Its information may not be accurate for newer versions of the game. If you update the article to reflect the current version, please archive the page referring to the older version and categorize adequately before removing this template. Please also change the background colour when you change the fitting! This guide that will teach how to succeed in Game Dev Tycoon. Each game size has a set amount of time required to make it. This time is split into preparation time small period before you get to decide about Stage 1 , and three equal development stages.

Note that this only includes development time - bug fixing is not included, and will take varying periods of time to complete. Each development stage is further divided into development fields. From the moment you start development, to the very end of it, all your employees who are not busy on training or vacation will contribute Tech and Design bubbles to the development. Depending on what field is currently in development, there will be a predetermined chance for every contributed bubble to be a Design bubble or a Tech bubble.

For the purpose of this guide you should stick to doing only Great Combinations - the rationale behind this will be explained later on. To use this table, look for your feature, see its cost, for example "Joystick 10K ", look up the table in the column with your game size Medium , find the value, and you now know the benefit value of the feature - in this case, 1. It does not matter what specific features you select, all the Benefit points of the features selected for the field are summed up for a total amount of feature points applied to a field so, whether you add a joystick, gamepad or steering wheel to a Racing game is absolutely irrelevant.

So, game size and amount of time dedicated to a field defines how many feature points you can implement. If you put more than enough features into a field, you should see a percentage value next to its name in the feature selection region - this means you have more features than you can implement in given time. Some features are mutually exclusive - for example, only one of "Simple body language", "Advanced body language" or "Realistic body language" can be implemented in a game.

You haven't assigned any features to these fields, and during the whole Stage 2, you produced 74D and 24T. Now, if you had assigned enough features to each field, you would have produced roughly D and 50T.

If you had assigned enough features to the Dialogues field, but none to other fields, you would have ended up with roughly D and 40T. If this was a game of Large size, in order to fill up a field with features completely, you would need to enable features for a total of 17 Benefit points for the Dialogues field, 10 points for Level Design, and 3 points for the AI.

You could get those benefit points by enabling "Dialogue Tree", "Voice Over" and "Advanced Body Language" features for Dialogues, "Dynamic Environment" and "Minigames" for Level Design, and "A.

Since this strategy involves using balanced employees, this does not matter for this guide. Assigning employees also "uses them up". The rate at which an employee is used up depends on the amount of time assigned to a field, and game size.

The game keeps track of how much of an employee's resource has been "used" and displays it in employee selection screen as a percentage, bar and color. It is not explained here how overusing the employee impacts development, but one can only assume it will decrease either his contribution or everybody's contribution to the project. Therefore, in order to tackle medium, large and AAA size games, you need at least 3, 5 and 6 staff respectively. You assign Employee A to Dialogues and Employee B to Level Design and AI.

This is the most important thing to understand about the game in order to succeed. The way the review score is computed is very counter-intuitive.

The following explanation will be a simplification and re-phrasing of what you can read in more technical terms in the Review Algorithm page. When you release your game, a single review score is calculated and then displayed to you by showing you four random variations of it.

For example, if your game scores a 9, you will see random values from 8 to However, the game does not just calculate your review score. It rather calculates your game's absolute score first, which will be referred to as " Game Score " to distinguish it from the " Review Score ".

The resulting value, after some manipulations, becomes Review Score for that game. This means that you compete only against your own "Top Score" or a value of 20, until you make a Top Score.

Therefore, in order to get a good Review Score, you need to improve over your best previous Game Score. For example, let's assume your Top Score is and you release a game with a Top Score of If you keep on pumping your Game Score as high as possible, you will keep getting out of options to improve your Game Score further, and thus keep getting low scores with only occasional high scores. The strategy this guide will be using is thus to improve your Game Score every time, but to improve it by the minimal amount needed to get another good review, and never improve it too much.

The exact formula can be found in Review Algorithm. So, your quality starts at 1 and three modifiers can add or subtract to it, while the last one can only subtract.

