Tips (Social Dev Story)
 Social Dev Story ✍
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This page consists of tips / a walthrough that is subject to opinion. While content is still required to be factual, tips are simply a possible route one may decide to pursue. |
How to earn money without too much hassle
[Noticed there aren't any tips here so I'm just gonna put something based on my opinion]
Whenever you develop a new game, there are 3 options: Paid, Free-to-Play, and Free-to-Play and Long Term.
We are going to talk about how beneficial Free-to-Play and Long Term games (hereafter abbreviated "Long Term") can be.
Long Term has a high cost, but such games can give a lot of money in return if you are patient enough. Once you develop a Long Term game, a new option in the Development tab appears, which is "Games currently being managed." Place your first Long Term game there and check back every 4 hours or maybe every 12 hours. Before you know it, you'll be seeing how beneficial it really is to create Long Term games. (At higher ranks, you may only want to wait 2 hours or less after claiming the earnings each time.)
One Reddit user mentioned being able to earn around 60k a day from 3 Long Term games, You can manage up to 3 Long Term games at once. I suggest creating a Long Term game using the "Comcap" platform. When you have more money to spend, then try creating Long Term games in other platforms.
This way, you shouldn't be worrying too much about earning money in the game now, which should also mean you can power up/level up your employees faster.
With 3 Long Term games whose Momentum are around ~60 to 80, it is possible to make ~170k/day.
Games' momentum decrease with time. The more momentum they have, the more money they will bring you.
Helpful Tip
This is a brief walkthrough of the game's mechanics and some tips
Developing a game Developing a game begins with choosing a platform. At first, you are limited to inferior platforms, but as the game progresses, more will be unlocked. You can even develop your own platform, but we'll get to that later. You may find it beneficial to stick with the cheaper platforms well past the point at which higher-tier platforms are unlocked.
Once you've chosen the platform, you will need to choose your development strategy. I recommend developing a few Paid games first to build some bank. After you have enough saved up, consider developing free-to-play games, as they will make it easier to achieve higher sales figures. (This may not apply until you're rank 25-30; Free-to-Play can yield worse results on top of the higher cost if your fan count or game quality is too low.)
The last option "Long-Term" is basically how you make money offline. You can develop up to 3 games for "managing," which generate revenue even you're offline. The maximum cash cap is affected by your company rank, so the more you level, the longer you can stay offline without missing out on profits.
Although Long-Term games are a bit pricy to develop, they are the best way to increase your cash supply. The "momentum" stat affects your offline sales, so replacing your managed games once in a few days (or more likely daily) is important.
Managing your staff
I won't be talking much about staff stats, since it's pretty self-explanatory. Feed them items to increase their level, gain some stats. The difference between the star ranks is the amount of upgrades possible and the amount of previous upgrades. (What's not self-explanatory is the fact that, for a given staff member, only their job's main stat has an effect on damage dealt to the "idea.")
Upgrading a staff member resets their level to 1, increases their max level, and adds a few base stats. Once a staff member reaches level 99, they can be upgraded to be "reincarnated" into a new job. This changes their job type and resets their bonus stats and level to 0, but it allows you to keep their previous jobs' base stats and the way they increase. For example, after a coder is reincarnated, he becomes a hardware engineer, but he also gains the programming stat level as if he was still a programmer. This is the only way to eventually have a staff member with 9999 everything.
Don't reincarnate your staff members before you have a solid team that doesn't depend on a single 4- or 5-star dev.
Recruiting every staff member possible is crucial, as the 1- and 2-star staff will be consumed in platform development later.
Furnishing your floors I recommend building separate floors for writers and developers, as the writers of all floors contribute to the project's idea grade and rank. So you can build a floor with all "cost increase" items and one with items that affect the writing skills. This in exchange will negate the 5% bonus from having every staff type, but the writers don't contribute much in the development stage anyway (they do damage, but they don't directly affect the game's stats like other job types). Having an extra engineer goes a long way in trying to S-rank every stat.
