Mad Games Tycoon (UP)

Legendary is a pain. You start with less money, critics are ruthless, events are mostly negative and I'm pretty sure everything costs more.... The gaming community also has ridiculously short attention spans so your game gets pulled from the market pretty quickly.

That said, getting to $1b isn't *too* difficult once you get off to a good start. It's the start that's the hardest part, so here's some tips on how to best get started.

First thing's first, start in the garage, not the small office. The space and initial expenditure is nice, but the monthly fee for keeping that office will screw you over.

Secondly, and this is important, make sure to set your game speed to Slow and not Standard or higher. It's not made clear when setting things up, but game speed controls the speed of the week but not the speed of your game development. This means that in, let's say Standard speed, when developing your first or second or third game, several new features (like sprites, colours, etc) will become available to you to research, and the critics will pan your game heavily for not having them, leading to poor sales or pulling from the market quickly! If you're stacking the hard achievements with Legendary, then it will take significantly longer to go for the "High tech - Create an engine with all features." achievement with this game speed, so I would recommend doing that specific achievement on a separate playthrough.

In slow I'm able to release one or two games at least before I even get 4 colours available as a feature, and was even able to get two or three games still on shop floors at the beginning, leading to regular income. Legendary is hard enough without having to struggle affording researching features and dev kits.

Thirdly, set your company to be based in Sweden, and set your character to specialise in Puzzle games and Sprites, with three points assigned to Game Design and two points assigned to Speed.

Fourthly(?), and this bit involves RNG - potentially requiring you to restart a few times, start your game and find out:
a) Which three topics you have available to you (build a 4x4 Dev office, create a game and check) and
b) Which staff you can hire.

The absolutely perfect start of the game is to have two topics available which fit well with the Puzzle genre, and to hire four staff at the beginning all with the Puzzle specialty. If you need tips on which topics go well with which genre, see the link below:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=61626...

(backup)

https://1drv.ms/b/s!Asr4z0Bu0rVYxeY0uJ-FI6gBQdLevA

Of course, this is a ridiculous thing to dice roll (literally throwing four 12 sided dice until you get all 12's), and if you do actually get it, then you should cruise through the beginning with highly rated games and strong sales, but at the very least you'll want at least three staff in your company at the start (including your character) all with the Puzzle speciality. The number of staff will help massively with the speed in which you're able to get games and updates out there, and with them all sharing the same genre speciality and potentially different feature specialities, should easily achieve higher ratings.

~~~

Now that you're past the RNG stuff it's time to get started. You will need loans to do everything in this next paragraph so take what you need just to get some income in place (I think I needed around $50k).

Place 4 of the cheapest desks in your 4x4 development office (put one along each side of the room, overlapping the door) and build your first Puzzle game, targeting adults, PC only, for Swedish and English. Publish it with any company who's fanbase is Puzzle based (I think this is completely random at the start, but not sure).

The moment your game releases, update update update it up to five times. While making money on your first game, build a 3x3 toilet asap, and once you reach $110k in profit, build a 3x3 Staff room. Just a single toilet, sink, hand drier and plant for the toilet and throw a sofa in with a plant for the Staff Room.

Once five updates are completed build a second game (NOT a sequel - that's an easy way to get your current game off the shelves), same settings as above, but flip the titles round (IE Art + Dragon becomes Dragon + Art) and change the name - these will now be your two Puzzle franchises which you'll keep on store shelves. Publish this with the two star Puzzle publisher (for me this was "Namco").

While your team is updating Game #2, the first feature research should become available to you; 4 colours. Build the research room and obtain it asap. Don't hire anyone for it though, just take someone out of your dev team to do it for now, and when they've finished researching, put them back. When you have more regular income you can hire someone proficient in Game Design to do the research specifically.

Once the feature is researched, build an Engine with all the features available to you. Set the price to 100,000 and 10% sales profit. This will help *a lot* with your finances!!

Now, you'll want to research a new genre; any, it doesn't matter, so that you can unlock subgenres. You'll want your sequels to now have the genre Puzzle + Skill.

And now for another bit of RNG - unfortunately this one can be hard to predict so I would save your game here and load if it doesn't work out.

Take another look at your "hire staff" window and see if there's a genre that's common amongst new staff, then hire them into a team (remember Group Management is a thing!). Try to aim for staff who don't specialise in outdated features (like ASCII), though this is something you can fix later on when you have more disposable income, and at this stage is less important. Your aim is to build a second development team of around 3-5 people focusing on a different genre from Puzzle. Your garage should now have two 4x4 dev rooms, a staff room, toilet and research room. If you have the extra cash, replace all the desks in your garage with 3 star ones. If you spot someone with a pretty high Office skill, place them in the head office (where the car is) to assist with development speed, though this isn't crucial at this stage.

With this setup, the plan is for Team 1 (Puzzle team) to now be building sequels to GameIP 1 + 2, update them five time the moment they release, and for Team 2 to be building 2x GameIP's and 5 updates for each of them, and sequels to each of them until you reach around $2m.

Do not attend the Mad Games Convention unless you have more than $500k and have fully paid off the loans with a comfortable balance sheet.

During this time, you'll want a dedicated researcher, so try and hire someone with a decent Game Design skill. Depending on how things are going you'll want to research a pair of new topics for the new IP's your developing, and you'll want to research new game genres so that you can build fully featured engines for them and sell them for $110k/10%. This is the secret sauce to making a profit at the beginning.

With regards to when to build for other languages, I started when my company was dancing around the $1m mark, to build a fan presence and to increase sales. As to when I started building for other platforms, I personally I didn't bother with any dev kits until the NES/Master System era, where I was already in a Small Office and had $m's to spend. This is of course, up to you, try to aim for platforms that have high marketshare (if you know your gaming history you should be able to predict which consoles started dominating at which era and plan accordingly!).

By the time QA becomes available to you, you really should start thinking about moving out of the small garage and into a large one, so check your funds and if it looks like you'll have enough to build the Large garage with ~$1m to spare, make the plunge. You should be able to build slightly two slightly larger dev rooms with 3 star desks and picture frames/fans/etc, a larger toilet, staff room, and a head office. Make sure there's space for a QA which houses 4 people and perhaps a marketing team.

As a side note, it's not clear from the achievement descriptions but any achievements labelled (Hard) also unlock in Legendary, so you may as well jump in with Legendary since you'll likely get most of the others along the way to $1b.

Good luck!