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Let's see what each individual part does, and then we will sum it up and simplify it:. Each game genre has its own "ideal" balance of Design and Tech. If your final values end up close to that, you get a bonus of 0. When you found it, multiply your Design value by that, subtract your Tech value and divide by max of the two:. For each genre or genre combination each field can be important or unimportant. You receive bonus or penalty based on how you have allocated time to important and unimportant fields during the three stages of development.

In order to find out what is important and what is unimportant for your genre, refer to the tables on Game Development page. This just gives you a flat 0. Aside from that, it is better not to release sequels in order to avoid complicating your calculations. This strategy never involves releasing sequels, so it will be assumes this modifier is equal to 0. Take note that it does not matter at all whether sequel is to a successful or failed game, whether game had many or not many fans or whether the sequel has the same topic or genre.

You will get penalized for several mismanagements and other actions. Here is the complete list of what to avoid:. It gets lowered by 0. This value is taken from the Raw Data table, but fortunately it is usually very small or identical to 1. Since this strategy involves developing mostly for PC 1 for all genre and occasionally for Gameling 1 for Action, 0.

This value is taken from the Raw Data table, but fortunately it is exactly 1. This value is less than 1. All calculations here are not truncated, so, in the previous example 4 bugs would be exactly 1.

Steam Community :: Guide :: ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR GAME DEV TYCOON

Bugs are your lifesaver, because they allow you to reduce your Game Score in case you end up with too high score. They will be used in the walkthrough for this purpose. You don't get penalized for not following most of the trends, so you can just ignore it. However, as you cannot expect Trends to last till release, you can never expect a Trend to not pop during development if it was not there when you started it.

If you end up getting a positive trend however - you should make sure to compensate. If it is too late for that, you can release with more bugs, or try putting someone on training to make him contribute nothing to the project the latter is not a reliable solution.

The calculation for it is complex and without performing several calculations after each release, one can never be sure of it, but it can be reliably approximated by the following:.

Next, there is a parameter called "Technical Expertise" that limits the maximum score you can ever get. Basically, the formula of your Review Score before randomization is as follows:. It is computed as follows:.

You can look up Graphics Tech Level in the Raw Data page. A specialist is only counted if he was assigned to a field which is important for the chosen genre or genre combo. Meaning, Graphics specialist assigned to Graphics for pretty much any game, or Dialogues specialist assigned to Dialogues in an Adventure or RPG game. Otherwise your fourth 10 will be changed to 9. This affects all games therefore, you can never get all 10's on a small game, or until you get yourself at least two specialists.

Basically, if you see only 8's, 9's and 10's pop up in reviews, you've set a new Top Score. If you see at least one 7, you haven't set a Top Score. If you only see 8's and 9's, you can't be sure. The way Final Review Score is calculated explained above , you can only have a new Top Score if you get a Game Score higher than your previous Top Score even if by a very little.

There is a "post-processing" stage which fumbles your score in certain situation just before it is randomized and displayed. There are two different kinds of post-processing passes that can happen. If the first post-processing triggers, and your Final Review Score is greater than 9, then it has a Therefore, right after hiring a new employee, it is useless to try to reach a Top Score.

If you use a "newbie" employee when he hasn't rested fully yet his exhaust bar is showing , the penalty will apply to two games. This is happening because he is not working at full capacity, and thus will not receive full "credit" for the game, and will need another game to stop being considered "newbie". Second post-processing is even weirder. Since the game is all about competing against your own top scores, but you have no top score of yours to compete against at game start, the game treats your first three top scores in a very special way.

Since your game Quality should be 1. However, game fumbles that a little bit. Until you score a Top Score twice, your Final Review Score becomes 8 if it was greater than 9. However, the real key lies in the third post processing event. If you score a Top Score that is exactly your third Top Score, your review score is set to This is your chance of getting many sales with very little effort and without raising your Target Score too high.

I also found that RPG and Adventure genres are the easiest to make, so we will first make Actions, Strategies and Sims, and then start making Adventures and RPGs mostly. Developing for PC is better than developing for G64, because PC has a modifier of 1.

