I'm going to try to keep this review as brief as possible because "Game Dev Story" (GDS) has a LOT to offer. The temptation to write a 100 page treatise is strong, but we'll have to suffice with a brief rundown of this deceptively deep game experience.
At its base, GDS is about running a game development studio where the player is tasked with heading up the business operations. You make important decisions about who to hire, what tasks to assign, consoles to license and develop for, advertising, attending trade shows, and about a hundred other things, to boot.
If that is where GDS began and ended, it wouldn't be that exciting. After all, you could have a thousand different factors and variables involved in the operation of your studio, but you still need a satisfying interplay between these elements to create a truly cohesive experience. Thankfully, GDS delivers in spades, creating a supremely rewarding feedback mechanism for all the combinations that you come up with.
For instance, you may begin the game by hiring talent that cumulatively excels at only one or two of the 4 available stats. On the other hand, you might choose a more balanced approach where each employee has a certain strength. Although you only start with 4 people, if you make enough money from completing contracts and releasing games, you can upgrade your office and be able to accommodate more employees. In turn, this means that you can achieve your goals much faster.
Another interesting mechanic in GDS is the "hype" number. This variable represents how excited your demographic is for your next release. This number depends on a variety of factors such as how well you are targeting your fan-base, the level of advertising and trade show attendance you are carrying out, etc. It just goes on and on, so the incentive to develop creative strategies and long-term plans is huge!
The game ends after spending twenty years with your development studio. You'll be straightforwardly graded based on how many games you made and how well they were received by the public. At this point, you'll be given the option to start the game over while retaining the levels in various game types that you accumulated during your previous play-through.
There's so much more to say about this game, but I'll leave that for my full review which you can find in the resource box below!
