with only the founder. So i would guess that my avatar going through the level was the source of the rising cost. What feels weird or unbalanced in that case is that if i'm founding my company, i wouldn't pay myself 20000 a month at the risk of bankrupting the company. 

- Another issue is that i didn't feel like my sales were "progressing" at the same pace, a decent/good game would always sell in the ballpark of 100 000 / 150 000, game ratings around 7/8. I also don't see a difference in sales between the 1st game and the last one despite having around 1500 fans.

- An other issue with the level system is that at the moment you don't want to level because you only feel the cost and not the benefit. I know there's some perks to be had, but those are very expensive, so i don't know what they bring. I feel like you really progress by training and that also cost a lot of money.

- I tried to use the Crunch ability at one point but i didn't feel a real boost, maybe i didn't manage to activate it properly. Where do i click to activate it ??

- The long term investment bug : the money definitely wasn't in either account. I admit i didn'tt try any more after that as my run was pretty much busted by it.

- Regarding the petty vs bank stuff, maybe you can try some things like you go shopping for groceries/leisure and stuff from the petty account, resulting in some productivity buff if you eat in classy restaurant instead of cheap noodles, but i wouldn't see if it could justify setting up that much micro.

- Not really important at that point, but i didn't see how buying better hardware would impact me nor by how much.

- Regarding the engine i managed to figure things out by myself, i had a level 12 engine in year 2 and rode it till the game over. I tried to look into it but i don t think you can upgrade an exisiting engine with new feature and you have to pay for all the old feature on a new engine... and money is tight... Didn't manage to make it this far though so maybe i m wrong. Maybe allow the player to upgrade the engine 2/3 time before it's obsolete and must be redone, idk.

- So all in all, i think there's a balance problem between the amounts of cash going in versus going out, but the game looks interesting enough and i definitely enjoyed my time. I wish you the best of luck and maybe i ll drop back in a few months to see where it's going.

Edit : and i remember another bug, i was creating a new game when i saved/exited and when i reloaded, the progress was lost, no game were being created. 

I played quite a bit these past couple of days, and to be honest i wasn t very sucessfull my 2 cts : 

- the monthly fixed cost scale way too hard in the early game, starting around 2000 to land above 10000 in the 2nd year, i think it is the main culprit in me failing all my games in the 2nd/3rd year. 10000 every month is a lot for fixed cost when you factor in all the research cost for the 1st engine that happens at the same time.

- a bug, when i want to place my money in the special saving account, the money doesn't come back after the specified period, i see the pop up saying my money is back but it's not.

- I think the difference between petty money and bank account shouldn't exist, that's a lot of unecessary micro, for 0 gain. Plus, when you create a company, you can charge research and training to your company and not out of your pocket. 

- Contract RNG and scaling : the contract become too hard in the 2nd year on average. I can't fulfill most of them when it s the period where i starve for cash. Plus the RNG of the contract production vary too much in my opinion causing me to fail some contract when i've managed to fulfill some that were harder, because some time, my avatar spends way too much time not producing green bubbles.

- the help section specify that the engine is not necessary in the first 2 years, but i had messages saying that games produced in the 2nd year are not up to par regarding engine.

That s all for now, may come back for more later.