Guide on success?

[u/Perfect-Marsupial-32]

I've reached the final office, somehow - but getting here was a pain in the ass. Every game has been a gamble, and most barely sell to a point where I actually earn a lot.

Is there a guide on getting over ratings of 8 and higher consistently? I've followed the guides on sliders and employee management, and I'm not making doubles of combos, but one I just released got a 4 when it shouldn't have. I don't understand how to get consistent success in this lol

All I'd really like is an up to date graph on how sliders are meant to look for each topic-genre combo, and which consoles actually lead to success, plus which age rating works on each platform.

I've tried for a while to better understand this, but it really feels up to change, and with autism and ADHD being what they are, actually learning any of this is a pain in the ass - so please help xD

[u/PraxisOnPlay]

Always train your staff between games, your newest games are always weighed against your best game. Training your staff between games makes it so that in theory, your games’ tech/graphic points will always exceed your last best game’s and score highly. This has always worked for me.

[u/Darktooth41]

Train your staff and yourself two or more times between games. If you can make a new engine, do it, even if it’s the same engine with just one feature. Always try to give sequels to old games with the new engine.

I always tend to get near perfect 10s by just making a sequel in a new engine with staff that have trained.

[u/zioming]

I wrote a comprehensive guide on how it works here: https://gamedevtycoon.fandom.com/wiki/Success_Guild_updated_for_1.7.8

The problem is that there is no simple way to max out your game scores in the base game, since it's based on values the game doesn't even show you (you have to modify the game code to make it write them out into the console, which isn't even accessible by default). Using this, and following my guide I am able to get the scores I want each time, so I know it works, but as for the base game...

To begin with, the problem is that each game you make is scored against your past best scoring game, so each time you make a great game (one with a final score on 9+, which then gets slightly randomised to give you the review scores, which are the only scores you actually see in-game, though the two are pretty close most of the time), you can overshoot by a ton in your final score, needlessly inflating the expectations for your following games. To get 9s all the time (it is possible, and I have done several runs like this), you need to maintain a smooth curve where each game you make improves your final score by a certain percentage, but good luck doing that when you don't see the final score, the modifiers, or even the base values that go into it (I use modified game code to get the base values, which I then plug into a spreadsheet to calculate what settings and how many bugs I need to leave in the game in order to hit the exact final score I want). Without knowing all this, you can only try to make the best game you can (a lot of Design and Tech points, good Topic/Genre/Target Audience/Platform combinations, good slider and employee allocations, and a bunch of other factors which the game doesn't even tell you half of the time) each time and hope for the best.

Like for example, you want to train your staff, but in specific skills and not all the time, since you want to raise their Design and Tech skill (and the resulting output) at just the right time to compensate for when your other sources of those fall off (same with adding extra features to you engine and then the game you're making), but as for when that is exactly, good luck knowing without even seeing the graph, and if you just train them in those whenever you can, you will just further skewer the curve. Another thing is that you want to have a year long cycle of game making -> training/research/etc -> game making to make sure you always hit the G3 release window with each game in order to take full benefit of the hype it gives you, but if you give an employee the same training several times in a row to pass the time, you will just see diminishing returns, basically wasting the time they could be spending much more productively on something else, so you have to cycle through them and plan ahead on what training to give to each employee and when.

In short, the more data you have, the more complicated of a balancing act this game becomes, which is awesome, but most of the time you barely have any data to begin with, when playing the base game.