The "cost" stat will become relevant once you've managed to land a few 4- and 5-star staff members. At the start you might not have to worry about it, as the 1-star staff members have a cost of two, 2-star staff members have a cost of 5, and 3-star staff members have a cost of 8. However, 5-star staff members can cost up to 70.
Save your high-XP items for 5-star staff (but don't start saving too early--festivals may happen a few times a day). They start with a higher-tier job and will gain more stats per level. Whenever you use any items, try to add in at least one of the staff's favorite things indicated by a small heart icon. Using the 2- or 3-star items for your lower tier staff is not a big deal, as these items are super easy to come across and will just fill your item box. The same goes for any item you can buy with dollars in the bargain store.
Improving your ideas You should always have at least one floor working on idea enhancements (note that you can't have all your floors doing so). The Creativity Boost card adds a star to the idea's star level, while the Limitless Ideas card makes the idea infinite, meaning it will not be consumed when used for development. I recommend focusing on only a few genres at first. Make a 3-star idea infinite, then increase it to 5 stars. This will make developing perfect games a lot easier and is also more reliable than holding a real meeting.
Raising your CEO Increasing the PF Knowledge of your CEO is only affected by the frequency of your logins. As for their experience level, always keep them busy, and you'll have nice stats in just a few days.
Holding meetings Save up your meeting points until you can hold 10 at a time. Stacked meetings generally won't give duplicate rewards, so if you want to unlock everything, save your meeting points and use them in bulk. (DeProgrammer confirmed that this method can result in several of the same idea appearing.)
Real meetings are not very reliable, so I wouldn't do them in the beginning. Coins are hard to obtain, and conserving them is very important, because you need them for additional floors and remodeling.
Every real meeting you hold gives you a random 3-star idea and a reward based on the type of CEO holding the meeting.
Spending your coins Like I said earlier, conserve your coins. Don't refill your stamina unless it's for a festival (in which case you should be picking the lowest-stamina genres available to maximize your rewards). Festivals give you super rare items and only last for a short period, so it's a good ratio of coins per item.
The item shop will sell different items for coins every day. Try to buy the stardom items or Kairosoft candy if you have some coins lying around. These items are pretty much the next best thing after floor upgrades.
Upgrading your item box is useful (e.g., you need 20 chocolate cakes at once to raise "Company Website Upgrade" to max level), but not a priority. You will only really need space after you've developed your own platform.
Maintaining your own platform The best NPC platform has around 60,000,000 members. This might sound like a lot, but isn't actually even close to the amount required for 20m+ sales.
Once you can consistently develop good games and have nice income, your own platform will be a nice boost to sales. Developing it to a useful point will take a while, though, since the co-op company upgrades require stamina.
The PF Knowledge items have 3 stacks, and upgrading each node will consume 1 stack.
Leveling the various management perks will increase the amount of preferred users. Thus, eventually, you will have every age group at full.
Adding overseas fans is less effective than upgrading your consoles, but won't require as strong of a dev team. Consider doing overseas upgrades if you have the items and some extra cash lying around. Note that each overseas upgrade requires one one or more copies of an item that appears in the bargain store only on weekdays, an item that appears in the bargain store only on weekends, and an Energy Drink, which is morning-only in the bargain store.
DeProgrammer's tips
Read the other pages on this wiki, as I've moved many of my tips to those...especially the bugs page. :)
Never upgrade your Card or Playing Card genres because they'll stop costing 0 stamina. You may also want to keep a low-level planner or two ready, because higher-quality game plans also increase the stamina cost (+1 stamina per letter grade) and enemy HP, which is even more detrimental during Festivals, especially early in the game. (More enemy HP is a good thing for festivals as long as you can reliably complete each stage, however, as there are more chances to gain items the more times your staff attack.)
Sequels gain more HP and damage the longer the series, as well as costing more stamina (one stamina per entry in the series). For example, I developed a 7th game in one series around rank 70, and the 5-star ideas had over 250,000 HP and did as much as 999 damage, while the same ideas in standalone games had less than 60,000 HP and peaked around 250 damage.