And after you research them you can get even better because PC has 1. As soon as Gameling is released, however, you will start developing for Gameling and keep developing or Gameling until about Y8 after that, M games for PC will start selling better than Y games for Gameling. Always choose Y audience when developing for Gameling, and do not choose topics that do not work with Y audience like, Military. Begin the game with developing a Sports Action. Next develop Military Strategy, Medieval Strategy.

You should now have about 45 research points, do some contract work, get over K cash, then you should have enough research points to begin researching Custom Engine. If you do not then develop next game and then you will have it.

If you have - research Custom Engine, then create your first custom engine, enabling only 2D Graphics v2 feature. From now on you'll develop RPGs mostly.

You can do Fantasy and Medieval RPGs one after another. If you want to develop something else, you can do Adventures but they are a bit harder to get the balance right.

Do not do any more research in the garage. Once you finished training yourself in staff management, immediately hire four new employees in quick succession. Spend 80K on budget. I hope you remember you need to do better each time in order to keep releasing well reviewed games.

The lower your employee's Speed, Design and Tech are, the easier it will be to increase them. Less starting stats mean you will have easier time increasing your productivity.

Also, when you hire 4 crew members, you will obviously increase your output tremendously. And first few training sessions will improve their output very much so you will get very good reviews at no effort at all!

You should now have five total employees, who are totally wasted their effectiveness is close to zero. They can still research as well. Therefore, start researching Medium Games, Target Audience if available and 3D Graphics v1 with two three of them. As soon as you have researched 3D Graphics v1 start creating new engine, put only 3D Graphics v1 and all other features in other fields.

As soon as you have completed your new custom engine, you should wait until most of your employees are halfway-restored, then start doing Contract Work start with easiest until they are completely recovered. After training is finished, do one small game RPG or Adventure or whatever, but I remind you those two are easiest. Again, use only 3D Graphics v1 feature but no other features. Therefore, we make one small game so that this does not effect our medium games.

Train everybody once in research. If you had to release with bugs in order to not get too high score, do not train in anything else. If you had released without bugs and still got low scores, train everybody in their weaker stat and your main in both stats - "gems" option. Now do contract work until your first employee becomes exhausted again. Wait until three of them become exhausted, then start vacating them starting with the one who's exhausted most, and vacate next when their "exhausted" meters are about equal, do same for third and fourth employee, this way they should end their vacation at around the same time and demand next vacation around the same time too.

Remember when this will happen they demand it once per year so that it doesn't hit you in the middle of game development. If their "time for vacation" happens to be around M6 or M7, this is bad, because you'll probably be developing a game there later because best way to hype your game - G3 - happens at M6W1.

If this is the case, you will need to gradually delay their vacation each time so that they vacation somewhere around M9. If an exhausted employee is doing anything other than training, developing and contract work - it is fine, so make use of that its okay to research or create engine or fix bugs with exhausted employees. Now develop medium games for publishers, because that allows you to rack in fans much faster than self-published small games.

Also prefer a platform with higher market share Gameling, for example. You can research a new genre if that means getting good contract.

Game Dev Tycoon on Steam

So expect worse scores at Strategy, Simulation and Action genres. You can also save before opening "find publishing deals" and reload if you don't like the list but you could also consider this cheating, I personally never do it. Watch out with your first medium release, do not overshoot with the Game Score through the roof, check it and release with bugs if needed. Remember, until you get K fans, your review rating for medium games is capped at 9.

Well, this is basically it. You should now be on your steady way towards profits and prosperity. Now, we will talk about general strategy for the whole game. This will make them generate so many research bubbles that you will hardly have problems with researching later on in the game. If you have an employee with very bad speed less than , train his speed instead of main stat from time to time. Always use most expensive training option available.

Do research after you trained everybody twice - this way you can assign research to those who finished training first which are those who happened to scratch their heads least and minimize overall team downtime.

If you have over research points and nothing to do with them, you could consider researching new topics, but this is not really that important. Only research after you've trained twice with everybody - this way you can assign research to those who finished training first who happened to scratch their heads least and minimize overall team downtime.

