Game Dev Tycoon For Android - Brief Review

This will be the first mobile game review by me and I will try my best to share what I know.

This game was just released for Android today and it's not a new game. Although a mobile version for iOS was released last year but this game have been around from way back. It was out in Steam in 2012 for PC and I played it the first day it was released there. It was so good and I played it every day for months that time. It might looks simple but actually it was quite sophisticated. It has been years since I last play it and that time I wished they come out with a mobile version on this game because it would be awesome to be able to play it on the go. 5 years later, they did it. It might be very late but better late than never.

There are a lot of changes have been made to this game ever since the last time I played it. I believe the mobile version is the same one like the PC version. This game, as the name suggested, is about being a game developer tycoon. It is a business simulation game and your job is to create and develop video game and earn money from it.

You will start in a small garage, on your own and with limited money. You need to create and develop a lot of games to get money and fans, which will determine the reputation of your "company". As you go on, you will unlock a lot of other things and the game-play will get more sophisticated. Even when you just started, to create a good game which will generate you a lot of money and fans will not be easy, although the game might look simple to play at first. You have 35 years of in-game time to play this game and this duration will go by very fast! You will start the game in the 80s when video game was started to booming.

To create and develop your first game you need to pick a topic, genre and a platform. For starting you only have four topics, 5 genres and 3 platform to choose from. You can unlock more as you go along. Don't forget to put a title for your game. After that you need to select the graphic for your game and you only have two to choose from for now, 2D graphics or text based. Which ever you choose will determined the cost of your game. Those are all that you have to do for the early stage of this game before you can start to develop your first game.

When you hit the "Start Development" button you will see the progress bar of your game at the middle top of the screen. Development of the game have three stages. Each stage you will have to choose which items should you prioritize by moving the sliders side to side. At this early stage those options doesn't have much effect on the overall quality of your game but it does matter, so adjust those things wisely. You need to think hard of what to do at every stage of the development because there's something more important than another that you need to prioritize. But if you're not sure what to do just move all the sliders to an equal part or all of it to the right. Later in the game you cannot do that most of the time because it will be more complicated.

As the development stage goes on, you will generate game points. This points is divided into two, design point and technology points. These point will determined how good your game will be and how much points you generate will be determined by your skills and all the options that you choose earlier on. The more points you generate the better your game will be but to go deeper into it, more design point means your game will be more beautiful and more technology points means your game will be more fun to play. While in those development stages, you will also generate bugs points which, well, bugs for your game and you need to fix it later after the development completed and before you release the game. releasing the game without fixing the bugs will severely affect your game's rating and will caused your game to flop which in return you will not earning much money and fans.

You can see the number of design points in the yellow circle, technology points in blue, bugs point in orange and the research points in the purple or dark blue circle.

After you finished developing your game, you will see how much experience you gain from creating and developing it. This will determine you level in a lot of things as well as you main level. You can see it in the picture below. The higher your levels are the better game you will create.

Before your game release to the masses and before you can start earning from it, the game will be judged by four reviewers. These reviewers can be very harsh towards your game and I believe that these review star rating will affect how your game will be received and will determined how much revenue and fans you can get from it. The rating will be 0 to 10 as the higher and five stars maximum. It's not easy to get good rating but if your game is good you will get it.

Video - Creating a game after 7 years. Pretty much what you have to do in developing your first game as well. Notice the name of the console and its company? Funny, right? If you want to know how the development of the game changed after you've upgraded your office, watch the video at the end of this post.

After the review, good or bad, your game will go on sale. You will received income from it every week until it is taken off the market. While being sold, your game will also have ranking based on how much it was sold and how much the earnings. You can see this at the graft on the right side of the screen. The most important figure will be the sales of the first week. It will determined your records on how much your game was sold. You can also generate game report and this report is very important because from it you can generate research points and knowing some insights of the game you've just released. These insights will tell you some things like the compatibility of your game's genre and topic, is it good for the platform you've chose, which parts in the development stages should you prioritized and many more. These insights are very useful when you want to create other games and the same one next time to make it better.

As you go on, there will new platform introduced. For each of the new ones you need to buy the license for you to create the game for it. Each platform will also add a price to the cost of developing your game. Don't be too quick to jump to new platform, it doesn't matter much which platform you choose, you will still earn money and get fans because each platform will have its own share in the market. Choose the one in middle or just stick to PC until you can afford the license and development cost.

Apart from creating and developing your games you also need to do research. There are a lot things you unlock through research such as new topic, new features to add to your game and features for you to create your custom game engine. All these will determined how well your game will compete in the market because new games need new features and technology as you progressed. To do research you need research points. Some of the things also need money to fund the research. Getting research point can be difficult in early stage so use it wisely. Just remember that as you go further, cost of some of the new things that have been unlocked that you want to research will be more except for the topics.

Once you accumulate 1 million money you can pay 150k to upgrade and move to a better office located at the technology park. From this point onward there will more things for you to handle. You can hire staff and train them. Your staff will help you creating a far better game. You will also need to play around with many other features and options while creating and developing your games. It will be harder but don't worry, you will learn how to play this game better each time your finished it and started a new one.

There will be also many other things popped up such as sabotage, interviews and even scammers! It will be getting more fun once you're upgraded. But you have to check on the game time regularly because you only have 35 years to run your company and time in this games goes by very fast.

Seriously?? LOL!

The name of the platform and the company behind it in this game is some what funny. If you play it you will know what I mean... LOL! Most of the times I got carried away with that and even named my game with weird names.

Ahahahahahahahahahaha

This game is not free, it cost $4.99 but it is very fun to play and it's worth you money buying it. One good thing is that it doesn't have adverts and in-game purchase. You just need to pay once and play it forever. Not much mobile games are like this nowadays, most will be free to download (not really because you still need to pay for your data) or free to start or free to play (but later on it will entice you to buy things in the game). If you prefer the PC version, you can get it from Steam for $9.99 if I'm not mistaken.

If you ever dreaming of being a game developer or run a company in that industry, this game might be for you. Although it doesn't portray all the complicated and sophisticated parts of creating and developing a video game in real life but all those things inside it, is enough to make you feel like a video game developers and learn their hard efforts in doing it. You will enjoy it, I believe.

This is how the process of developing the game after you moved and upgraded your office. It become more sophisticated and complicated. There are a lot more things you need play with. In that video you can also watch how to create custom game engine and how joining the G3 game convention look like. Looks fun isn't it?

One of my successful games, The Badman Return! :D