Software Inc. Tutorial - Project Management Explained
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- čas přidán 4. 09. 2024
- For the full tutorial playlist:
• Software Inc. Tutorials
For the full playlist of my Software Inc. Season 5:
• Software Inc. Season 5...
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Game Details:
Name: Software Inc.
Official Site: softwareinc.co...
Steam: store.steampowe...
Game Information:
Construct and design buildings for optimal working conditions. Hire people to design and release software, so you can defeat the simulated competition and take over their businesses. Manage and educate your employees to make sure they are skilled and satisfied with their job.
- Build, furnish and maintain office buildings up to ten stories + basement, on an enormous land, using a free-form building system with easy copy-paste tools
- Hire employees to design, develop, support, research and market software in teams
- Build roads and parking to ease commuting for your employees
- Tend to your employees' needs, demands, skills and specializations, while making sure each team has compatible personalities
- Customize your own employee avatar
- Create your own software products and franchises
- Compete in a simulated and randomly populated market by selling your products, taking on contract work, creating patents, making deals or trading stocks
- Hire staff to repair your furniture and computers, clean your office, make food for your employees or greet visitors
- Mod what kind of software you can develop, add your own furniture, upload your building blueprints or add support for your language
- Delegate important tasks to your team leaders, such as managing development cycles and human resources
- Set up your own servers for products, source control and running your own online store
Music: incompetech.com/
Outro Song: MBB - Island (Vlog No Copyright Music)
Music provided by Vlog No Copyright Music.
Hey there. Firstly thanks for the recent tutorial videos. They've allowed me more insight into how the game works and I'm sure my next play-through will be more successful than the first one I did a couple weeks ago.
There are some questions though, not about this video in particular, but about the game in general and some details I've missed in your earlier tutorial vids.
Lets start with the quality of work. Since there's no blue bar that determines the minimum quality (like it does for the completion state of a contract with programming/artist requirements), how much of an iteration is required to increase the quality sufficiently to avoid penalties? I've been playing around a bit and have gotten anything from insufficient to outstanding in a quick five minute test with less than 1 full iteration of design, but I don't know if these values are comparable. Can I use the achieved quality from one contract and use its advancement of x iterations to any future work, or do other criteria (like the complexity of the contract, the employees assigned to it, etc) play a factor as well?
Is there actually any reason to ever attempt the more complicated contracts? I completed one for a total reward of about 80,000 € and was fined over 25,000 € in bug penalties.
How do I find and fix bugs before a project has been released? In my first and only play-through, I was lucky enough to complete an antivirus tool with a rating of >9, which I then sold a few hundred thousand times over the course of a year. In the aftermath I was overwhelmed by bugs, because I didn't have a dedicated support team and had to deal with >2k bugs that were found! Is there a way to get started on that earlier and if not, what's a good product cycle tactic in your eyes?
Can players offer contracts to AI companies too? I imagine that some stuff will be more difficult to complete without the correctly trained staff, so why not shop it out to someone who can do it better?
Finally, you said at some point that the first product of any new career had to be successful. Can you elaborate what led you to say that? Is it about the rating, the fan base, the sales?
There is some other minor stuff too - for example, does staff compatibility only matter if they work together in a team, or can there be a negative influence when they are in the same office/building or frequent the same break room - but none of that needs to be in a tutorial video series.
First off, thank you very much for your (lenghty) comment. I'd also like to say that if you search for any support or whatsoever with the game, you can join our Discord server (the link is down in the description of every video). Over there you can more easily talk with me and other members that know a lot about the game. Honestly, some over there know more about it than me ;) Now let's go into your questions.
About your first question on quality of work. I think you mean the actual products you will develop. In that case, try to make as many iterations as possible (4 is the max). These iterations give different bonuses. With every iteration you improve the overall quality potential of the product (so not the actual quality). Each iteration also removes some bugs and makes it less likely to gain bugs during the development phase (which also ties into one of your other questions). This process could take a long time (especially at the start of the game), but in my opinion it's well worth it! Once you get better designers it will go more quickly and the iteration bonuses will be greater. In short, always make more iterations of a product before starting development.
For the next question you asked about using these iterations in the future there is a simple answer. No, you can't use these in the future. They are only applied to that product as far as I know. What you can use in the future is frameworks. Whenever you make a new product you can choose to make a framework for it or use a framework previously developed (by you or another company, however they will take royalties for using it). A framework gives you speedboosts to certain features and if you develop a good one yourself, other companies might use it, paying you the royalties. However, it doesn't replace the need for iterations!