When you research new graphics version and ONLY when you do , consider creating new custom engine and putting every feature you have researched by this point into it. Do not put 2D graphics in as soon as you get 3D graphics, and do not put older graphics versions in - only newest.

Start with cheapest features in order to not overshoot with Game Score. Basically, as long as you train your employees every time, you can let go without features for a long period of time and keep getting good scores. It does not matter which employee you assign to what field, but be consistent.

If you assign your best dude always to graphics and something else in stage 3 , do it always like that. Consistency is the priority. Do not overuse your employees so you can get the "great management" XP bonus every time.

Remember too publisher contracts for Medium games until you have K fans, then self-publish Medium with proper marketing, see below until you unlock large, if you have K fans self-publish Large, otherwise take contracts for Large until you do, then self-publish Large.

When you self-publish medium and large games, market like this: If you want more hype you can do another K Campaign at the beginning of Stage 3, but I don't think it's worth it.

Make sure that G3 happens at M6 W1 every year will happen during your development if you can wait a little bit for it, or postpone some research bunch, do it because that's the cheapest hype you can get. For large games you can do K instead of 50K Campaign, for AAA games - 2M Campaign instead of K campaign "Special AAA marketing" is bullshit, do not do it. When choosing booth size at G3, choose the smallest until amount of visitors becomes less than one and a half of your total fans.

From there on increase to medium booth, and when that cannot satisfy your fans too - go for large booth. Do not choose anything if you cannot have a game in development during the time when G3 happens but you better do have a game in development when G3 happens.

You do not need it. Do not train specialists until you want to develop AAA games. Immediately hire two new employees, one Design focused spend 1. Train him to get , train him as specialist in his field, then start training his other stat only until he becomes a balanced employee. I haven't found benefit of Own Convention, it costs a lot to organize and G3's largest booth seems to give the same effect at least until you have more than 1.

Make sure to lower the budget back to 0 when you finish research - you don't need extra research points at that bizarre cost. Probably best to wait with your console until you research 3D v7. When you research AAA games, prepare three specialists. You should keep getting steadily good reviews, with occasional great reviews. Well done, you now excel at this game. Better do an MMO on your own console. As you see, I never told you to reassign your sliders to balance for something.

Works the same with different slider settings of course for Adventure. So, before I was against the "allocate your sliders like this" table and was one of the people who were arguing it's BS and does not work and should not even appear on the wiki, and now I'm advocating just allocating your sliders and telling you it will work? Yes, you can just allocate sliders to some predefined values, and be fine for the whole game, if you're doing RPG and Adventure games.

This, coupled with the fact that using my strategy you only recruit balanced employees, means that you have a quite large margin for error. And if you add features evenly which you should do, because that means lesser development costs too, because adding one 4-benefit feature is more expensive than four 1-benefit ones as long as you can meaning, you first max out your fields you dedicate least time in, and only then start adding more features to the other fields that have more time assigned to them then you will hardly ever run into a situation where you screw up your balance.

However, for example, if you will employ employees who specialize in one stat or another which a lot of people may be doing , then you will need to find your own balance. And for other reasons it may also not work very well. If you optimize like I do, and if you know how the game works, then this simple slider table works, but if you want variety in the games you develop or staff you hire, then simple "Set sliders like this" will be of no use to you. Most importantly, it will be of no use to people who do not know how the game works, and for people who know how the game works, it is irrelevant because they can calculate such a table of their own.

Basically, every genre or genre combination is equal, in terms that as long as you pick a Great Combination, get the balance right, assign the same number of specialists etc, it will produce the same result. However, in my opinion, there is a big difference between genres. Factor number one is that the whole balance is skewered in Design's favor. As you can see, there are more options to gain Design points than there are to gain Tech points. This makes it naturally easier to achieve balance in Design-focused games rather than Tech-focused games.

However, this is not all. There is even more tilt towards Design-focused games. For more information, see global market research. Factor number two is how the genres target balance correlates with its designation of important and unimportant fields. As you see, both have useless Tech focused fields in unimportant list, which is okay.

