YMMV / Game Dev Story

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Players really want to recruit developers with high stamina pool because higher stamina pool means they'll stay longer for work and can be trained for longer. Once you have at least four employees with high stamina pool, you can just fire the ones with lower stamina to save space for better devs.
  • Players would also rather train the devs to become Director/Producer/Hardware Developer in their studio and stick it there. The former two are Jack of All Stats with respectable stat pool and usually has high enough stats to keep you afloat for the entire game, while the latter is a Game-Breaker mentioned below and important to develop your own console. The early game specialized positions like Writer, Designer, and Sound Engineers are decent but not good enough for endgame and usually upgraded to the aforementioned class because of their higher stat pool. Hackers are potent Master of All but is very expensive and the research data can be used to upgrade your developers into the three aforementioned positions instead. Coders are only used to train and learn some game themes, leveling it up to another position, and never to be touched ever again.
  • Pinball training is used for two things; learn some extra themes for specific positions, and for boosting stats beyond the training soft cap. It's the only training method that will always grant the user +6 to all stats regardless of how high their stats are, though it's RNG based and you might not gain any stats from it, but the game doesn't punish save scumming as long as you didn't overwrite your save before.
  • For contracts, Console Analysis is the only thing that worth doing. Most contracts becomes obsolete and it's much less profitable than developing a middling 5/10 game on Playstatus or your own console and it's only done to gain extra research points, and Console Analysis is just so happens to be the one that grants extra research points the most.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Certain genres of games will match almost any theme. Anything RPG, Sim or Life related is pretty much guaranteed to work. Making your own game console can be this as well since you'll likely have a decent percent of the market, no real licensing costs to speak of, and unlike non-player consoles, your console can actually gain market share and provide you with a trickle flow of cash.
  • Whichever character you make into a Hardware Developer. If you start them as a Level 1 coder with average stats, you'll have leveled them up 19 times by the time they can become a hardware developer. Mix that with some training and you've got a (very expensive) Game Breaker character that's better than the most expensive "specialists" you can hire.
  • Special mention goes to Mister X. He's one of the best employees you can get as early as the first time you move on to the Studio 2 and develop a game there and he has the largest stamina pool available so far, where most of the other employees won't have his amount. Sure that his base statline is low, but with the abusible training and leveling up mechanics he can easily reach hundreds with enough resource and save scumming to get super parameter increase. He's also one of the cheapest late game viable unit you can train and even comparable to some late game recruits, ensuring a good return investment. Not bad for basically the first secret unit and supposedly the weakest.
  • The ever-so-humble Self-Help Book you can get as early as the first merchant visit is a powerful Magikarp Power in the right hands. Once you have yourself employees with high stat and stamina pool, you can spend a measly 30 dev. points to motivate up to 3 employees and rack up to hundreds of progression points. The amount of dev. points you spend for activating it once is piddly small for what you going to get in return. Suddenly getting perfect scores are not much of a sweat.
• Good Bad Bugs: Whenever you get to develop a new game and you had to choose which one gets to write scenario/design the graphics/make soundtrack of, using the same writer/graphic designer/sound engineer will slowly fatigue them and get less progression points from doing so in repeat attempt. The solution? You can simply cancel out then redo the development progress again to make it so that the game treats it as if you never choose them in the first place. This bug existed in every build of the game and hasn't been patched since, so abuse it to your hearts content!
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • PC is considered one of the worst (if not the worst) platform for developing video games. It nets very low sales, generates low hype (which is important to boost employee's productivity), and doesn't generate high ratings all around. The only saving grace is that PC doesn't cost extra for development and is available in every time period with no expirations, but some consoles later on (including your own) doesn't expire past Year 20, and they usually cost less (or none, if it's your own console) than what you can earn from developing games on PC.
