The Truth About Game Development

The Truth About Game Development is a sarcastic glimpse at modern game
development: you play a game producer, and your goal is straightforward: to
produce the best possible game, in a fixed time, and at minimum cost.

The main screen of the game is dominated by a big Donkey Kong-like platform in
a gloomy factory, on which your developers (aka “slaves”) move along slowly,
working on your game. The speed of their movement shows how hard they work —
the quicker they move, the better your game will be; that is, the more of it
will be finished in time.

There are two simple means to motivate your workers: The first is to increase
their wages — but that costs money, of course. A cost-free alternative is
firing (“killing”) a slow and lazy slave, which will greatly motivate all his
co-slaves, if only for a limited time. But careful — kill too many, and your
workers will start to revolt.

The quality of the game you will produce is measured in three sections:
graphics, gameplay and marketing. The “Budget” screen allows you to divide the
worker’s productivity between those categories — the more you allocate to one
section, the quicker the quality of the game in that section will improve.

Most of the few minutes that this game lasts is spent by staring at your
workers gradually slowing down, and meditating about whether you should kill
one more or not. This is sometimes interrupted by a random event where you
often will have to decide. An example is one of the slaves having an original
idea, which will create more favorable reviews, but which will take time to
implement.

At the end of a fixed time (or after an all-out rebellion if you kill too many
slaves), the game is released and shipped, and you will get an evaluation of
you work, depending on the quality of the game’s reviews, the number of games
sold and the total money spent.