Hollywood Animal: Early Game Walkthrough Guide

Complete step-by-step guide to surviving the early game in Hollywood Animal.

Hollywood Animal: Early Game Walkthrough Guide

This step-by-step guide will walk you through each phase, ensuring you have enough money to play in sandbox mode (risk-free) by the end of the tutorial.

I’m starting a new game to demonstrate this guide and prove it works for everyone. I chose Blind Love for its profitability, though it might just be random. I focus on medium-quality films for a good starting profit.

For HR, I pick the cheapest option since the 1% seniority difference isn’t worth extra cost. For other heads, choose those with full money upgrade bonuses (e.g., 20% money speed-up). If not available, pick level 1 heads and manually control upgrades. Always prioritize money upgrades since you’ll eventually have plenty of extra cash.

For buildings, I choose 50% fast build, as repairs can be done later when you have more money. Some suggest 100% build speed to avoid morale hits, but I think giving gifts to heads is easier.

For genres, pick three long-term favorites, as writers can handle other genres in the early game. Let them work on IDEAS until the story workshop is ready. Use one script for the second movie tutorial, then discard the others for EXP.

Set up essential buildings as soon as they unlock.

Key Upgrades

By now, you should have unlocked your upgrades. There are some key upgrades that you should prioritize. For departments I didn’t mention here, feel free to do what you want.

Human Resource:
First upgrade: Services (because gifts are overpowered).

Financial Department:
Second upgrade: $500 cash per month (because you’ll need them as extra options in events).

(SUPER IMPORTANT) Distribution:
First upgrade: Marketing and Outreach.
Second upgrade: Theater Management.
You must rush both of these to survive the early game. You need marketing first so you can continue to profit from your 4th movie onward. From that point, you must have a marketing building to do marketing. This means you need to rush the tech and build it before your fourth movie.

Owning a lot of theaters is borderline “cheat code.” It multiplies your profit per movie like bunnies at super high cost-efficiency. It’s literally the “I win” button.

Maintenance:
You should have the repair crew completed by the time you need to do building maintenance. Beyond that, you can experiment. However, the general consensus is that landscaping is the best route as it helps improve personnel happiness by creating a beautiful working environment. Personally, I do medium landscaping -> repair crew as my first two upgrades.

Pre-production:
First upgrade: Casting Office (because you need to be able to sign all the personnel as soon as possible to assemble your A-team, which will be key to early survival).
Second upgrade: Technical Support (so you can buy new techs when they become available).

Production:
First upgrade: Line Production Office (because this building allows you to adjust the filming schedule. In the starting phase, setting it to 5 days, 8 hours helps keep the crew’s happiness from decreasing during filming).

Security:
First upgrade: Bodyguard (not a must, but an event will require it soon).

Script:
First upgrade: Freelancer Writer’s Office (so you can buy great scripts for your A-team).

Scriptwriter Powerleveling

After you unlock the story writing office, hire the cheapest scriptwriters up to 7 (the max you can get without penalties). Don’t worry about their low stars, scriptwriters are the easiest to level up so just pick the cheapest and work them like some mules. If you want to go the “ultra saving” route, cut the initial 3 screenwriters as well and get 7 cheap screenwriters. You will depend on market scripts in the first few years if you do this. Maybe consider keeping 1 initial screenwriter though, cuz it’s easier to do some quests with your own script.

After recruiting them, spam storyboard scripts with them. Why do storyboards instead of other options? because storyboard scripts have the fastest writing time (55-60 days) vs other things like “inspiration” (90-100+ days to write). For your 1 star crappy scriptwriters, you are not expecting them to produce scripts you will use, you are just asking them to write and write and write so they will become the Stephen King of scriptwriting after 5 years. That’s why we chose the fastest option so they can write more and gain the highest exp in the shortest time frame.

You will be doing a lot of storyboard plot setup so just go with fast and easy — I put a single number as script name like 1, 3, or 0. 1 genre, random setting. Not sure if the script’s synergy affect the scriptwriter’s EXP rate so I just play safe and go with boring-but-sure combo like 100% adventure + adventurer protagonist + Roman Reigns — I mean… the tribal chief + Rival + treasure hunting + protagonist gets treasure OR other obvious-as-heck starting synergies you can find. I am sure everyone of you are smart enough to pick the right starting combos.

