QCF: Game Dev Tycoon

ame Dev Tycoon is a game I've wished for since playing Game Dev Story back in 2010. I couldn’t tell you how much I played that game. In fact, it was my game of the year back then. So when picking up Game Dev Tycoon and diving in to a deeper, more fleshed-out version of that same experience, you’d think that I'd be jumping for joy the entire way through. However, what I really discovered is a game so difficult to wrap my head around that it's almost a cautionary tale about the current state of game development.

GDT starts you out as an indie developer toiling away at your computer and developing games in your garage. There's no real narrative in place, so you just start making games back in the early days of gaming before the NES even launched. Being that you're a one-person game making machine, you begin to pump a text adventure here and military strategy game there. Once you gain a little money you can invest in developing your own engine and research new types of games.

Now the engine is the crux of pretty much everything you can do in GDT. If you want to program for home consoles you'll have to first research the gamepad upgrade, and then you have to create a new engine with certain upgrades built into it in order to use it. Overall, the main push of the game involves making more money, researching new upgrades, and then developing a new engine to keep your games current. As everything happens, the game industry evolves around you and follows a history similar to ours, including new consoles such as "Vintendo’s TES." Once all your hard work pays off and you finally make a game that sells hundreds of thousands of copies, you can expand your garage development studio to a larger office and hire employees; that’s when the game experience explodes and becomes super challenging.

When you open your studio and start hiring staff, you’ll notice one thing: they're expensive. Even for a low level programmer you're paying $9,000 a month, so you must start slow and not hire four people right away. You can also develop medium-sized games once you get an additional employee, which allows you to gain publishing contracts for specific game types or systems. Meanwhile, you'll work to level up your employees and create better game engines and genres.

The game's difficulty takes a huge jump at this point. I played about 15 different companies in GDT, and once I hired at least two employees, every time, everything just started falling apart. As you level employees up, they become more expensive. Furthermore, games you produce, even with higher technical design and quality, score or sell worse. You also have to make sure you produce the correct game for the right system. For example, games geared towards younger audiences would fare better on the GDT equivalent of the Game Boy. This giant implosion and then hemorrhaging of money would cause your company to go bankrupt in a year.

While I’m not saying that Game Dev Tycoon isn't a great game, the systems for developing a game still remain, and researching new game types and developing new engines still becomes fun. However, the mid game difficulty spike and just lack of information telling you what you did wrong leads to frustration more often than not. I would release a game that I thought I had made with worse scores that would sell more than one with higher scores, and I don’t know why. I'll still go back and try to play it again because I do enjoy the fantasy of running my own game development studio. Hopefully some updates would allow for a better idea of what you’re doing in later game scenarios.

Anyone who enjoyed Game Dev Story a couple of years ago should give GDT a try. Though if you're not looking for a difficult experience, apply elsewhere.