As soon as you land in your new office, you'll learn how to train your "Manager". Train the Manager in Management so that you can begin to hire staff. Once you've finished your training, starting filling staff. You'll be able to hire four new staff, one at a time. While you are doing this, keep your manager busy doing research, particularly on 3D Graphics v1 and then Medium Games (after you hire your first staff). Also, you should be able to research Target Audience if you can't already and once you can, make sure to research it.
Hiring Staff
To Hire staff, save your game and then click the Hire Staff button at the table. You'll be given a slider and three options. Right now, we're going to go for all balanced people. Right now you don't need any specialists and having well rounded characters will allow you more flexibility. Pick the "Game Demo" option from the list and set it to $80K on the slider. This is the sweet spot and should land the quality of employee you want. Which is to say, not very good.
You want to hire the least skilled and most balanced employee you can. If for some reason you can't get a relatively balanced employee then you can reload from the save. It's not crucial that they really be exact because a small difference can easily be trained away. The key is that it isn't a large difference and that they are unskilled. The only skill that you want to be high for these employees is Research. If your prospects are roughly tied, take the one with the highest research and lowest speed. The reason for this is that Speed directly effects the number of points that employee puts into a game while Research will simply give you more Research Points and more options.
You should have enough money that you can fill the entire table. As you hire each new person, perform the "Staff Welcome" training option. Once your new employees start to be freed up, have each of them perform the Training "Make Me Think!" which will improve their Research skill.
After that, set your staff to make a new Engine with the 3D graphics and whatever other features you can fit. From now on, you'll only ever have the newest 3D Graphics attached to your engines and you will use it for every game you make until you unlock a newer version to research. As soon as you do, research the new 3D graphics version and make a new engine to use it. You can't get new versions of the engine without using the newest version available and gaining experience in its use. The reason for this is that your employees will still not be 100% but the quality of your new engine won't be negatively impacted by this. This allows them to be effective even if a little slow.
Once the engine is complete, create one last small game because even though your staff's bars are likely filled at this point, your staff actually still perform at a lesser quality for their first game. Make any game to get it out of the way. With this game complete, your employees will likely want to go on vacation. If you are somewhere around M6 of the year, try to delay sending them on vacation and have them perform research, training, or contracts until perhaps M9. Otherwise, just send them on vacation. The reason for this is because later on you'll have the G3 conference in month 6 and you always want to be developing a game at that time to get the huge boost of Hype for you game that the G3 conference provides.
Publishers and Medium Games
When they return from their vacation, you can start making your first medium games likely for the Gameling if it is out. You want to make Mature games for the PC until the Gameling comes out, switch to Young games for the Gameling and then switch back to Mature games for the PC around Y8 because these offer the best bonuses. However, you want to get a Publishing Deal first.
Publishing is a little bit tricky because you don't really get a whole lot of options compared to the number of options there could possibly be. What this means is that it's very possible for all of the publishing deals to end up being things like a Military RPG for the Gameling (which is an aweful combination).
The only way around this is to save your game, check the publishing deals and the reload the save until you get good combinations. The goal is to get as good a combination as possible. Try to get one that is Gameplay or Any Platform and then a good Topic/Genre combo. You also want to get as high in royalties as you can. You might be nervous because these can frequently come with the requirement of getting an 8+ for your reviews but even if you don't the fee for failure is well worth the money you'll make in return. $100K as fee is well worth the difference between 8% and 13% when the games are selling as many as 5M copies. That 5% difference could literally be millions of dollars.
You want to continue making medium games with publisher deals until you have 100k+ fans (probably anywhere from 3-5 hit games). Once you hit 100k+ fans then you can start making your games without a publisher. Do this until you hit at least 250k+ fans. When you get to that point, you can start making Large Games and self-publishing (allowing you to skip past the Publishing Deal stage). You may want to wait until you move to the larger office which will give you more employees but it is possible to make large games even with your smaller team. This is a matter of comfort and skill that you need to decide on yourself. You'll move to the next office after you've got $16M in the bank, four employees, and pass Y13 though it may not happen right away. If not, you are still very capable of making boat loads of money and good games at this stage so don't worry, it'll happen when you're ready.
Your Rhythm
Make your medium game and then remember that you want to continue to add 12%-20% on to that score for each successive game. The best way to go about this is to make the first game without any feature (things that pop up on the right side of the sliders) except for the 3D graphics. In between each game, train your employees in Research and then whichever of the two main skills (Design and Tech) that is lowest before making your next game.
You won't be able to train your employees past 500 points in any given skill using the first set of training (Book training) so if one of your skills tops out, train a different skill. Just make sure that you don't train the same skill twice without making a game in between because your returns diminish drastically which wastes both money and (more importantly) time. A couple of years after the G3 conference starts up (likely triggered once one of your employees hits around 500 in Design or Tech), the G3 conference will start competitions. This is just a fancy way of saying you've got new training opportunities. These are similarly capped at 700 skills points after which you won't develop any more. You'll have to wait until you move to the larger office to unlock the last level of training.
Keep doing this until you can upgrade your graphics. Once you can, do it so that you can start working to the next level of graphics. When you have employees that aren't busy, have them research something new (avoid topics if you can as they aren't particularly important) or do contracts. As soon as you can research Marketing, do so.
Hype
The first tool in your Hype campaign is Marketing. Try to use the smaller marketing at first until you have enough fans for it to really be worth it. I would start with the Magazine and Demo combo since you should have enough money for this. You can even use that while you are using Publishing Deals.
After you make your first few self-published Medium games, you can start with the small campaigns and finally you can do the large campaigns when you are close to starting Large games. In marketing, timing is everything and the two best times to invest in marketing are a little past halfway through development and when there's only about 10% left to go.
The second chance at hype is by far the best both in terms of how much hype you can generate and how much you get for your money. The G3 conference will offer you a chance, once a year, to increase hype for any game you have in development. This can easily jump your hype up several hundred points. You can use this in conjunction with your marketing campaign.
The biggest thing to keep in mind is that once G3 starts being held, it will be held the same time every year at the end of M6 W1 so you want to make sure you are developing a game at that point. As for the booth size, you want to go with small until you hit about 100k fans. After that, use the Medium booth until about 250-350k fanse. After that, start with the Large booths for most of the rest of the game. Towards the end, you'll have various opportunities for increasing Hype through your Hardware and R&D Labs but they are generally a waste of time unless you are making/made a console.
Pop-Up Opportunities
Over the course of the game, you'll be given several chances where you get your choice of two options. For the most part trust your gut (and certainly don't trust the Nigerians). Whenever you are given the chance to upgrade your office in some way, do so. This will usually improve the output of your office or the cost of maintaining your office. Your employees will ask about sponsoring a women's group and hosting a competition, both of which you should approve of. Do not agree to the hackers deals and, again, stay away from the Nigerians.
