Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Graknorke]

Hm, so what makes a product profitable, exactly? Because even releasing good and better products I don't seem to make any appreciable profits on them, admittedly with only 2 man teams (since it's kind of prohibitively expensive to keep too many employees around for the duration of an entire project.)

EDIT: Also is the activation key thing supposed to come up every time you start the game? It's pretty obnoxious.

[BigD145]

I'll wait for full release. $6 price difference is worth the wait.

[dennislp3]

You have to adjust the project budget to allow for more money. They default to 10k budget...which is about 2 days worth of wages for 4 employees of any caliber.

As for breaking even. You have to be careful about hiring without enough money to make a full project. I used to get stuck in a loop of doing contracts to stay afloat and I was getting no where...so I said screw it, took out a $50k loan, and then developed a good OS with 5 or so employees...and boom I was rich. If you don't want to make your own OS make sure you release software on at least the OS with the largest share. Since it is random sometimes you can get very lucky and find a good OS with 40%+ share of the market and reach out to a LOT of people. Also very important is to make sure you market your products before launch.

Once you can support it you can set up a server farm (you need LOOOTS of servers) to help bring in some small income to help offset wages.

A few other tips:
Add lots of money to your insurance pool...the more money there the happier the employees seem to be and the less in wages they ask for...plus you get small interest from it. If you want to test it then take all the money out...everyone will be furious and start asking for wage increases on account on not having enough benefits.

Make sure you hire an IT person every few months to keep computers/servers running in good shape...hire janitors (really should be called maintenance or something) to work on everything else (lights, AC, heating etc). Obviously cleaners are good too for keeping your environment score up to keep productivity up.

Don't be afraid to invest in stocks! Just don't put them all in once place. If you are careful and do it right you can make lots of money from stocks alone.

Make sure you have enough bathrooms and break rooms near your work areas...everyone seems to come to work tired and hungry. Having multiple fridges and coffee pots per area really helps prevent everyone from not working.

Specializing employees helps speed up and improve certain aspects of your software...just don't do it too early or you will end up with lots of wasted time on smaller projects. Large projects like OS's seem to benefit most from specialized workers.

[LoSboccacc]

I've thrown together a guide to start into profitability - you can do better by micromanaging a second dev from the star, but this is easy enough and gets you to 300k before the second year with about 30k monthly budget on average

https://imgur.com/a/fbmF8

[Graknorke]

Any advice on scaling up the building? It seems like after any more than 3 employees or so they spend more time going to the toilet and eating and getting coffee than they do actually working, by a long way.

[Graknorke]

Any advice on scaling up the building? It seems like after any more than 3 employees or so they spend more time going to the toilet and eating and getting coffee than they do actually working, by a long way.

I've not got the game, so I don't know, but how about placing all the coffee, toilets and eating areas in a central 'hub' with the workers in offices adjacent, so they have minimal walking distance?

The problem seems to be that employees will only do one task at once before returning to their workstation. So they'll get up, go to the fridge, walk back then immediately get up again to get coffee or something.

[LoSboccacc]

check out the tutorial I made: they have a coffe room in the very room they work, and now I optimized it even more so they have it on two step on their left in line with the exit door, so janitors have less to clean

it works more or less as dwarf fortress housing, just have mini hubs with canteen and toilets in center and surrounding dev rooms. you'll also need to build them near a parking slot, which contains 5 cars, so I'm organizing it around a 5 person block

Edit

Cant understand how budget works. I gave generous allowancces for budget and hr and they keep hiring cheapocodemonkeys 

What are you using? I'm going with 500k and 25k now but its not working well

[Neonivek]

Ok played it and overall I'd say the game is!!!

Average... its ok if it is your thing. It does a few things interestingly, but for now it lacks the charm to put it all together and make it truly worth it.

You can do projects but they lack an OOMPH! that makes you go "YEAH! I just made something!"

[jocan2003]

Sooo am i alone thining this game should have ascii instead of that thing called graphics? I mean it has its charm i guess but is a total turnoff for me. On the other hadn i find them funny bashing they keyboard...

[LoSboccacc]

dunno it feels and play different once you start automating. the problem becomes scaling, building skycrapers of people trying to not get them into each other way while providing a costant supply of alchoocoffee

Sooo am i alone thining this game should have ascii instead of that thing called graphics? I mean it has its charm i guess but is a total turnoff for me. On the other hadn i find them funny bashing they keyboard...

well, for one I hate the vignette

[Neonivek]

dunno it feels and play different once you start automating. the problem becomes scaling, building skycrapers of people trying to not get them into each other way while providing a costant supply of alchoocoffee

Sooo am i alone thining this game should have ascii instead of that thing called graphics? I mean it has its charm i guess but is a total turnoff for me. On the other hadn i find them funny bashing they keyboard...

well, for one I hate the vignette

Wow, you make it sound unappealing.

Like immensely so.

You make the game sound more like a factory Sim with living robots powered by coffee.

---

Also the ASCII would have probably helped the charm a TINY BIT!

But ultimately the issue is more one of tangibility. You often don't feel like you are doing anything.

[Chiefwaffles]

Uh, is there any reason why my OS team refuses to design the networking portion of their project? I have a designer and a multi-role both with networking specialty in design, yet the networking bar isn't going up.

[LoSboccacc]

select all component of the team from the team view and post a pic of their cumulative skills along with the projcet bar

[Chiefwaffles]

I wasn't lying. I knew that A.) All bars except Network were at 100%, but Network was at 0%, and B.) I had three members with Network design skill. One with a really high network design skill.
But I figured it out. I think. I started the project then hired the network guys, which seems to of messed it up. Starting another OS later with the same team worked fine.

In other news, I think I may of somehow broken my game, or am extremely unlucky.
Somehow all of my products are making $0 in profit. All of them. Even with an Outstanding project with max marketing. I think it's because I checked "open source" on one of my projects earlier?

[The13thRonin]

How does this compare to Mad Games Tycoon?

That's probably the best Game Dev Tycoon I've played... Roughly x100 better than Indie Game Dev.