Dev Tycoon 64

It is 1983. You have a Commodore 64, a bedroom at your parents' house and $5,000.

DEV TYCOON 64 is a game dev company sim for the Commodore 64. Pick a genre, a theme and a size, and watch your team pour fun, graphics and sound into the game week by week - along with the bugs. Then the magazines have their say.

• Make games. 12 genres, 12 themes, 3 sizes. Some pairings suit each other, some really do not.
• Read the reviews. Four magazines score every release. Good scores sell and win fans. Rush out a sequel and they will notice.
• Hire a team. Coders, artists, musicians - and a debugger, because four or more bugs in a released game wreck the reviews and halve the sales.
• Send it to the testers. It costs time and money, and the game ships with no bugs at all.
• Get better. Train yourself, buy new tech and gadgets, advertise, and take a holiday now and then.
• Move up. Seven places to work, each with its own room: your parents' bedroom, a damp basement flat, a sunny flat, a noisy shop loft, a tidy studio, a draughty office, a modern office. A cheaper place has fewer desks and more bugs.
• Survive the news. Pirates, power cuts, the tax man, VAT, rent rises, a dead C64 - and a fire that sends you back to your old bedroom.
• Watch the money. A raster-split status panel under the office, a chart of the company's value, and a best sellers list of your own games.
• Listen. A SID soundtrack with arpeggios and a filtered bass, plus jingles for the hits and the flops.

Ten years, one company. Four months in the red and the bank closes you.

What you get

• The game as a single .PRG file, and the same game on a .D64 disk image.
• A short README with the controls and how to play.

What you need

• A Commodore 64 emulator. The game is tested in VICE (x64sc, PAL) and in C64Emul8r: https://polytricity.itch.io/c64emul8r
• A joystick in port 2 (or the emulator's keyboard joystick).

Made with the C64 Dev Machine.