Right now, the grading process is not very intuitive, and I'd hazard a guess many people fall to the same wrong conclusion as I have, that the score penalty comes from
a) any deviation from hard-set slider positions
and
b) time spent on the dev stage counts by itself
After a somewhat heated discussion with @xsellier, I was proven wrong, so I'd like to request making it into something more obvious and user-friendly.
The basic idea is to add an extra slider I call "Tempo" to completely separate proportions from amounts. Changing this slider should allow the CEO to relax production if they're in no rush, thereby improving the morale, or engage in the infamous crunch, pouring extra money and manpower into development to hasten it. Something like this:
As for specifics, here's what I suggest:
There should be a hidden counter tracking how much the player relaxes or crunches across all their projects. Let's call it reputation on work ethics.
This reputation score should affect hiring prices for poaching from competitors, and slow down loss of happiness score at work as well as genre boredom, up to reversing the latter if office happiness is high enough (let's say 20% for difficulty of №1 and 100% for №5) — after all, who won't come to like the thing they're working on at their own pace, for a good price, and in decent environment?
The general approach to crunch should be the inverse square law, as in, if you want to speed up development x2, you will only generate a 1/4 of points towards it for the same expenses, and if you want it to be EA and cut down the usual AAA development cycle from 3 years down to 1, the points your devs generate will be divided by 9.
The general approach to relaxing the terms should be the linear progression, because it's generally harder to make a positive impression. Maybe let the HR quality affect it to some degree?
Right now, the grading process is not very intuitive, and I'd hazard a guess many people fall to the same wrong conclusion as I have, that the score penalty comes from a) any deviation from hard-set slider positions and b) time spent on the dev stage counts by itself After a somewhat heated discussion with @xsellier, I was proven wrong, so I'd like to request making it into something more obvious and user-friendly.
The basic idea is to add an extra slider I call "Tempo" to completely separate proportions from amounts. Changing this slider should allow the CEO to relax production if they're in no rush, thereby improving the morale, or engage in the infamous crunch, pouring extra money and manpower into development to hasten it. Something like this:
As for specifics, here's what I suggest: