The Creation of the Perfect Game – How to Get a Clean Sheet of 10s

Overview

Don’t you just love it when your game does phenomenally with perfect 10s across the board, only for All Games to let the air out of your balloon with a 9? Yeah, nor do I, so that’s why I’ve created this guide to show you what I did and some general tips for improving your games to acquire that coveted clean sheet. Note that this is more targeted at achievement hunters, but those who would just like tips on perfecting their games can use it, too.

What You’ll Need to Maximise Your Chances

First things first, the method I’m going to show you will require you to be late into the game and willing to invest a fair bit of time to get the resources you need. It’s also an expensive way of doing things, but if you’ve been playing well, your currency reserves should look like the price of a stamp in Germany in 1922 (look it up). Anyway, hyperinflation jokes aside, here’s what you’ll need.

• A full cabinet of specialists (which ones depend on your signature genre of game and the strengths of said genre, but Engine, Gameplay, AI and Graphics are highly recommended). OK, so maybe this is more of a recommendation, but it makes life easier.
• An R&D Lab (you won’t get this without a Design specialist, so make sure you train a design-oriented employee well).
• The “AAA Games” technology researched (this one takes ages to research).
• 3D Graphics V7 (gotten by way of levelling up 3D Graphics V6 (which you get by levelling up 3D Graphics V5 to level 4) to level 4).
• A wide array of topics so you can best match them up with your audience.
• Having sent all of your employees on vacation (and having them all come back at roughly the same time) before development begins.
• A game engine with lots of possible features.
• Matches for every part of the game as “great” (that is to say Topic-Audience, Audience-Platform, Platform-Genre and Topic-Genre) and sliders that match the importance of a certain area in the genre you’ve chosen (for example, for an Adventure game in the first development phase, Story/Quests must be maxed out, gameplay has to be second and Engine must come last).

(Fun fact: What you can see at the right was the 10/10/10/10 game I made prior to taking these screens. No settings were altered in the following screenshots.)

Now, what we’re worried about is score, not sales. As a result, try not to worry about hype too much when developing your game. Only worry about the numbers, more on that later.

What You Should Know

Now, before I give you my example of a perfect game, there are a few things that you ought to know before starting out.

The Percentage of Death
Have you ever noticed that as you add features to a game, a percentage might pop up next to the category that goes down as you add more? It took me quite a while to find out that that’s the effectiveness of the features that you’re adding. The lower it is, the less effective the features are. No sense blowing over 800K on AI when it’s one of the lower priorities of the game you’re making. You’ll want to make sure this percentage never shows up, since it could mean the difference between 10/10/10/10 and 10/10/10/9.

Time is Good Reviews
AAA Games are good and all, but as you might expect from the largest game size available, they take absolutely ages to finish. As such, employees may well lose efficiency at the worst possible time which can seriously hurt your score. By the time I finished my game, all of my employees were at half-efficiency at the most, absolute zero at the least. Time the development of your AAA game carefully, and don’t worry about coinciding with G3 too much. Again, we’re after scores, not sales.

Recording Success
Sometimes, you gotta push the limit. Kick reason to the curb. All that fun stuff. Those Tech and Design points you get while creating a game are a direct measure of a game’s quality and each increasing game size will necessitate more of them for a good score. This is why AAA games are so important to this. You’ll end up generating way more points with a game of this size, making getting a good score much easier. But what you really need to do is surpass yourself. Setting new records for both design and technology will make getting a higher score much easier, especially if what you chose to develop was a sequel. If this is your first AAA game though, then doing this should (hopefully) be no problem for you.

Video Games Killed the Ratio Star
No, that wasn’t a typo (but it is kind of an obscure title). As it happens, each game has an ideal ratio of tech and design points assigned to it. That is to say, a game’s success can depend on how weighted towards one side or the other it is. Some games do better when they’re more tech-oriented and some do better when they’re more design-oriented. The ideal slider positions for each genre can clue you in on what is required. Going back to the Adventure game example, because the important elements are all design-focused (Story/Quests, Dialogues and World Design). This can clue you in that a focus on design is preferable.

My Method

Now, after reading what I’ve written, you’ll likely go looking up good combos to use for your prospective blockbuster. To spare you the trouble, I’ve done it for you. I’ll list below the method I used to get a score of 10/10/10/10 so you can replicate it if you don’t feel like trial-and-erroring your way to the best combos.

Starting Out Strong
So to kick things off, I made a superhero action game (action is one of the best fits for this topic). Double genres are a bit more difficult to allocate time to, after all (not that this could stop you, of course). The best matches for this are Everyone (the topic’s and system’s strongest audience) and Playsystem 5 (action games work best on there). I also made sure to select 3D Graphics V7, so my game had the best chances of being praised in that regard.

A Marvel of Modern Engine-eering
For an action game, the sliders should be Engine first, Gameplay middle and Story/Quests last. In each image you can see what I selected feature-wise. What matters here is money invested. Because of the size of the game, I can implement a LOT of expensive features. Try to push features as hard as you can without seeing the dreaded percentage. Tweak the sliders if you end up with a percentage like 97% or something. The more money you can put in to a sector without seeing the percentage, the better.

No Artificial Preservatives!
And now for phase 2. Here, AI should be the main focus, with Level Design a close second and Dialogues in dead last.

Graphics Aren’t Everything Except When They Are
In the final phase, the order goes Graphics, then Sound, then World Design. If your employees weren’t tired from phase 2, they almost certainly will be now. If you’ve been managing your employees properly though, this should hopefully only start close to the bug fixing phase, where development starts to slow. If this is your first AAA game, then the bug amount is likely to be enormous. If you want a perfect score, it should go without saying that you will want no bugs at all.

Conclusion and Taking Things Further

Well, that’s that. With some luck, this guide helped you in finally getting that Perfect Game achievement. But before I go, have you ever heard… of Turn It Up To Eleven? This is an achievement that involves getting a reviewer to give you an 11/10. Yeah, that’s correct. It seems mostly luck-based than anything and the exact requirements of it are lost on me, but it’s possible, all right. All I can tell you is that I released a sequel to a nigh-perfect game (bloody All Games…) where I got a new record for both design and tech thanks to the move to AAA (over my last game in the series AS WELL AS the example game) and I basically followed the same principles as creating my first perfect game (though I didn’t mimick the sliders, given that what I developed afterwards was an Action-Adventure game). In that regard, all I can say is “good F.N. luck”.