You'll start out at the beginning of a 30 year jaunt through the Video Games industry. The Garage serves as a sort of tutorial so you can learn the different things you can do. The rules here are slightly different than the rest of the game but for the most part, you'll get a good understanding of how game development works, how to research things, how to make Custom Engines and how to take on contracts.
The single biggest difference (especially if you're already familiar with the game) is that your Review Scores are not based on your previous best scores but are set against a pre-existing scale. In other words, your games will slightly improve in quality after each successive game until you hit the preset High Score number and get a big hit. When you get this, you'll make enough money to move out of the Garage and into an office (where the game begins in earnest).
For now, just continuously make games for the PC. It has a lower market share but it has a better bonus for the "Everyone" audience category which is what you use until you research "Target Audience" later. As soon as you finish one, begin another. You want to do this until the Gameling comes out and then switch to making games for Young Audiences for the Gameling until Y8 (when you will make Mature games for the PC again).
To maximize how well you do with each game, you'll need to adjust the sliders depending on the genre of the game (topic doesn't matter). This is something you'll only really do in the Garage for this walkthrough simply because later, everything is relative so even if you set the sliders incorrectly, it'd be better to leave them messed up so that you are consistent rather than changing them.
The most important part of setting sliders is the percentage of the bottom bar that is taken up for each item (not the sliding bars themselves since they have no actual value). The percentages in the following table are based on percentages of the bottom bar, not the sliders themselves. Plus signs mean that it needs to be atleast that percentage of the bar while minus signs mean that it must be set less than that number.
| Genres | Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Phase 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Action, Simulation or Strategy | 40%+, 40%+, 20%- | 20%-, 40%+, 40%+ | 20%-, 40%+, 40%+ |
| RPG or Adventure* | 20%-, 40%+, 40%+ | 40%+, 40%+, 20%- | 40%+, 40%+, 20%- |
*These numbers aren't entirely accurate for Adventure as it is a little more flexible than RPG but the table was designed for simplicity since this is only a small portion of the game.
Try to make every good combination of Topics and Genres available to you because this will give you an experience boost. Since you can repeat genres but repeating a topic twice in a row will penalize you, it might be simplest to start with one genre and go through each good topic (this will allow you to keep your sliders the same for the entire genre).
| Topic | Good Genre 1 | Good Genre 2 | Good Genre 3 | Good Genre 4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sports | Action | Simulation | ||
| Military | Action | Simulation | Strategy | |
| Medieval | Action | Adventure | RPG | Strategy |
| Space | Action | Simulation | Strategy |
Once you've tried everything, Research the New Topic Racing and make at least a Racing Simulation game (which will unlock a piece of research for later). Next, Research the Fantasy Topic. Once you have all of these out of the way, you'll have at least two topics that can support each genre (Fantasy is good with Action, RPG, Adventure and Strategy) so you can pick your favorite genre and alternate between the two good topics. RPG is HIGHLY recommended however because it has great ratings with both the PC and the Gameling (the two best platforms) and both Young and Mature audiences (what the Gameling and PC excel in respectively).
While you are doing this, keep an eye on your Research Points counter. You want to research the Custom Game Engine as soon as you have 50 Research Points. When you hit that point, stop making games and do that Research. When you've done that, make your own Custom Game Engine. The only thing you want to put on there for right now is the 2D Graphics v2. Remove anything else that you have. Continue making games and do no further research until you leave your Garage.
Use only the new graphics when developing the game (remove the basic sound feature from the phase 3 development). Simply continue to make games using this engine and eventually one of your games will be a hit. This should launch you right over the $1M mark and likely up over $2M. As soon as you are given the chance, move to your new office to begin the next phase of the game.
