A simple simulation game, Game Builder Tycoon tasks you with making decisions to get your small solo dev studio to survive, and eventually grow into an AAA powerhouse. The demo is limited to 5 years though, so maybe set your goals a bit lower.
Essentially you have two resources in the demo, time and money. At some point it seemed like you should be able to get an office and start hiring staff, but either it was not meant to be part of the demo or was bugged when I tried. That said, as a solo dev with only the 5 years, I made some real banger titles and had some great success.
As I said in the title, it makes it seem so easy, as you have your seed money from your dad to start, and making a game is just a matter of picking your genre, platform, and how much effort you’re spending on each part of the game like art, story, and gameplay. Then it’s just time, and the game comes out and you start getting your reviews and money. You’ll be able to use the funds for your next game, or to research work on other genres, platforms, or skills like marketing. As you add these, you can use them in your game, adding to development time, but, ideally, increasing it’s worth when released.
I haven’t played Game Dev Tycoon to compare, but, this was reasonably fun, even if the choices are limited. It was good to have little events like letters from fans, and to see my assumptions about what matters in each game type line up when the game was released. If only I could just sit at my computer and finish my own games and have this kind of success.
Game Builder Tycoon’s demo is still up, and the game itself has a Q3 release target.