Hey there! Next week, it will be eleven years since Game Dev Tycoon came out on Steam, and as we shared a while back, through most of that time we've been working on Game #2! After a decade of hard work poured into it, we are excited to reveal that Tavern Keeper, our second game, now has a RELEASE DATE: November 5th! Check out the new trailer below: [previewyoutube=Hg2MT-7kINE;full][/previewyoutube] If you loved Game Dev Tycoon, come and follow us on our journey to release our second game - there is a demo available right now for you to try: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2833530/Tavern_Keeper__Demo/ All of this wouldn't be possible without your support! Thank you! The Greenheart Games Team

Hello there! SimFest, the Steam festival celebrating the variety of simulation titles, has begun! And how could we not be a part of it?
For Game Dev Tycoon, we are running a discount of 65% to celebrate our love for the genre! During SimFest, we are also releasing something major for our Game #2: The DEMO for Tavern Keeper is now available! As we shared a while back, we've been working on this charming fantasy business sim game for more than a decade! If youre a fan of Game Dev Tycoon or enjoy the genre and want to see what's next from us, consider giving the demo a try! https://store.steampowered.com/app/436780/Tavern_Keeper/ This Demo is a hand-crafted experience, separate from the full game, in which the narrator is looking for the main character of Tavern Keeper. Is it you? Thank you for reading and giving us your support throughout the years! Much , The Greenheart Games Team

Hello! As we shared a while back, we've been working on our second game for nearly a decade! Today, we revealed the first gameplay trailer for Tavern Keeper, sharing a bunch of the systems that you'll use to manage your fantasy tavern and run the show! [previewyoutube=32vdOG-Jjeo;full][/previewyoutube] If you loved Game Dev Tycoon and want to see what's next from us, consider putting this on your wishlist! https://store.steampowered.com/app/436780/Tavern_Keeper/ Thank you! The Greenheart Games Team

Dear Game Dev Tycoon Fans, Here's a surprise, theres a new edition of Game Dev Tycoon available on Netflix! Truth be told, we never dreamed that wed be able to make an update to Game Dev Tycoon as weve been flat out working on our second PC game but then an opportunity with Netflix came along and together with the Game Dev Tycoon mobile team we made it work. The new edition is exclusive to Netflix for the time being - we wouldnt have been able to make this happen at all otherwise. If you have a Netflix subscription, you can download it and play it with no extra fees - it's already included with your Netflix membership. It's the same Game Dev Tycoon you know and love with a few added features:

Licensed topics

Content Creators

How to play?

Whats next?

Happy New Year, everyone!

Steam Capitalism and Economy Fest

How to avoid bankruptcy

• Save up a good amount of money before moving on to level 2. This can help you experiment with topics a little and gain more experience.
• Medium games work best if you have a team of 3, so your aim should be to get to 2 additional workers. Be mindful when you grow your team since staff members are expensive!
• Fans are important, and to get more fans you should try to take publishing deals. This will help you later on when you want to successfully self-publish games.
• Be very careful what publishing contracts you take. Publishers often suggest not-so-ideal combinations which can lead to bad scores and you having to pay a penalty.
• If you have trouble thinking of what audience is better for what platforms, just think of the best-selling games of the real-world equivalent console and what audience these games target.

Our second management game

TEN YEARS + Anniversary Sale

A New Game From Us

Fixed start script for Linux: Instead of setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable it gets appended.

We've released a small bug fix where the staff welcome training was not available after importing from a mobile save game.

We've released a small update which fixes subscribing to our newsletter from within the game.

We've released a small update fixing a few minor cross-platform bugs, as well as aiming to restore game knowledge (and some save slots) that were sometimes lost for some players when upgrading to 1.8.x This update also introduces a workaround for a known issue where modders on Windows are unable to update their workshop mods. We've described the issue and a new workaround for it here. We expect this will be the last update for a while. Hopefully things will run smoothly now. PS: Consider following our developer page.

We have just reverted all Windows users to the old version of node-webkit (the underlying tech making the game run on PC). Sadly our latest upgrade to a newer version caused game hints and achievements to not load (nor save correctly). The good news is that hints and achievements previously gained should now load again so there should not be any data loss. Unfortunately a proper fix is anything but simple as the issue seems outside our control for now but we will investigate any possible fixes. Other than the fact that we are now again running on an older version and thus miss out on the nicer text rendering, there is no loss of features in this version on Windows. It still comes with all the new features like save-sharing. We have left the Mac version on the newer version as the old version has significant performance and display-compatibility issues. Hopefully we'll have another update to address this soon.

