Hello everyone!
Here we are, a little closer and working tirelessly to complete this game. Last week we spoke about satellite offices and management. Today, I want to continue that conversation a bit longer but with image commentary. I have screens that I will dissect with you and I am preparing a gameplay video to showcase this aspect of the game in much more detail soon. So let’s get right to it.
I hired a chief operating officer who will handle the communication and orchestration of all of my operations company-wide. As discussed previously, the COO is who all general managers of your satellite offices will report to unless you decide you wish for them to report to you directly. This game is mostly about choice in how you run your company and this is a prime example of that. If you decide to delegate this responsibility to your COO, he will compile all satellite office reports into one major report that you the CEO can read and get a great idea how your company is operating. If you decide against having your COO handle this function, you will get separate reports from each GM running each of your satellite offices monthly or at the frequency you choose. As you can imagine, the more offices you run, the more reports you will have to read. The fun in that is that you have a choice—if you prefer to take the micromanager approach, then simply refrain from delegating that responsibility to your COO. You can completely forego hiring a COO (although they do more than just prepare reports for you) and save the money having your GM’s report directly to you.
Speaking of satellite offices, right now I am running six of them aside from my HQ.
Here is the satellite office selection screen (Still undergoing layout changes and adjustments). You will be able to select which region and city you acquire them. If you want to open up a game studio in a different country, you can. When it comes to your manufacturing facility/Warehouse however, be mindful of the distance it will take to deliver your products to your customers. The longer the distance the higher the shipping costs. Then again, you can pass the cost to your customers… shame on you!
We have a Research Lab. As you can see, this facility can house up to twenty-four R&D personnel as well as four HR and Finance personnel respectively. Each satellite office has a special window on the bottom right side. For the Research Lab, we can see how many of each discipline is stationed at the lab as well as their collective skill level and cohesion (how well they work together). Further down we can see what research projects are being facilitate in this lab. You can designate up to five research projects per lab, but remember that all projects split the attention of your overall talent at the lab. Right now we have no employees at this office, it looks like we have some hiring to do.
For our Warehouse we have some employees already hired and in place. As you can see, we have some information displayed to us (not all aspects of the UI are working yet). As mentioned above, each office has a specialized bottom right section. Although you can’t see in this example, the bottom right of the Warehouse would show you the products being manufactured and shipped at this office. You would see the quantity ordered and the number of units already shipped. You can see the overall order’s progress as well. You might also notice that unlike the R&D lab, we have a General Manager in place at this office. We can see he is a pretty efficient GM. We have the option of firing him (I don’t think that is a good idea) and/or get an office report from him. This is what I was eluding to earlier. You can set it so that you can get a report popup every week, month or year. You can also choose not to get a report sent automatically and just visit each office and click the “Get office report” button which will solicit the report from your GM on demand. Each GM will present you the details of the satellite offices operations that you cannot readily see in this window. For example, in this window you can see the employee’s overall happiness at this satellite. When you get a report, the GM will breakdown the details of that happiness or unhappiness. As you might remember, each employee has six to seven different aspects of happiness, each of which can drag happiness down if low enough.
When it comes to hiring, everything functions fairly the same as with the HQ. You can delegate the hiring to your GM, or you can take ownership yourself of that responsibility.
For choosing a GM, you will be able to hire anyone from inside or outside of your organization. Do you prefer to promote from within or bring in talent to run your offices? In the end, the choice will be yours. General Managers will need to have a slightly different set of skills than other manager types. The GM will run an entire office and therefore should be good at leading people (universal skill), but also in administration and project management (still fine tuning some things here).
For my game studio, you can see four of the five roles of the game development studio in this image that I can hire. You can hire the exact makeup of talent you wish. Depending on the style of game, genre and other details, you will require a different mix of talent. Some games are more graphically intensive and others are more reliant on sound and animation. I will wait to delve deep into the game studio and development game-play for Tech Executive Tycoon. It will be fun!
That is the update for this week and I hope you enjoyed it. There is so much going into the game at this point. We have finally begun to move at a great pace and things are coming together. It is good to see the game systems starting to work together and the glimpse of the final product is coming into view. Please stay tuned and connected as we keep pushing toward completion.
I will leave you with these last two images previewing next week’s blog (possibly video) showcase of the training for your employees. There is a lot to talk about and I cannot wait. Stay tuned for more!
