What's the meaning of jobs in Game dev story?

Question

I'm confused about the jobs in game dev story. Specifically about how the apply for the stages of game development.

I already discovered that I can use both Designers and Producers for Character Design phase.

Are there any other crossovers? Or am I missing the meaning completely?

Answer 1

Basic Jobs

There are three basic jobs that you need to make a game:

• Writer: Excels at the 'scenario writing' phase of developing a game.
• Designer: Excels at the 'character design' phase of developing a game.
• Sound Engineer: Excels at the 'soundtrack' phase of developing a game.

Using the appropriate person for the job early on seems to get you more development iterations each time you tackle that part of a game.

Coders don't too too well at any of the phases. In my experience, if you try to get a coder to do any of them, you get about 2 iterations of development.

Complex Jobs

I toyed around with this a bit and basically tried to get each of the complex jobs (director, producer, and hacker) to do each phase of a project just to see what would happen. I had this preconception that producers did better at graphics and sound and directors did better at scenario writing. In practice, I saw results that were all over the map in terms of number of iterations the worker would go through, even when I did it multiple times with the same person (while also swapping people every time to make sure they didn't get penalized for doing a job too much).

The number of points a worker generates seems to be based on a combination of stats and iterations. However, it would seem that the titles only really affect you early on in the game.

I noticed that hackers kind of fell flat on sound more often than not, but my sample size wasn't exactly large.

Hardware Engineers

Hardware Engineers allow you to make your own console. I toyed around with having one own all parts of a game and the results were similar to the complex jobs in that they varied. Given the stat distribution of a hardware engineer, though, they didn't contribute a lot of points to the graphics or sound portions of a game. I did notice a few times where they contributed less than three iterations to graphics. In terms of scenario writing, I saw it go from high amounts to low ones.

Answer 2

From what I can tell, the "job titles" affect a few things:

• Point distribution when switching to that job (Coders will have higher programming skill, for example)
• Point gains when leveling up (Coders gain more programming skill when leveling up)
• Whether the character is listed as a choice for a given stage of the game, perhaps? (I have seen my hacker not show up for Scenario before, for example)

The 4 basic roles (Coder, Designer, Writer, Audio Eng) each excel at one particular skill.
The 4 hybrid roles (Director, Producer, Hacker, Hard Eng) all excel in multiple areas.

In the end the main thing that matters in the various phases is the character's skill level for that particular phase - if you've got a Director, a Designer, a Hacker and a Producer all listed as choices for Character Design, you're best off with the one with the highest skill most of the time.