Bugfix: Migrating save files with custom consoles from mobile version did throw the error "InvalidStateError: Failed to execute 'drawImage'".

Bugfix: Deleting a savegame threw a "TypeError: Bad arguments".

We've just released v1.8.0 to Windows and Mac users.

Technical details and background information

With this update, we are making it something of a tradition that every time we release Game Dev Tycoon on a new platform, we update all existing platforms with some new features. Two years ago we released the game on mobile and brought a big update to Steam including lots of UI improvements, as well as the ultra-difficult "pirate mode".

v1.7.0

Play Game Dev Tycoon with us!

Other changes

Known Issues

Behind-the-scenes

The first total UI overhaul mod for Game Dev Tycoon called "TAG Mod" is now fully released. All the way back in July 2014, a small group called Throw Away Games (short TAG, hence the mod name) teased the mod on our forums with some impressive mockups. Since then they have changed their name to Bellwood Studios but kept working on the mod year after year. The result is nothing short of impressive.
TAG Mod not only gives Game Dev Tycoon a fresh look but also introduces some neat convenience features such as the ability to generate a game report from the sales UI, or the super-charged game history screen showing you how you set your sliders on your past games and which engines you used. That's not all though, there's lots more to discover so head over to the mod page and try it out yourself: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1527391789 The folks over at Bellwood Studios are also working on their own game, if you are curious what the talented team is up to, check out their discord link on the mod page. Until next time. Patrick Greenheart Games

