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Carlos Beirise
Hang around the fighting game community for any period of time, and you'll hear discussion about why playing fighting games online can be frustrating. A genre built on twitch reflexes and player reactions, fighting games can struggle at times to translate their offline success to online environments. Good online play is possible, though, and nothing is more important for realizing this goal than choosing the right approach to netcode.
Online play in games is nothing new, but fighting games have their own set of unique challenges. They tend to involve direct connections to other players, unlike many other popular game genres, and low, consistent latency is extremely important because muscle memory and reactions are at the core of virtually every fighting game. As a result, two prominent strategies have emerged for playing fighting games online: delay-based netcode and rollback netcode.
Even if you think you have a good connection, or live in an area of the world with robust Internet infrastructure, good netcode is still mandatory. Plus, lost or delayed information happens regularly even on the best networks, and poor netcode can actively hamper matches no matter how smooth the conditions may be. Good netcode also has the benefit of connecting regions across greater distances, effectively uniting the global player base as much as possible.
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Typically, the goal of game development is to get a high review score (preferably 9.5+). However, during the game development your actions do not influence your review score directly, but rather, your game score.
The Game score is a hidden value you can only see by Modding (do not confuse it with the review score you see), is basically the sum of your Design + Tech, divided by a modifier based on game size (this compensates for the fact that bigger games take longer to develop and accumulate more points) and then multiplied by several quality modifiers. All those modifiers are usually capped at a value of around 1, and have lowest values of around 0.6. Therefore, failing even one quality check can lower your game score significantly. This game score does not translate into review score directly, but rather is compared to your previous high score (read next paragraph for details) to calculate your review score.
You can influence the sum of Design + Tech you receive mainly outside game development, by researching more features (allows your employees to contribute more points while developing the field that feature belongs to) and training your employees / hiring additional employees (increases point contribution total), while during game development, you can mostly influence all those quality modifiers of your game.
In this game, you compete exclusively against your own previous high score (except in the very beginning of the game, where you compete against a pre-set top score value, until you can beat it and set your first high score). Your game score is compared to your high score (with an added increment of about 10%-20%), and that is your final review score (before it gets randomized a bit and you get to see it). Therefore, in order to get a good review score, you need to perform slightly better than your previous score.
Why would you care to make high quality games then? Because it is easier to make a top-quality game (game with all quality checks maxed) than it is to make a non-top-quality game of the same level of (non)quality.
This is even more radical for, say, genre/topic combo. There are way more Great Combos (quality modifier of 1) out there than Strange ones with lowest possible quality modifier of 0.6. Therefore, if you focus on making only worst strange combos, you will be very limited in what genre/topic combo you can choose (not to mention you will hardly have any multi genre games to do). However, if you focus on making only great combos, you have much more freedom.
For example, Dungeon, Airplane, Fantasy, and many other topics can produce only 1 worst Strange Combo but 4 Great Combos. Overall, there are very few topics that give more strange combos than great combos (Game Dev and Superheroes with 3 strange vs 1 great, Romance, Startups, Hospital and Surgery with 2:1), while most of them produce way more great combos than strange combos.
Therefore, this page will not tell you how to make games that get good review scores. It will tell you how to make top quality games, which will in turn help you be consistent in your score, which will in turn help you get good reviews. If you develop games of consistent quality (great combo, tech/design balance upheld, no bugs etc.) your game score will be almost exclusively based on the sum of Design and Tech points you see, and thus you will have an easier time judging how well you did (before you see the reviews).
As stated above, game quality is calculated as a combination of different modifiers that all are applied as multipliers to your sum of Design + Tech. Setting aside those outlined above as things to avoid, you have the following modifiers influencing your game quality:
The only way to get a "Great Combo" for multi-genre games is to use two genres that when used on their own with the chosen topic result in a "Great Combo". This means that topics like Surgery can not get "Great Combo" on multi-genre games. -source
You will occasionally get messages about matches or mismatches of target audience and platform you have chosen. Your choice of audience primarily affects the number of sales your game will generate. The higher the sales modifier of the selected Topic is, the more sales you will get with that target audience. -source
Each genre has its own popularity on each platform. Your choice of genre, relative to platform, slightly affects the review scores. The higher the sales modifier of the selected platform, the more sales you will get with that genre.
You will occasionally get messages about matches or mismatches of target audience and platform you have chosen. Your choice of audience primarily affects the number of sales your game will generate. The higher the sales modifier of the selected platform is, the more sales you will get with that target audience. -source
Design sliders allow the player to control the time allocation for the various aspects of the project. The higher a slider is set to with respect to others, the more allocated time it will receive during development, which can be previewed at the bottom bar of the game development screen.
When reading the tables below, remember, it is the bottom composite bar consisting of three parts (located under the sliders) that is important, not how much percentage you assign to each slider individually. All those 40%'s and 20%'s refer to the relative size of the field's part on the bottom bar.
The point of multi-genres is to eliminate a genre's requirements, giving you more flexibility with what features to cram in. For example, Strategy/Adventure and Strategy/RPG has only 3 "+" fields and everything else is not bound by rules, while if you'd be making Strategy or RPG, you'd have 6 "+" fields and 1 "-" field to worry about, therefore, multi-genre gives you more creative freedom when you combine genres properly.
Based on the size of the game, employee will get "used up" in the project at different rate. For medium projects, the rate is 1, for large it is 5/3 and for AAA it is 2. This means that for each percent of time allocated to a certain field, employee assigned to it will receive that many usage percent. Therefore, medium game will require a total of 3 people to complete, large will require 5 and AAA will require 6, without overloading your employees. The total amount of employee's effort used is displayed as a progress bar under employee's name on the slider allocation screen. If you do not let any employee get a serious overload, you will be awarded with a 30% experience bonus for Good Management (this does not affect review scores). Overloading an employee results in less points towards Design and Technology.
No matter who is assigned to what field, every employee keeps contributing design and tech points to the project. However, it seems that depending on who you assign, overall points contributed are slightly varied. Assigning a person that fits better to the field will make you end up with more design/tech points overall. You can refer to the table in the beginning of the article to find out who is best fit for what field.
Late in the game (year 40) while developing a medium game assigning employees correctly (every employee has enough design and tech points to fully cover the requirements of the field) gave net result of 2536 total points (average between 2 tries), and assigning employees incorrectly (every employee has not enough points to cover at least one requirement - for example, a 300/800 employee assigned to a 810/90 field) gave net result of 2404 total points (average between 2 tries). This is only a 5% increase but maybe if the difference in stats was more drastic (like, assigning a 720/180 employee to a 180/720 field) there would be a bigger difference in net result.
Since you only compete against your own high score, having a balanced all-around team (every member with very close design and tech stats) would be much more viable because it would be easier to make consistent games. A downside would be that you would have to wait a little bit longer before you can open your R&D lab.
Sliders are not the main way of getting good scores, it is a mix between many factors. Some of them include previous reviews, your staff, what year it is, the genre to the platform and the main one is your tech/design ratio. I'm not saying this table is worthless (it kinda is), but if you follow this table and your tech/design score is way off, then you will get horrible reviews every now and then, because your game quality will be unstable - sometimes you will hit the nail on the head with this table, sometimes you'll be far from top quality, and instability is what leads to bad reviews. Please check out some other pages and read up on the game before using this table or just have fun and make games how you would want to play them. The table way above with + and - is a much better reference if you know what you are doing.
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