Monday Developer Journal #21 news

Hello everyone! Another week is here and so is another update. We missed last week as we’re pouring as much time as we can into development only. Just like cramming for a school exam, we’re cramming to get this game to you as fast as possible.

So this week I want to shift gears and talk about the satellite offices you will be running in the game. As mentioned before, the gameplay visuals will be based at your company’s headquarters. All other offices in the game will be off-screen. However, you will have full control over those offices. I want to talk about what types of offices there are and explain how they work in this blog and what you can expect to do with them.

Satellite offices are all of the offices (mostly specialized) that can house more employees when your headquarters is no longer big enough to house all of your company’s operations. You will eventually need to expand and spread out. There are many gameplay aspects to the satellite offices that have a big impact on how successful you can be. Let’s begin by listing the different offices you can expect to buy/lease

1. Headquarters – at the beginning of the game and throughout, you can house most employee types at your headquarters. As the game progresses you will find that specializing your operation can assist in organizing your company. Also, Headquarters is the only place you can house executives. Executives work out of headquarters but can visit the satellites to get more hands-on management of their departments. Currently, the only employees that cannot work at headquarters are manufacturing and warehouse personnel.
2. Factory / Warehouse – The Factory and Warehouse is where your products are physically created and shipped out to the public. This is the only office type that can house warehouse and manufacturing personnel. In the early game, you will not necessarily need one as you can outsource this to more than willing companies.
3. Research Lab – The research lab houses your scientist and engineers. Scientist and Engineers perform better within a research lab as it can host the best equipment for the job. You can buy different types and quality level equipment for your teams that will have an impact on how efficient they can be.
4. Call Center – Each product you create will have customers who are either dissatisfied or may not know how to necessarily use it. Others will experience malfunctioning product and you will need to have personnel available to take care of those customers. The call center, like all of the specialized offices provides a boost to your customer server and tech support teams. Better equipment and infrastructure will make way for better service to your customers
5. Game Studio – If you prefer to create games, you will be best inclined to do so from a full fledge game studio. It is entirely up to you what equipment and technology you decide to set your teams up with. The best equipment is great as long as your team is skilled enough to use them.
6. Administration office – Lastly, if your headquarters has become full and you really don’t need a specialized office, you can simply acquire an administration office. This is very much like a headquarters, just–off screen.

For every office, you can hire a General/Office Manager to manage the offices connection to headquarters. So for instance, placing a General Manager at your warehouse will make it much more efficient as the manager will directly report to your COO at headquarters, or directly to you in the case that you don’t have a COO. Without a top level manager, that office will be less efficient due to its lack of leadership. Gameplay-wise, data and information will be less accurate and slower to come in for you to analyze without someone preparing those reports for you or your executives.

In the game, there will be teams for your employees. You can set them or you can delegate and have your leadership teams set them up. Each team consist of a manager and a number of team members of a specific department. As your company and position teams begin to grow, you can place managers over teams of those positions. So, for example, if you have 10 Accounting professionals in your Finance department, you can place a manager over them which will increase their efficiency (as a unit and individually) based on the leaderships skills of the manager. This can be a very effective way to save cost as well. The more people you hire, the more you will need to have effective management. I will showcase more on this soon.

So at every office, you can have an Office/General Manager, managers who run teams and then the teams themselves within each department. You could also just have a bunch of disorganized satellite offices if that’s your thing as well.

Thanks again for reading and there will be more coming in the next week. See you soon!

When you introduce motherboards as a product can you instead let motherboard architecture technology be just for the motherboard so you can make computer architecture technology a separate technology so we can slot all computer based products like operating systems, memory, power supply units, graphics cards, central processing units & hard drives into the computer? Will we be able to make higher cored CPU’s allowing us to research higher architecture technologies than level 5?

WEB: At this point, you can still do that without motherboard technology being separate. At the moment the way it works is as follows: You can research motherboard technology which allows you to slot more items to a motherboard. However, you still must slot the computer (motherboard) with things like you mentioned; CPU’s, GPU’s, Power supply, operating system and hard drives. So motherboard technology improves the motherboards on which you will be slotting your computers.

To your last question, we can always increase the technology levels as we go if it fits, but as it stands some of these technologies will take a very long time to complete unless you have a stellar science team working on it or a ton of scientists working on it.

Hey, Can’t wait for the game to release, it looks very detailed, realistic and really good overall. Will we have the option to design and develop software as well? and make our software to be built in in our products? thx

WEB: You will be able to design games and software. Later on, you will also be able to develop operating systems. So to answer your question, yes. To elaborate, you will be able to create operating systems and productivity software that can come standard in a computer you build if you so desire.

Will there be technology in the game that will allow us to decrease the size of the CPU/GPU as well as the other components to achieve a slimmer profile for laptops if we want to make a gaming laptop like NVidia’s pascal laptops with GTX 1060-1080?

WEB: The plan is to have another technology tree that will allow you to research compact manufacturing of something to that affect. It will allow increase power while shrinking physical size of components (Which have weight).

Do the video games have different categories and sub categories like you can make an action adventure game or adventure RPG game

WEB: Yes, there will be plenty of gaming genre’s that you can create games for. I cannot wait to share the game development process with you all. The correlation of what type of game you want to design and the talent you have at your office will be an interesting one indeed.