It's been five whole years since Game Dev Tycoon released on Steam. Time for a brief illustrated trip through the games history. Back in 2011, my brother Daniel and I (we are both software developers) decided that we wanted to try to make a game. After days of brainstorming and discussions, we settled on the idea of making a game dev simulator. We were inspired by Game Dev Story on the iPhone (made by Kairosoft) and wanted to make a game in that genre with our own spin on it. Our intention was to make a game dev simulator where the player would have finer control over the decisions of what to focus on during game development. Game Dev Tycoon started, as many games do, on a single piece of paper.
Back then, we imagined the game as a turn-based game with almost no graphics for phones. Our plan was to create a small but fun game to gain experience and test the market. This is what the game looked like as a prototype.
We spend a few months in this prototype developing the algorithms on how points are generated, what decisions players make, and how virtual games are reviewed and judged. Next, we realized how difficult it would be to be successful on mobile without a big marketing partner so, when Windows 8 (remember Windows 8?) was announced, we pivoted hard towards Windows. Our plan was to make Game Dev Tycoon the first simulation game on the very first Windows Store which we thought was a decent marketing strategy. Windows 8 was all about tablets and touch-screens so our designs - intended for phones - no longer cut it. We changed from a turn-based simulation game with almost no graphics to a real-time isometric simulation game where you see your office at all times.
Windows 8 only had two reasonable technology choices: C++ with Microsoft's Windows-specific XAML frontend or HTML5. We both had XAML experience and Daniel is a great C++ developer (me, less so :D) but we also both disliked XAML. More importantly, while we heavily bet the game on Windows 8, we had enough experience in the Microsoft ecosystem not to trust the hype blindly. If the Windows 8 Store would flop, what would we do? With that in mind we opted to go for a versatile cross-platform technology instead of what we knew and decided to write our game in HTML5. Neither Daniel nor I had ever written anything in HTML5 before. We took our prototype and ported it from C# to JavaScript. We also changed our algorithms from turn-based to real-time. In May 2012 the game looked like this:
What followed was months of intense work to make the Windows 8 launch deadline. Moving to HTML5 was mostly easier than I personally expected but it did take me a whole day to figure out how to stack buttons on top of each other in CSS, not to mention how to center things :D Initially, both Daniel and I worked on the game as a side project to our full time jobs but we soon realized that we needed to give it much more attention. I transitioned out of my job and put my savings from 10+ years as a software engineer behind the project to hire artists and finish the game on time, while Daniel worked hard next to his job and on weekends. If my money would run out, he'd have to support us both. It was an intensely stressful and uncertain time full of the highs and lows of indie development. Three months later, we published a free 'lite' version which just contained the first level of the game on the Windows 8 Consumer Preview store. The rest of the game wasn't even close to being finished yet.
This looks very familiar at a glance but in the final version we replaced the 3D modeled characters by more cartoony 2D ones and reworked the level art to be more crisp, stylized, and colorful. We also ditched the cut-off wall look.
Left: preview style. Right: release graphics. We were quite nervous releasing just a preview game but within days we had nearly a thousand downloads and 4.5 star reviews. We were the very first simulation game on the Store.
Fueled by the positive response and early reviews, we put our heads down and developed the rest of the game. Here are a few images from the process. This is the evolution of our second level. From basic sketch and a painted version in our old art-style to complete reboot and finally a vector draft which is quite close to what we ended up with.
By the time we designed the last level we had optimized our design process. Below you see a much more streamlined progression from sketch to layout concept to final piece.
On the UI front, we quickly decided against a more commonly seen fancy UI and instead focused on big readable text and minimalism. Here is a comparison between an early design versus what it ended up looking like.
After 8 intense months of work, Game Dev Tycoon launched on the Windows 8 Store on December 11th, 2012. With around 420 sales on day 1, we made it to spot 3!
Sadly, Windows 8 and particularly the Windows Store didn't quite reach the adoption we had hoped for and sales quickly dropped and leveled out. We knew that we had to port the game to a wider audience if we wanted to be able to work on another game full-time. Our previous decision not to use Windows-Store-only technology for the game now proved crucial and within a few months we made the game run on desktops for Windows/Mac and Linux. Late April 2013, we published the game on our own store via our website. At the same time we released a modified version on torrent site as a little piracy experiment. I still remember saying that after working non-stop on the game for over a year, I was planning to take a week off. I was just gonna publish the results of our piracy experiments first. I published the story late at night, went to bed and when I woke up the next morning everything was on fire. Our piracy story went viral overnight. We had 500 emails in our inbox. Our website was down because it couldnt handle the traffic and Game Dev Tycoon was suddenly discussed everywhere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0U7XEG8djU We were utterly unprepared for the sudden spotlight. Emails kept flooding in and because of the sudden influx of players so too did the bug reports. At the same time the discussion around our experiment exploded and the press wanted to talk to us. We hired some help to handle emails but decided to listen to our players and retreated from the spotlight to focus on the game instead. With all the new players, lots of valuable feedback and critique was brought to our attention and after we were Greenlit for a Steam release we decided to address those concerns. Four months later, this resulted in the release of the improved Steam version on August 30th, 2013.
Steam in 2013. Since the original Steam release a lot has happened. - We have released 58 updates to the game. - Most recently, a major content and quality-of-life update introducing new topics, everyone's favorite new console, a brand new game mode and several important UX improvements went live for free. - The technology we developed (and open sourced) to enable Steam support for our game has now been used in 23 other Steam games. - Game Dev Tycoon has been ported to iOS and Google Play. - We have manually replied to nearly 40K emails in five years. - Our modding community is still going strong with hundreds of mods and dozens which go far beyond simple content additions. From the ever-green most subscribed mods to more recent additions like the Compact Topic & Genres mod and the much anticipated upcoming TAG MOD.
Screenshot from the upcoming TAG MOD by Bellwood Studios. We are incredibly honored and humbled by the success of Game Dev Tycoon and for the past five years we have turned this small two-brother team into a seven-people indie studio and poured our heart into developing our next game: Tavern Keeper. It's not ready yet but we plan to write an update in coming weeks and give you a better idea of what to expect.
Quite an old screenshot by now. We'll aim to share more soon. Please consider following our developer page and sign up to our newsletter if you want to know more. We are also thinking of doing a special Game Dev Tycoon developer stream in a week or so. If youd be interested in that, please let us know in the comments. Thanks for all the - Patrick Klug Greenheart Games

Today's Deal: Save 75% on Game Dev Tycoon!*

Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!

*Offer ends Saturday at 10AM Pacific Time

Valve has just launched developer pages on Steam allowing you to follow your favorite creators and be notified of upcoming games. It's like they read our minds ghsmile If you want to follow our journey and stay up to date with news on our next game, please consider following us here: https://store.steampowered.com/developer/greenheartgames You can also sign up to our Tavern Keeper newsletter on the official website: https://tavernkeeper.com/ - Patrick Greenheart Games

We've been quietly working on our second game (Tavern Keeper) in the past years but to celebrate the mobile release of Game Dev Tycoon (it came out on iOS and Google Play), we've decided to take a break from designing taverns and worked to bring a FREE content update to our amazing Game Dev Tycoon community. Here are the goodies:

