Indie Dev Tycoon by Apple Dash

[raw]
made by Apple Dash for Ludum Dare 46 (COMPO)

Manage your very own indie game and try to keep it alive wink-wink through the development process!

Features:

  • Customize your game and yourself! Change game's name half way through! Change the genre half way through! Add features!
  • Buy new stuff in the Asset Store for real fake money!
  • Manage your game! Balance your features and progress against the focus (or, well, boredom) of your team;
  • Hire new people! Fire new people! Their destiny is in your hands! Your destiny is in the hands of the random number generator!
  • Jokes! Not even sorry for most them!
  • Lack of tutorial! An exciting opportunity to venture into the unknown or a cut corner to get the submission out on time? Yes!
  • It logs your progress! Relieve the fun memories of the past couple of minutes at the very end of your game.

Screenshots: image<em>2020-04-19</em>20-42-06.png

image<em>2020-04-19</em>20-42-25.png

How To Play:

So, about that lack of the tutorial.

The main goal of the game is to get your game to the finish line. To do that, you must fill all 4 bars (Game Design, Programming, Art and Sound (last one is certainly ironic considering this game's soundscape)). Each developer you take on the team add points to the bars every couple of seconds (that's Delay stat). You can review each dev's stats on the Team screen.

How do you hire new people then? From the same Team screen. Just pick the devs you like from the list of available people and click them. This list refreshes every once in a while.

Now, making indie games for free for prolonged periods of time leads to the loss of focus and Boredom. That's the grey bar on top of the bars. Every time it fills -- a developer you hired leaves the project. If you don't have any more people on the team and you yourself get bored -- that's Game Over.

So, how do you prevent it? Change the project over at the Project screen, of course. Add new features, change name, genre or theme -- go nuts. But, obviously, overhauling the project half way through comes at a great (well, -ish) cost. You lose some of the points you already accumulated.

Some people on your team come with free money. Go over to the Store and spend it on assets to boost your bars and alleviate some boredom.

As your project comes to an end (successfully or not) you will be shown a log of story of your game's development.

Now that I'm writing this, I realize that you kinda have to Alt+F4 out of the game to start over, but it's a bit late to change things, huh.

Oh, and the game is capped at windowed 720p mode, as I don't have the energy to fight Unity's UI systems anymore. Sorry about that

Ratings

Overall 889th 2.978⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Fun 894th 2.761⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 533th 3.283⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Theme 671th 3.5⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 962th 2.565⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Humor 140th 3.595⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Mood 940th 2.525⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Given 44🗳️ 17🗨️

Feedback

Giordas
21. Apr 2020 · 13:05 UTC
It was quite hard to play on my computer because i couldn't see the buttons at the bottom of the screen.
🎤 Apple Dash
21. Apr 2020 · 13:08 UTC
@giordas oh no. I guess, I should fix that UI after all
Sami
21. Apr 2020 · 13:12 UTC
A nice change on the theme, and one many of us can probably relate to with continually moving to new projects being an issue for game devs! A tutorial of sorts might have been helpful to understand more of the correlation between the different parts of the game.
🎤 Apple Dash
21. Apr 2020 · 13:42 UTC
@sami yeah, in-game tutorial would have been great, but I couldn't squeeze even a simple how to play screen, so it had to be on the game page. But if you are talking about effects of different assets and features -- the exact values were deliberately made vague to encourage experimenting. All underlying values are related to the feature itself and its description (with a couple of exceptions for the sake of the joke)
M8rix
21. Apr 2020 · 17:59 UTC
Maybe a bit too complex to fully enjoy it for only a couple of minutes. Not that challenging either. Still a f-ing hilarous game you got there. Lovely concept that most of us relate fully to, the texts was what made this game outstanding. Great job man!
Bastienre4
21. Apr 2020 · 18:08 UTC
When I attributed my points, I had no way to remove them. In the end of the development I had to fire myself because I had no skill in Sound. I loved it. Good job :)
niklasriewald
23. Apr 2020 · 19:58 UTC
Wow, pretty meta. I was a little overwhelmed by the game's complexity at first, but after you get the mechanics it's fun. Impressed by all the stuff you managed to put in there!
Pandapear
24. Apr 2020 · 18:43 UTC
This game had a fun take on the twist, and I feel like it had a good concept that could've been polished a little more. I wish the mechanics of what actions raise what stats had been a bit more clear; the boredom timer went up so fast that I often didn't have time to read descriptions or stats, so I ended up clicking randomly. Color cues for specializations or some other easily recognizable element might help with this. However, I thought the balance was good; and I felt it was a bit challenging but not impossibly hard. Nice job!
Gogani
30. Apr 2020 · 14:28 UTC
pretty original interpretation of the theme!
NNNIKKI
01. May 2020 · 11:16 UTC
When I opened the game, I was simply baffled because of all the numbers. It would be immensely helpful to include a tutorial in-game so the player can learn instead of being overwhelmed. That and the fact that it's a time-sensitive game - I played another game called The Shopkeeper which also chucks numbers in your face, but at least gives you time to process it. Most players will be overwhelmed and quit, not willing to learn everything on their own.
🎤 Apple Dash
01. May 2020 · 17:30 UTC
@nnnikki I agree. Unfortunately, I was running out of time, so description on LD page is the best I could do. Also, the balance is way off imo, so that doesn't help to wrap your head around all the numbers either. Anyway, thanks for the reply, really appreciate it)
vfqd
06. May 2020 · 10:04 UTC
10/10 would fire all my staff right at the end of development again