Game Dev Story is a business simulation about choices.
What genre, what platform, and what theme do you want for your game?
Is the game cute and simple or realistic and innovative?
Do you want to use an in-house art, story, and audio folks or outsource assets and writing?
There are quite a few choices and you’ve got the freedom to make larger decisions about advertising campaigns and which development path to focus on.
Nothing is free, you’ve got to pay platform holders for devkits, employees their salaries, and fees for everything and everyone in the studio. Game developers won’t choose to grow on their own, you’ve got to prod them forward with research data gathered during development. Once they’re more talented their salary has to rise too. Though at least the game doesn’t simulate headhunters to recruit your developers out from under you.
Your team of developers will approach you during the various stages of development with costly suggestions that could result in a dramatically superior game or it could fail and fill the game with bugs. You’ll pay for those in development time before the game ships. Alternatively you can choose to ship early and chance critical disaster.
Maybe you should show off a vertical slice at Gamedex, or you could spend that money on advertising instead. Buy some Dead Bull to keep the developers motivated and read the latest Game Guy magazine to see what people are saying about your studio. Lets hope you don’t suffer a power outage and no-one else releases a similar game before you ship your own.
What makes Game Dev Story fun is interacting with your staff to create the best game, watching it develop, taking risks, making a name and shipping it. Was it well-received or did it fail miserably at the hands of critics and the gaming public? Maybe you’ll do better next time and eventually the fans will be lining up for launch day.
It is a never-ending dream come true for anyone who enjoys simple simulation games and is curious about game development.
The default interface left two black bars at the top and bottom of my iPhone screen, didn’t support landscape mode, and doesn’t support task-switching. Just enable the superior virtual gamepad and save often. This initial release is otherwise extremely promising and bodes well for future games from Kairosoft.
10/10 Magical Aardvarks Will continue to waste many hours into this sim, and heck it even got me to write my first game review in a year.
Buy Game Dev Story for $3.99 on the iOS app store. it is a truly special once-in-a-lifetime sim that will ruin your life with its addictive gameplay.
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