Pirate Mode

New Review Screen

New side bar messages

New Topics, Icons & Drag to Scroll

We've been quietly working on our second game (Tavern Keeper) in the past years but to celebrate the mobile release of Game Dev Tycoon (it came out on iOS and Google Play), we've decided to take a break from designing taverns and worked to bring a FREE content update to our amazing Game Dev Tycoon community. Here are the goodies:

Pirate Mode

New Review Screen

New side bar messages

New Topics, Icons & Drag to Scroll

Women in Tech

Swap and late-game PC

Modders

• Mods can now add an (optional) icon to their topics by specifying an iconUrl (documentation).
• Mods can now add their own settings UI to the game's settings-panel via a call to `GDT.addSettingsTab(title, content);` (documentation).
• Mods can spawn messages in the new sidebar. (documentation).
• The game now ships the Greensock GSAP animation library which modders can use to its full potential (documentation).

Thanks for playing!

Full changelog

• New: super-difficult 'pirate' game mode including new piracy, DRM and company ownership game mechanics.
• New: Added Ninvento Swap console and 100% more mentioning of denatonium benzoate in the game.
• New: Added new modern PC image.
• New: UI panels have now a kinetic drag behaviour.
• New: Updated review screen with new star animations.
• New: Added 15 new topics.
• New: Nicer topic and genre picker with all new topic and genre icons.
• New: Added icons to context menu.
• New: New message sidebar where messages can appear without interrupting gameplay.
• New: New 'Messages' settings allow you to set which in-game messages should auto-popup and which should open in the new sidebar.
• New: Character can now be randomized when starting a company.
• New: Settings, achievements and highscore panels are now draggable.
• New (modding): Mods can now add their own settings panel via GDT.addSettingsTab(title,jqueryContent);
• New (modding): Custom topics can now specify a iconUrl to show a custom icon (otherwise generic fallback is used).
• New: Modders can now make use of greensocks GSAP animation library: https://greensock.com/gsap
• Improved: Added more famous women to the game.
• Added: Translations of new content.
• Improved: Removed UI selection outline from slider handle.
• Improved: Added visual clue when there are not enough research points to start a research project.
• Improved: Small story window is now slightly wider.
• Improved: Sponsoring the women in tech event now causes more women to apply for jobs.
• Improved: Combobox in new game window is now larger.
• Improved: The default character when starting a new company is now randomized.
• Changed: Progression hint messages are now categorized as company milestones and will auto-open by default.
• Fixed: Randomize character button in company creation screen has missing icon.
• Fixed: Animation sounds would sometimes continue playing when starting a new game.
• Fixed: Typewriting animation would sometimes speed up on the intro screen when starting a new game.
• Fixed: Several buttons do not play a sound when clicked.
• Fixed: It was possible to have a game that never went off the market if a company had lost all fans and then released another bad game.
• Fixed: The splashscreen is no longer draggable.
• Fixed: When stories picked team members, often the first staff got picked.

Mobile Relase

Developer log

Mobile Relase

Developer log

We are happy to announce that Game Dev Tycoon is finally coming to mobile and to celebrate the occasion a free content update for Steam will follow soon after the mobile release. You can look forward to:

• an updated story line (something about bitter tasting cartridges).
• new topics to enable even more game types.
• a new super-difficult game mode, inspired by true events ːantipiracyː.
• all-new gorgeous icons for every topic in the game.

We are happy to announce that Game Dev Tycoon is finally coming to mobile and to celebrate the occasion a free content update for Steam will follow soon after the mobile release. You can look forward to:

• an updated story line (something about bitter tasting cartridges).
• new topics to enable even more game types.
• a new super-difficult game mode, inspired by true events :antipiracy:.
• all-new gorgeous icons for every topic in the game.

Today's Deal: Save 60% on Game Dev Tycoon!*

Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!

*Offer ends Sunday at 10AM Pacific Time

Today's Deal: Save 50% on Game Dev Tycoon!*

Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!

*Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time

Today's Deal: Save 33% on Game Dev Tycoon!*

Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!

*Offer ends Thursday at 10AM Pacific Time

Today, we are happy to announce that Game Dev Tycoon now ships with Steam Workshop support and, even better, there are already a dozen great mods available for you to enjoy. From simple mods that add topics and platforms, to more advanced mods adding competitors or allowing you to build custom PCs. Head over to our Workshop page to check out what's on offer. Create your own mod! Whether you are an expert modder or a complete beginner, you can create a mod for Game Dev Tycoon. For beginners, our community has created a wizard-style mod creation tool that requires no programming knowledge. With its simple UI, the Ultimate Mod Editor allows you to create your own mod in no time. Game Dev Tycoon is written in HTML5 and if you do have some programming knowledge, the open nature of this technology doesn't put a limit on what you can achieve. To start with, you can use our modding API but skilled modders are *not limited* by what the API provides. We have an enthusiastic and friendly modding community and we'd love to see you become a part of it. Head over to our forums and say hello :) To developers Is your game created in HTML5? Want to add Workshop support to your own Steam game? Good news! We have just updated our open-source Steamworks integration library, Greenworks, to include Workshop support and you can use this to integrate Steam Workshop for your game for free. Check it out here.