For the contracts, I wouldn't bother with them too long. Deals are way better once you hit 3 stars reputation (check my season playthroughs of season 3, 4 and 5 to see why and how I do this). The bigger contracts I rarely do, unless I have an art team that does not have something better to do later in the game.
So for the bugs, make sure to use the max iterations possible, which will reduce bugs. Also ask for reviews of the product during the development and re-iterate a few times. Re-iterating a product in development phase will make the quality better and it takes out a small percentage of bugs, however it also costs money. By reviewing you will also get an idea about the actual quality of the product at that point in time. Next thing is to take your time with the beta phase. During this phase your programmers will test the product and will try and fix as many bugs as possible. The better skill the workers have the faster they will do this and the more bugs will be found pre-release. However, don't think you will find every bug before release, that's virtually impossible. Always make sure to have a support team ready after a big release (after a big release you should have enough money for a nice big support team) A support team should have members with skill in support AND programming so they can not only find the bugs, but also fix them. Their skill doesn't have to be very high though. Bugs are just there, doesn't matter what you do, but you can significantly decrease the amount by following these steps and as long as you can fix them in time it doesn't matter.
Product cycles are hard. It really depends on the size and quality of your teams, their composition, the financial situation of your company and your overall idea. Do you want to make only one type of software? You can cycle more often then. Want to make different kinds? Build up your teams to make sure you can handle those cycles, but also keep in mind that that it will cost way more, so the financial situation must at least be stable.
By my knowledge, players can't offer contracts to other companies, however this might be added in the future. If you buy another company and make it your subsidiary you can assign them tasks, like support or marketing or even making an entire product for you. I would personally not recommend that, but everyone is free to do what they like. In my experience your subsidiaries will make you way more money if you just let them do their own thing.
For the staff, their compatibity only matters if they are in the same team or room together. Break rooms are not really a problem, since they won't be in there for too long, but shared offices might pose a problem if you share them with different teams.
Lastly, I will explain what I meant by my notion that I think your first product needs to be good straight away. Basically you have two options at the start. You either make a good product or a bad one. For new or inexperienced players the game can be very hard to play and have fun with if they get off to a terrible start. Having a bad release as your first product is the worst thing for someone like that. You have wasted a lot of money in a bad product, you have a bad reputation (which means less fans, less sales, worse employees to hire, contracts pay less, deals pay less etc.) and you are now lacking behind the competition because you lost a few years. In short, it makes your position worse than you had it when you start off. In contrast to that, if you make a good product at the start, you will make some money to invest in better employees and an even better second product. It also grows your reputation and fanbase which means better employees for hire, better payouts on deals and contracts and higher sale averages based on your fanbase. Marketing also gets easier when you have a larger fanbase, since fans will always follow your company and its releases.
I hope I answered your questions sufficiently and did not miss any. Also sorry for the essay I've written, but the game is complex to new players and it's important to see the whole picture. Again, for better help or just plain fun, join the Discord! And if you want to learn more about the game and have some entertainment while doing so I highly recommend watching season 3,4 and 5 of my playthrough. You will learn why I start the game in certain ways, see what is possible and what's not and a lot of people have commented that they learned a lot from watching those playthroughs. Those reactions actually gave me the idea to do these tutorials. A new season will also come in the future, so make sure to stay around!
Lastly, welcome to the channel and I will pin this comment so it will always be on top of this video's comment section for others to see all this information, because you asked some very good questions!
Btw: not sure if you're interested, but in about 24 hours I might do a livestream playthrough of software inc. ;) Keep an eye on the channel if you're interested, but it's not 100% certain yet.
@@Hipbone Thanks for the heads-up. I've already subscribed to your channel and activated the alarms, so I'll definitely keep an eye out. I'm notoriously bad about catching live streams unless they run all day though :D
Haha good to hear! The livestream is already scheduled so if you really don't want to miss it you can set a reminder by going to the stream. You can find it on the channel page ;)
Dont pay attention to the bots
So now I know everything... except how to actually get the Project Management to do a Project.
You might say this in the newer video that I've not watched yet, but "Single IP" means the leaders doesn't work on anything else other than what's in the Project Management queue, whereas "Only Sequels" means the PM team continue development with the one IP until you tell them to stop and won't make a different IP, but they can work on other projects outside the Project Management queue if you haven't ticked "Single IP."
Thank you!
You are an amazing CZcamsr! You should consider doing season 11 cause software inc is now in beta and there is some nice new features.