The Loving Meetings skill does not produce meeting points if the character is busy (e.g., enhancing a genre), nor if you have the game in the background, nor if you have a window open in it (which pauses numerous things, like the aura build-up, recovery, and store restocking). This skill appears to produce about 4.3 meeting points per minute on average. (I haven't verified whether the effect stacks if multiple characters have it on the same floor or otherwise; if not, then the average is actually 12.9 per minute. It could also be affected by company rank or something.) You also get meeting points occasionally when a furnishing's (unlabeled) XP bar fills up.
To reach company rank 15, it takes roughly 50 games (I wrote this in case you want to use an emulator to get the gifts required for your third through fifth floors).
If you have enough money to give items to your staff as power-ups, keep your item box close to full with items of various types so you've got various "favorites" handy when you're forced to use items to get back under capacity after completing a game.
While you can "start developing" before your previous game is finished selling, it prevents your staff from recovering and gaining aura, and their planning (and the timer) doesn't begin until the selling finishes. Thus, starting development before the selling completes is generally only beneficial if you've only got a few seconds left during a festival. However, if you're not worried about recovery or producing meeting points, note that you can start development on a game during the planning phase as well. Stock the proposal you want to develop, select "try again" to start another round of planning for free, and then go to Development -> Develop using stock and pick the proposal you just stocked (or any proposal you want to develop). Done this way, the proposal planning timer will continue during development.
Drops in general are higher-level for genres/contents/methods with more stars, including those triggered by the Kappa or Mini-Kairobot assistants, but each additional star increases the enemy HP significantly. Also note that an A-rank combo with more stars yields several times more game stat points than an S-rank combo with fewer stars.
Challenges may appear once a day. You can ignore them until a festival occurs (especially on a lower-tier platform) to maximize the benefits of the challenge.
Save your assistants that increase the game's impact, playability, craze, etc. until you're going for an award well above your staff's skill level, like the National Games Award. The cost-benefit ratio becomes excellent at that point, and it's even better if you make a "Free-to-Play and Long Term" game this way. Save your Mini Kairobot assistant for festivals. Additionally, when you want to make a better game, immediately use Upgrade followed by Ads as soon as it goes on sale--the download bonuses provided by these and the roulette all override each other, meaning that only the last one is counted. GameDex's bonus works the same way.
When remodeling, all furnishings in that room are deleted. If you don't have space for that room's furnishings elsewhere, swap furnishings you acquired via trophies into that room, because you can claim the same furnishing from the trophies screen again afterward rather than it permanently disappearing. Note that trophy #13 (Building Diorama, +569 Networking to networkers and +60 recovery) requires 120 furnishings, so you may want to focus on the floor models that have 30 small furnishings and no large ones. Besides, the bonuses from large furnishings come nowhere close to adding up to the number of small furnishings they prevent you from placing; just note that making up for the lack of large furnishings with small furnishings will cost a lot more.
In Management Level Up, the fan count bonuses increase more rapidly at higher levels, while others are linear. The Backup Tools Upgrade gives exactly 50% damage reduction at max level. Staff Focus Increase also provides a 50% boost to aura effectiveness at max level, and Staff Environment UP and Dev Tools Upgrade also boost by up to 50%, while Catering goes up to 100%. The damage reduction from Backup Tools Upgrade is not reflected in the numbers shown during development, i.e., the enemy will appear to hit for 200 damage, but the staff member will only take about 100 damage from that attack. (I originally claimed the damage reduction was 75%, but I must've had a staff member with Attentive or something, as the code pretty clearly shows a 50% difference.)
Dawn means around 5:00 AM. This is when the daily roulette count increases and you gain PF Knowledge.
Time periods: Morning is 4:00-11:59, Evening is 12:00-18:59, and Night is 19:00-3:59. It's based on the server time and your phone's time zone, but I think it's unaware of Daylight Savings Time, because everything happens an hour late for me (during DST).