• If you want to use your own script, have 1-2 best scriptwriters write “serious scripts” that you will use. Otherwise, just buy high star scripts from the market. The biggest pro of using your own script is that you have complete freedom as to what gender and what role you want your actors to appear in.
• The other 5 you let them do stereotypical storyboard script and say “good job dude”, throw those scripts away, and tell them to work on the next one. By throwing those scripts away, I do delete them so my script storage aren’t loaded with 100 pieces of crap.
• Some of the scriptwriters will have 2-3 stars max potential. If so, just fire them after maxing out and look for new 1 star scriptwriter to train. Some of them are bound to have Stephen King potential, you just gotta dig them up and train them again and again to find out.
• Be prepared to be sick of having to do multiple storyboard scripts every 55-60 days. It’s a small price to pay for long-term success.

After you train up your Seven Samurai — I mean, your Seven Godly Writers, you can use them to spam a lot of good scripts at once OR use them to get a lot of story elements early on so you can have fun writing the scripts with all kinds of elements and enjoy the creative process. The success rate of getting a new story element is tied to their star which is why you need to remove the 2-3 max potential guys and look for better writers. Even if you don’t care about writing your own high star scripts, you want them as your “element researchers”.

In my tutorial game, I finished my story writer building and started my Seven Godly Scriptwriters training by 5 June 1929.

This is my storage of garbage script as an example.

I am very lucky in my demo game. Usually, I will hit a lot of 2 star max potential writers but this time, I only get one 3 star max out of my initial hire. I still decided to cut him and train up another freshman though.

A-Team, Assemble!

After unlocking the casting office, you can now assembly your A-team. There are many ways to do it but I always go for the simple 3 years deal for my A-team. They will be making me so much cash that I don’t care I am paying extra for them.

Some people do say that you can save more costs by doing movie deal first.

Until 1932 or so it is almost always better to do per movie deals. Here is why:

1) Do a one movie deal with a “big name”.
2) Make sure they are as happy and loyal as you can do at the early stage of the game before they want to renegotiate.
3) Do not renegotiate right away.
4) Wait until after the movie they were in is archived.
5) Now with the “successful collaboration” bonus giving a 10% discount AND their base price will be cheaper due to increased reputation, AND they will offer a smaller multiplier to their base on longer contracts. Also get loyalty bonus as well. Loyalty and Happiness are static while not at the studio.

So it ends up cheaper in the long run to do so, plus one can use the medical coverage as a small discount as well. The other studios won’t hire the free actors until 1932.

I do see the benefit of this method but if you don’t want to be micro-ing a lot on talent management, then go with my 3 years deal approach. It’s fast at the expense of slightly more cash, which we will have a boatload of eventually. For my demonstration game, I am doing my 3 year deal method on everyone I sign for A-team purpose.

The salary asked by high stars talents VS the potential profit they can generate is completely lopsided in your favor. They are helpful to maintain your script quality despite the low tech and low production value in the beginning.

Check the labor market every 2-3 months and look for new or released, established talents.

For instance, in my save I found a 8.5 stars actress on 3 August 1929. She only asks for 105K over 3 years. She can easily make millions for me in one single film. Meanwhile, there’s a 3.9 stars actress asking for 41.1k over 3 years and she is probably losing me money every movie. 105K earning me millions VS 41.1k losing me money. Think with numbers in mind and you will realize that the A-list level talent in this game are asking for menial labor level of wage for what they are truly worth. So, don’t cheap out on talent. Hire established stars to earn your first pot of gold, they are your “insurance tickets”.

When you have services and gifts, always use them when signing. They save you money in the long run. Don’t believe me? Just run the number yourself!

In my experience, two A-teams are good enough but if you just want to earn a crap ton of profits right away, go with three top squads! If you can only find the composition of one squad at first, just check the market once in a while to assemble your second squad. Most of the time, you are lacking a second 7+ stars producer or director from the initial search.

You probably won’t have the money to run more than 3 at first, but eventually you can sustain 3-4 or even more of them!

So, what makes a complete A-team?

Producer is the only “one per team” individual whereas other talents you can do them in rotation if you want to They are with the project until the end of release so you must have more of them if you want multiple teams. It’s an absolute “one per team” personnel until you unlock “two projects per producer”.

