Mad Games Tycoon 2 – Tips for Very Hard (Early Game)

Very Hard Difficulty Tips

  • Don’t waste money. Don’t research things you won’t use, don’t make your rooms “cute,” don’t build a room fit for ten people and only put five desks in it. The interior decorator in you can wait until you have the money to do interior decorating (like, a billion dollars.).
  • Try having as few IPs as possible (ideally only one) use as few genres as you can (ideally two or three) and as few topics as you can (ideally less than five.) This will allow you to get better at all the game elements faster, and increase your sales.
  • Don’t add improvements unless you absolutely have to. Polishing for one month does the same as adding one or two improvements, but does it for free.
  • Arcades are a very good way to make money early on, try researching the Workshop and porting your games to arcade. Or even better, make your games for arcade first, then port them, that boosts the sales of arcade games a lot.
  • Try to publish through the strongest publishers (five stars rating) and getting an exclusivity contract with one of them. That’s going to make every sale you make worth it. Some people say going for smaller publishers because they “pay more” but the thing is, their potential sales are lower, so you’ll be losing potential profit.
  • Make contracts to improve game elements. This can’t be repeated enough, and it’s one thing neither the tutorial nor the oh-so-overestimated “slider guides” ever bother mentioning.

Those stars next to everything in the game development window? They affect your review score more than having your sliders one or two points off could. If you have less than three stars on any element, try not to use them in your own game unless you must.

  • More people make better games. It’s how it works in this game, I’ve found that twenty “newbies” of 30 skill will have an easier time making a good game than three or four “pros” at 70 skill. Quantity means quality.
  • Don’t ever hire a “legendary employee.” They are – at best – 3 times better than normal employees, but cost – at least – five times more, usually closer to ten times more. In short, they’re newbie traps, money sinks, things you don’t want around if you want to stay afloat.
  • Minimize and optimize your building. Some people make the mistake of having one large, centralized toilet/lounge. This causes employees to have to walk for literal in-game weeks to go take a pee. Every second an employee is not sitting on their desk typing is a second you’re losing money.

It’s better to build small rooms (for five or ten people) and have small toilets and lounges close to every room, that way your employees will only be away from their desks for seconds, return to work faster, and be more productive.

  • Don’t add graphics or sound artists to your dev room. They slow down development and only bring in a minimal amount of graphics and sound points, while sacrificing control/gameplay points. You can get 98% reviews on a graphics/sound-heavy genre (like action, racing or RPG) with just game devs and programmers.
  • Don’t do racing games at first. They’re harder to get good review scores for, don’t have a suitable subgenre for a long time (which harms review score,) and their available topics are few. Racing is the “hard mode” choice for making games until you have Graphics and Sound rooms and a suitable sub-genre for it.
  • To practice, play in the Giant Warehouse map. This will give you one huge building, and being able to expand without wasting millions really lowers difficulty. Later on when you feel like you know what you’re doing, you can start a run on a different map.

All these things allow me to do “insane” things like producing one game every two months in normal speed in Legendary and still get 95%+ review scores almost constantly, so they should work better in Very Hard and below.

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