Server - if you add network feature to your software like Live Update's for OS or MMO for games, it will use this server instead of your SCM or DDN server.
Thanks for the info!
The most important part of Project Management is a Leader with three stars in Automation! If you set to Print 200,000 you will have 200,000 in stock on release date!
Thanks for clearing that up!
i have an issue where when trying to pick a prototype for my 3d editor project it only shows me my 2d editor and wont start
What exactly do you mean with prototype? Are you trying to make a sequel or do you mean the framework option that speeds up development?
@@Hipbone when you pick a prototype software for the project to base its products from in the project management window. For some reason it was only showing me one product out of the 5 or 6 I had developed
Ah ok, what type of products did you develop? Because a prototype needs to be a similar sort of software type. 3D editors can't be based on Operating Systems right? So maybe that's why not all the other products were showing? In case you should have a list of all those it might have something to do with the technology levels within the product or it can be a bug. It's hard to say without being able to see exactly what happens.
@@Hipbone at that point I had made 2d editor, 3d editor and antivirus, a couple of versions of each, but it only showed the 2d editor in the list. I’m sure it’s just something minor that I’m over looking
It probably is something minor indeed, but again: it's very hard to determine without being able to actually see what happens.I'd say: check every option and make sure that everything is set up correctly and see if it still happens.
Can you make tutorial how to effective use servers and how to make best use off subsidiary company
This series is a bit older so probably won't be making many more tutorial videos anymore, but you can also learn a lot from my regular playthroughs.
Servers aren't that hard. Make sure to think about how to set them up though. I like to set up a network of servers for internal use for the projects and one for external use (sales, deals etc.). The latter one will probably be bigger than the first one. There's not much more to it. You can also set up a third network as a spare one that you can use in those situations where your servers get overloaded, but it might just be a better idea to add that network to your external one immediately.
Subsidiaries used to be really good to have up until alpha 10. Since the introduction of alpha 11, subsidiaries are in my humble opinion not worth it anymore. Most of the times they're not making enough money to pay back the amount you invest in them. This might change in the future again, but for now I would not recommend using them unless you're okay with losing money from them and getting the occasional small profit.
I hope this helped out!
Thx for quick response and I’m watching your current series
@@flor-df7nd No problem, if you have any more questions feel free to ask ;)
I have a question about Project Management in relation to Executive Leads, I poached one from another company in order to have her develop a new 2DE. Unfortunately, I can't select her as project lead, so how do you go about assigning her as the lead for my PM? The potential leads list that I can select from to project manage this 2D editor are normal creativity at best. I want to create a visionary/inspriring product, not normal. I'm not really understanding how to go about selecting my most creative people to lead this PM. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Hi, sorry for the delayed response. I looked into your question and the only thing I can come up with for now is that maybe the character you want to select as a project lead does not have the required skillset to be able to do so. However, I must be honest here: I have not played the game sufficiently with the updates reagarding executive leads etc.
I decided to share your question (anonymously) in our Discord server to see what the other people think about it. If they come up with a good answer I will share it with you here as well :) Or you could join the Discord server (link in description of video) if you want to be part of that discussion yourself. Either way, if anything interesting comes out of it, I will let you know! Hope that helps for now!
One of our Discord members also said that you cannot select a new lead before deselecting the current one. The actual post: "I think this could be that another team member is already a lead with an exclusive lead role. This means that within that team, that employee is the only one which can be the lead". It might be worth checking that out as well.
Welp, back again.
I never use project management, as I like to have full control over my projects, so here's discord plug nr.4 ((discord.gg/z8bfJVU (tell the discord I said hi))
sincere,
ThatTipListGuyThatWritesBlocksOfTextAndCallsInSickIfHeFallsOffHisBikeThatIsAnnoyedAboutTheToiletsHereAndHatesClassesThatNowAlsoHasToCopyTheNamesBecauseHeCantRememberThemAnymoreThatAlsoTookAbreakOfThisChannelBecauseHeHadOnlineSchoolsAndThusMoreHomeworkWhoIsHereToHelpTheCommunityWithEvenMoreTipsAndBasicallyIsADiscordPluggerForHipboneThatReachedExactlyThreeHundredThrityThreeCharactersTheCommentBeforeAndIsAbitTiredOfotBeingAbleToSocializeWithAnyoneThatDoesn'tWorkNightShiftAsHeSleepsAtDaytime
P.S. *in the most karen voice ever* I expect my 10% raise or to be moved into day shift as sleeping during the day is annoying!
Haha we will take a look at your demands ;)