Today, we are happy to announce that Game Dev Tycoon now ships with Steam Workshop support and, even better, there are already a dozen great mods available for you to enjoy. From simple mods that add topics and platforms, to more advanced mods adding competitors or allowing you to build custom PCs. Head over to our Workshop page to check out what's on offer. Create your own mod! Whether you are an expert modder or a complete beginner, you can create a mod for Game Dev Tycoon. For beginners, our community has created a wizard-style mod creation tool that requires no programming knowledge. With its simple UI, the Ultimate Mod Editor allows you to create your own mod in no time. Game Dev Tycoon is written in HTML5 and if you do have some programming knowledge, the open nature of this technology doesn't put a limit on what you can achieve. To start with, you can use our modding API but skilled modders are *not limited* by what the API provides. We have an enthusiastic and friendly modding community and we'd love to see you become a part of it. Head over to our forums and say hello :) To developers Is your game created in HTML5? Want to add Workshop support to your own Steam game? Good news! We have just updated our open-source Steamworks integration library, Greenworks, to include Workshop support and you can use this to integrate Steam Workshop for your game for free. Check it out here.

Today's Deal: Save 50% on Game Dev Tycoon!*

Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!

*Offer ends Sunday at 10AM Pacific Time

Every week we receive questions about if and when Game Dev Tycoon will be coming to mobiles and, today, we are happy to announce that a completely revised version of Game Dev Tycoon is in the works! Developed under the guidance of the best mobile-game design gurus, this will bring an entirely new and FREE experience to the mobile market!
Surprised? To learn all about this move, check out our announcement!

Missed all the excitement around Game Dev Tycoon modding? Now is a good time to catch up on what's happening: http://www.greenheartgames.com/2014/02/28/game-dev-tycoon-modding-taking/ (In short: dozens of great mods and a community-created mod editor, plus Workshop support is in the works.)

Save 50% on Game Dev Tycoon during this week's Midweek Madness*!

In Game Dev Tycoon you replay the history of the gaming industry by starting your own video game development company in the 80s. Create best selling games. Research new technologies and invent new game types. Become the leader of the market and gain worldwide fans.

For the Steam release of Game Dev Tycoon we have updated the game with a longer story line, new features and completely re-balanced the game based on player feedback to make it more enjoyable. More info is available on our blog.

*Offer ends Friday at 10AM Pacific Time

The Steam Sale is here! Take advantage of huge savings on thousands of PC, Mac and Linux titles. Check back often to take advantage of our eight-hour Flash Sales.

Today's Daily Deals include:

• Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition 60% off
  
• Dark Souls 80% off
  
• Dead Island: GOTY 75% off
  
• Don't Starve 66% off
  
• Final Fantasy VII 66% off
  
• Game Dev Tycoon 50% off
  
• Papers, Please 50% off
  
• The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing 66% off
  
• XCOM Enemy Unknown 75% off
  

Today's Deal: Save 40% on Game Dev Tycoon!*


Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!

*Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time

Game Dev Tycoon is Now Available for Mac and Linux customers and is 20% off*


I2n Game Dev Tycoon you replay the history of the gaming industry by starting your own video game development company in the 80s. Create best selling games. Research new technologies and invent new game types. Become the leader of the market and gain worldwide fans.

To celebrate the release of the Mac and Linux version of the game, Game Dev Tycoon is 20% off*


*Offer ends Tuesday, October 8 at 10AM Pacific Time

Game Dev Tycoon is Now Available on Steam and is 20% off!


In Game Dev Tycoon, you replay the history of the gaming industry by starting your own video game development company in the 80s. Create best selling games. Research new technologies and invent new game types. Become the leader of the market and gain worldwide fans.

For the Steam release of Game Dev Tycoon we have updated the game with a longer story line, new features and completely re-balanced the game based on player feedback to make it more enjoyable. More info is available on our blog.


*Offer ends September 5 at 10AM Pacific Time