Shown: Updates, Experience, Cash, Refactors, School, Fame.
The Game Dev Tree is an Idle Game made in The Modding Tree by The Paper Pilot and released in 2020. In it, you are making your own game, releasing updates for it once you accumulate enough hours of work. Progress slows down over time, which is why you have to reset for updates as well as later resources like experience and cash, but those reset updates. Later layers will only reset those directly above them, leading to more strategy. Can you reach 1e1,000,000,000,000 hours of work?
The game is playable here
.
This game provides examples of:
- Challenge Run: Degrees in the diploma tab task you with reaching an enrollment goal while disabling row 4 effects except for two specific ones.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Each layer has its own color, and certain key words related to a layer will appear in that layer's color.
- Updates: Green
- Experience: Red
- Cash: Orange
- Refactors: Blue
- School: Brown
- Fame: Pink
- API: Avocado
- Time flux: Purple
- Diplomas: Indigo
- Lectures: Teal
- Good will: Dark green
- The Cracker: Certain updates unlocked by the Good Will layer involve hacking or using malware for your own benefit.
- Diminishing Returns for Balance: Your productivity slows down early on, lowering the amount of hours of work done every second. You quickly get upgrades to weaken the effect.
- Emoticon: The part about how your productivity decreases in terms of hours of work done ends with a :/.
- Export Save: You can export the 4KB+ savefile into the clipboard and paste it into the game.
- I Should Write a Book About This: The last action needed to complete the game is writing your thesis/Magnum Opus, "The Game Dev Tree".
- Leet Lingo: One of the classes is CS 1337.
- Loot Boxes: The Surprise Mechanics good will upgrade unlocks cash upgrades that add cosmetic loot crates and loot crate weapons to the game, making customers give way more cash.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: The TAs have names based on real-life game designers, like Gabriel Newell and Jean Carmack.
- Post-End Game Content: The game ends once you write a thesis at 1e1,000,000,000,000 hours of work, but with a good endpoint setup and some grinding, you can keep going and reasonably reach 1e10,000,000,000,000.
- Protagonist Journey to Villain: Downplayed. At first, your only goal is to make good games and become more efficient at doing so. However, later layers and upgrades in them (ads in the games in the Cash layer and various tricks to improve resource production in the Good will layer) lead to you adopting rather unethical methods to progress, such as running a botnet.
- Rainbow Speak: Many node descriptions color certain words related to them and other ones accordingly.
- Reset Milestones: Every layer that uses static currency in the 3rd and 4th row has several milestones that provide convenient things like retaining upgrades/milestones, automatically resetting layers, and autobuying buyables, but three of them let you progress further by unlocking Degree programs and the culmination of the game.
- School Grade Hacking: One of the Good Will upgrades is "Hack into college databases", which allows you to "Manipulate your GPA to multiply enrollment gain based on your refactors".
- Skill Point Reset: You can press a button to reset endpoint and good will upgrades, which is helpful since both are limited resources and not spending the latter may be more beneficial due to its boost to fame and fan effects.
- Sock Puppet: You can make alt accounts on Discord, Patreon, Twitch, and Github to boost their effects if you're famous enough.
- Take That!: The game gets in a lot of potshots toward the game industry, from practices such as microtransactions to the idea that buying overpriced hardware will improve productivity.
- Time Abyss: Before long, you will get to the point at which you've spent eons on your game development career.
- Verbal Backspace: The description of lectures says "you should be able to start hiring Teacher Assistants to take advantage of", with "take advantage of" crossed out and followed by "help you out."
- Whatevermancy: The time flux layer mentions a course in Chronomancy which teaches time manipulation.
