I've played Game Dev Story for iPhone for quite a while now, and winning a GGA Grand Prize seems to be quite difficult. So far, I've only won one, despite high (36+) review scores on many games.
The one time I won the Grand Prize, I released 4 Hall of Fame level games that year, and ended up winning Best Design, Best Sound, Runner Up, and Grand Prize. Is this the only way to win the Grand Prize?
Review scores don't seem to affect your chances; only the game's stats. Also possibly the game's combination, but you should never make a game that doesn't have an "Amazing" combination (more $!). I'm not sure whether or not creativity has a bigger influence on your Grand Prize chances than the other stats. Also, review scores don't mean anything anyway. If you save your game right before you kill the last bug, and you get a review score of 37, restart the app. You might get a review score of 36. Restart again, you might get a review score of 40.
Make a really really good game! It's got to do with lucky but hire as many hackers as you can, choose a "Creative" or "Amazing!" combination. Make sure you use some pretty high stats people to create the game. Also promoting it while in development helps!
I've won that 5 times so far, here is my combination, hope this helps - Dance + Motion - Music + Drum - Adventure + cowboy - Online RPG + Hunting - Online RPG + Historical
Dont know what exactly makes the Grand Prize, but all these games getting review score > 37 and sell more than 40,000,000 copies.
It's very easy. All you got to do is get a score of 33 or more and then name it gamedevstory.
I know the first 3 awards are based on scores, but I always thought the grand prize was based on timin. The next game in the pattern of names is usually the game to be chosen after you tap the screen. I've had games up to 39 and sold number one games back to back over at least 7+ years (3 games per year) and never won the grand prize. Plus seeing that the game gives you two chances to "pick" a name seems to make me thing the grand prize is another mini game. I have an android phone by the way, not iphone or ipod.
I just won for the first time!
I had a combo of shooter (level 5) and robot (level 5) with the lowest score (sound) of 210 and the highest (fun) with 317. The game's score was 38. I named it "Medal of Honor".
Hire the best employees and train them a bit. There is no known way to guarantee you will win, took me a while to win my first one, but once you win make a sequel for it the next year, almost works every time.
I won on my 89th year. I found out that you have to have a lot of fans. I had 38 points and the game was for the console that I made. The combination I used for my game was action ninja and I sold 25 million copies of it.