Simplest Setup – Everyone Stay Together

The simplest setup you can do, with the least micromanagement possible, is to have a fixed, full team that only do one film every cycle. This means your whole crew will wait for the producer to finish the release before starting a whole new film. It’s not optimized but as I have always said, you don’t always have to play like a hardcore 200 IQ mathematician min-max freak if you don’t want to. Big whoop they will have more virtual money than you in a single player game, play how you want. If you want a relaxed setup yet still able to survive and have fun, do this.

For this you need these personnels, per project:

1x Producer
1x Director
1x Cinematographer
2-3x Acting talent (unless you intentionally write an 1 OR 4+ characters script, you will be seeing stories with 2-3 most of the time)

And they stay forever and do films together again and again as if they were a Youtube channel.

Rotation

This is probably the go-to setup if you don’t mind a little bit of micro. In this setup, you go with 2-3 producers to run 2-3 projects and have others be on rotation. So, you will have something like this:

3x Producer
2x Director
2x Cinematographer
4-8x Acting talent (I think 3 male 3 female should be enough for a minimalist approach. In my demo game, I sign more than I needed and still in profit, so if you want to cast a lot of people, feel free to run up to 10+. If you want to go 10+, you can consider signing people on “per movie” deal instead of “per year”)

Producer A starts production with the first set of talent. Producer B then starts production 30-40 days later with the second set of talent. After movie A enters post-production, anyone not producer from first set are now free so you start up movie C with producer C + first set of talent. producer A then make movie D with second set of talent, and vice versa.

There will be some actors on standby so you can freely use them as you need to. Having more acting talents is great for preventing repeat on character type and genre type on the same actors. The game do have penalties for typecasting until the talent earns “established” status.

As in, fans don’t mind watching Arnold Schwarzenegger in 100 action movies as he certainly has the established genre buff in the action genre. But for a random nobody they don’t love, they don’t want to see him being a freaking cop in 5 action movies in a row.

For me personally, I sign a lot of talent because I enjoy making movies with different talents and imagining them in various roles. After you are rich, you can run a 50 actor roster and just have fun this way if you want to.

For editors and composers, 1x is usually enough for multiple projects (up to like, 3 per cycle) unless two films are finished close to each other. I usually just keep 1 of them and if I need another I just sign 1 from the market at that time.

I waited patiently until September 1929 to start my second film. My luck is bad and I cannot find a high star producer at this point so I just go with a 4.8 star producer here. If you aren’t unlucky, you should have a full A-team for this movie.

This is not a must but I think it’s better to go with full soundstage to cut down filming time. It’s fine too if you want to go outside, especially if your cinematographer is great in nature. I don’t think the filming time is going to hurt my approach, but if you just want min-max result, then go full in-house to cut down filming time so you can use your A-team on more movies. In my demo game, I go full outdoor just to prove that my plan will work even if I spend some extra time filming my second movie. It’s also a market script of adventure genre and fantasy kingdom setting. It’s the worst second film in term of cost and money. If you are doing a city rom-com, you will be saving time and money compare to me.

Extra and crew I never cheap out on them on my A-team film. We do want quality here. Trying to save a few Ks and risking quality that could be a few hundred Ks differences in ticket sales is just poor man’s mindset. Think like a rich mofo when you play a tycoon game like this — it’s never about saving costs to achieve things, it’s about finding ways to get more money so you can afford what you want to do.

There are a lot of discussion on how to figure out how many screening to buy for each week in the discussion forum. I don’t have it figured out so I can only give general advice. My approach is to do something like 10k / 8k / 3k / 0 for a 6 commercial movie. Go up by a K or two on first week for every star above that. Most of the time, attendance drop very fast after week 2 so you can even just do 0 by week 3 for a weaker movie.

Here’s the result of my second movie. It’s one of the worst movies I had with high star team so I am sure you can do so much better than me.

My third movie did much better but as I said, I did not research properly on screenings so I am not maximizing my income with this film. I show this to make some points:

• This game isn’t as hard as it sounds, even if you make mistakes you can still survive and thrive.
• Optimizing screening count is important, but you can get by with less optimized settings and just keep learning.
• The profit margin of our A-team strategy is strong enough that you would not be fiddling with bankruptcy very soon.

