Mad Games Tycoon (UP)

Having the perfect sliders, development focus points, genre combinations and topic combinations, together with all extras from the Art, Sound, Motion Capture and Gameplay/QA implemented will still have your games dance between 92-98% as RNG is involved, but there's certainly things you can do to tip the scales in your favour, and that is having the right staff in the right departments with the right skills.

In late game, you'll eventually start being able to develop on platforms that support up to 35 features from a game engine. This means that you should have, or aim to have, at least 35 game developers in each development team, that specialises in each feature. And also you'll have each team specialise on the same genre as well. This should almost guarantee a 100% or very, very close to 100% game pretty consistently.

I got lucky and managed to unlock this in 1994 without such specifics with the staff, but I did notice that staff specialising in the same genre made a huge impact on the rating, and having *that many* staff leads to more games being made quickly, which means features don't end up out of date and less staff sitting around idle. Staff with outdated features (like PC Speaker audio) who have decent skill bars can be moved into another department like Research or Customer Support. or else, fired. It is not possible to change what genre or feature the staff member was hired with.

For this reason, it's worth knowing which skill bars go well with which room;

Development room: Game Design, Programming, Graphics and Music.
Music Room: Music
Graphics room: Graphics
Motion Capture: Programming
Q&A: Game Design and Programming
Research: Game design
Marketing: Office Work
Game Suport: Office Work
Headoffice: Office Work

Use the QA department to make game reports showing which sliders, target audiences, subjects and sliders you got right during the creation of the game and make a note. Or, if you want to save on experimenting yourself on the right sliders, genre combinations, taking on user feedback to try and find the perfect slider setup, then a guide on Steam has been published with tables showing the best sliders. genre combinations, target audiences and topics to use for each genre that I found extremely helpful. Formatting can't be transferred cleanly to TA so I'll just link directly.

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

In case the above gets taken offline, a quick and dirty PDF can be viewed here:
https://1drv.ms/b/s!Asr4z0Bu0rVYxeY0uJ-FI6gBQdLevA

This icon guide that I made will also help when marking off which staff you've hired in which dev studio, or simply to remember what each icon means.

https://1drv.ms/b/s!Asr4z0Bu0rVYxeZEgENEU3Roc5bMcA

It doesn't have a couple of the very late game (Year 2015+) icons, like ZeeTree, Augmented Reality and a couple of others, but I don't think you'll need them, as I was able to get all of the achievements that didn't require hard/legendary mode before I unlocked all the features pretty easily.

A screenshot showing my game's office after I had obtained all normal mode achievements, in case you need layout/studio size ideas. Remember you can enable "Auto Object Placement" when building rooms to make constructing 3 star rooms 10x easier.

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Asr4z0Bu0rVYxeZRlFTtinga85dUAA

Any questions give me a shout and I'll try to help.