  • Starting stats for each employee doesn't really matter as the training and leveling up system allows you to inflate their stats sky high with enough resources, with only one exception; Max Stamina. Each recruitable employees has a fixed sets of maximum stamina meter in varying quantity that cannot be changed no matter what. Employees consumes stamina whenever there are activities going on, like developing a game/contract, being motivated also consumes a good portion of their stamina, and most importantly, training your employees also costs them their stamina. If they ran out of stamina they will leave the office for a while and not working on the current project or the contact, the latter being important since you had to complete them in a set amount of time before the deadline hits (at least early on). Because of this, employees with lower stamina power will be overshadowed by even the baseline Mister X, and investing on them is generally a lost cause as the stat they have will not translate to more points when progressing or doing other activities.
  • Genre and types with popularity C is not going to sell well, nor will it be favourably reviewed even with the highest of effort put into it, so the only reason you want to develop a game with it is to increase it's level to gain as many direction points you can.
  • Each career role has their functions on developing the game (or console, for Hardware Engineer), with the exceptions of the Coder; all the Coder does is to make progression in your current development and adding as many stat points as the stats they have, which were often lopsided to its Fun factor that's lower than Directors and Hardware Engineers. Because of their low statline even compared to others on top of not being able to contribute to anything but giving points in regular development, their sole function is to level them up, train them to get the needed game types, then change their career to Writer and make progression towards Director career, who were Coder and Writer career combined with better stat pool and gains.company).
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Prior an update, you cannot input any name beyond the 14 character limit. It's rather harmless at first, but becomes annoying if you want longer titles. This was later patched so you can get longer titles onward.
  • The fact that you can no longer develop a sequel of a game you developed previously if the score of the latest installment you made is less than 32 points really annoys some players as it punishes Sequelitis, sometimes unintentionally. It's especially egregious if the disparity is only few points lower, all because of the reviewers are hard to please. It's going to be hard because sequels grants you extra development progress from the previous installation you made, and if that game has hundreds of points put on, you can start off with pretty high points at the beginning which makes it easier to develop a better game from it.
  • Power outages and equipment failures are lumped together because they're basically the same; randomly generated roadblocks that penalizes you regardless of your current progress. Whenever either one of them occurs, you lose a good amount of points from it. if you save scum right before it happens, it will loop over and over until you decide to progress normally.
  • Occasionally there are employees that would propose to increase certain parameters in your current development progression, at a cost of several development points. This would be nice, if it's not marred by the fact that the progress is chance-based and is based on their own non-stamina statline, and whatever they're trying to increase is often the ones that they don't have the stats to accomodate to it's succession, and if they do succeed the amount of point increases really worth diddly dick because of their low stat, which is also based on how much stamina they have left (they usually smart enough to start giving their proposal when their stamina is near or full at the very least, but there are certain examples). To top it off, you probably get more points from normally progressing or using self-help book, which (almost always) costs less dev. points to gain more benefits, especially in late game where the number you get from progressing normally and from motivations are much higher, and you can get it from multiple employees too! Needless to say it's a beginner's trap for early game and no mere hindrance in late game.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Some players have tried playing with an extra condition that renders them forfeit if they managed to get to the point where their assistant have to sell off her valuables to fund the company. Invariably, this means trying to not dip below $50k in cash (it feels disgraceful because your assistant is selling her valuables to fund your company).
• Unintentional Period Piece: It's obvious that the game was designed with Japanese gaming market in the late 1980s to early new '10s in mind. Several combinations like Puzzle-Horror that was made famous by the Silent Hill franchise and has been copy-pasted to hell and back by aspiring devs is considered a questionable combination by the game, and some popular themes like Sports are only C-rank at best despite its saturated popularity everywhere else. There's also the fact that the game doesn't acknowledge PC gaming resurgence in the new '10s by making PC being one of the low-tier platform that will always have low sales combinations throughout the playthrough, though it was justified since PC gaming isn't very popular in Japan after suffering a crash in the early 2000s and did not recover even in the new '10s, and only making it's resurgence during the Vtuber era in the next decade.

---