What do they differ by? RPG has a Tech focused field Level Design 4: What does Adventure do to compensate? Require you to tilt balance like half the way further! And if you look at Action, things turn out just horrible. You have Gameplay 8: Finally, the game calculates balance delta how much you missed the balance by using the following formula:.

You have developed a game for a theoretic Design-focused genre with required Design to Tech balance of 2: You have developed a game for a theoretic Tech-focused genre with required Tech to Design balance of 2: Yes, for tech-heavy game the margin for error is twice as small! With the formula this game uses, Tech games are at even higher disadvantage.

Their error percentages will always be bigger when compared to the error percentages of their Design counterparts exact amount of difference depends on the balance - for example, in case of 1. Summing up the study, here is the list of base genre, sorted by their attractiveness based on these factors. However, remember that you can hire employees specialized in Tech, or assign more features to tech-focused fields and therefore it is very much possible to develop balanced Tech games - it is just harder to do and requires more effort rather than doing RPGs or Adventures.

When multi-genre comes into play, you have a lot of opportunities. This pretty much makes it a piece'o cake to hit the balance goal mind the fact that tilted error weighting is still in effect, but since target balance is very close to 1, it is almost nonexistent. Basically, in order not to calculate everything myself, I have made a LibreOffice spreadsheet that calculates everything for me. Fields in yellow are supposed to be typed in by you, fields in orange are output fields that provide you with information.

Play in windowed and put it at the bottom of your screen and let Game Dev Tycoon take the rest of your screen.

When you have finished your game, on the screen that shows your XP gained, check if the amount of bugs, D and T in the table is correct and type in final values if needed. If table shows you a number in New Delta field, you should type that value into Delta field on the left, and then your game score into top score field on the left.

In case you're review-capped at 9, this means that you have to score a 10 not 9 review score to set a top score.

If it fails at close calls like, it told you that you'd get 9. If it fails miserably and gives off completely wrong results, write in comments and maybe I can fix it or maybe you can fix it - it's not that complicated really.

Excel option created by Jaimaster. Not the same as or based on the LibreOffice version. Usage - enter your game information into the purple and blue boxes on the top left area of the score manipulation tab. If you get errors after entering your information, you have probably entered an invalid value and broken the lookups E. Godvodore64 is G64 in the sheet, "S M L AAA" are the size options, "Y E M" are the audience options.

Trend options are "no", "normal", "strange" and "miss strange". All of these can be found and changed to your preferences in the tables starting in row AC. The staff list and design plan can be used to ensure you do not over extend any staff member when designing games that are stretching your staff to capacity - medium with 3 employees, large with 5 employees or any AAA. You can record your game history in the "Game History" box. Topics can be cleared and re-added as you research them in the "topic strength" box, which will then populate the "topic used" box with topic names but the numbers of games by topic needs to be entered manually.

Topics used does not support cross-genre but by the time you can create cross-genre games you shouldn't need the research bonus of new combinations anyway. I use "KAOS" as the name of my custom consoles, and the spreadsheet requires that.

You can change this in cells AC75 and AJ75 to "custom" or the name of your custom console, if you wish. Comprehensive Google spreadsheet option created by timikx. Instructions included within the sheet. Designed to be a faster, easier method of getting good scores. FANDOM Skip to Content Skip to Wiki Navigation Skip to Site Navigation. Games Movies TV Wikis. Explore Wikis Community Central Fandom University.

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Game Dev Tycoon Wiki is a Fandom Games Community. Content is available under CC-BY-SA. This page applies partially or entirely to version 1. You have made a non-"Great Combo" game during "Strange Combos" trend the worse the combo - the bigger the value. A value by which you should improve over your Top Score to score a In case of PC its always 1.

How much bugs can you leave in the game and still get max possible review score. In case new top score has been set, this is the value you'll have to improve by next time. First type this into the Delta field on the left, and then type your game score into the Top Score field on the left.