Theoritically, this movie could be much better if not for the quest I am doing. I put 4 characters in this script to dilute the impact of a weak link. This demonstrates the power of an A-team in this stage of the game. They will carry your studio no matter what.

I only released 2 films (and one of them wasn’t great) in year 1930 yet I am in slightly profit.

Early Technologies

For early research, I always go with one upgrade at once. You do get time discount if you research multiple upgrades at once, but I think it’s better to take an upgrade from time to time (so +1 per 300 days) than to wait a long time for a straight +3 boost.

I always focus on quality first. One can argue about practicality being great too as it saves time and anything that saves time is a big win in any kind of tycoon sim game. Time is the most limited resource you can have. Economy is near worthless unless you are a super min-max extremist and you care about saving an extra 50k per film. Completely unnecessary to care about when you are swimming in cash, but hey, there are perfectionist actors in the game and there will be perfectionist players.

For this guide that covers just the super early game (tutorial period), my only big advice is to get HESPRO 35 tech as soon as possible and do 5 films with it to unlock the powerful advanced version. It’s not a must-have but it helps for sure!

Theater Rush

Owning a lot of your own theaters is the closest thing to an in-game “cheat code”. It’s the biggest “number maker” in the game for many reasons:

• The monthly theater maintenance fee is so much lower than the distribution fee to get a movie up on a neutral theater. Huge advantage in number min-maxing for owning as many of them as possible.
• Even with just a 6-7 rating film, you will be filling up a ton more showing than your initial theater count so you should buy asap to get most out of your film. This cuts down your “distribution cost per film” so much that what you saved in a single film would be covering the monthly maintenance fee.
• It’s free to release your own film in your theater. You only pay the printing cost for the film and that’s it! This means you don’t even have to study or predict “how many releases do I need for this film of X score”. As they are free, you just max out the screening on your own cinema on any film worry-free. It’s so cheap that I would do this even on a 2.0 crappy film.

You don’t have to buy all the theaters at once. Just buy some before your A-team film every cycle so you earn more and have more money to buy more theaters on the next cycle. Do note that competitors will also buy cinemas in time so it’s by the game design that you should be buying them asap and hoard them as if you were a dragon!

In my demo game, I had the theater management office done by 31 October 1930. I waited until my 4th movie is finishing post-production to save up some rental fee. I went from the starting 91 to 250 in one go on 3 March 1931. Now I can have 8,750 free showing per week instead of 3,185. Totally worth the 1.59M!

You don’t have to be this aggressive though, going from something like 91 -> 150 -> 200 -> 250 is fine. Just buy some every cycle as I said.

To demonstrate the power of theaters, I ran my fourth movie without renting independent cinema (yeah I know I did not set the default 1 to 0). As I have said, we can safely run any movie just in our cinema if we aren’t confident about adding extra showing on it and still earn solid profit.

End Result

This is my end result by the start of 1933. After you know all the important stuffs, all you have to do is to keep making movies with your A-teams and you should be able to consistently generate income.

I have a net profit of 3.2M on my 1932 and that’s with me playing in a non-min-max fashion. I am sure if you are more aggressive with script writing and/or script hunting at the market and having more established teams at work you can generate far more income than me! Even if you play sloppily like me, you still survive the early game with relative ease and should be set to progress your game without risk of bankruptcy.

I have 400 cinemas at this point. It should be enough for general usage, but I still do suggest you to take as many cinema as possible before your opponents do so.

This is my homegrown team of Seven Godly Writers (who aren’t Godly yet) after 2.5 years of training:

In theory, they would have more stars if I force them to spam more scripts instead of spending a lot of time in element researches. In my games, a lot of the scripts I used are just 5+- rating scripts they wrote early on. I had some 6-7 stars scripts later on that I didn’t use yet. So, if you just ask them to write script a lot, I am sure you’d be using 6-7 stars script by 2031 or so and would have much better movies for the crowd. That would be the min-max way to play for early profit – but again, I didn’t do so to prove that you don’t have to go that extreme to survive.

I expect plenty of players to want to have a lot of story elements asap so they can start writing they story they wanted instead of just doing the same boring formula again and again. Some players play this like The Movies, in which their creative expression is an integral part of their experience. Hence, I experimented with “element research rush” with my writer team to show that it could easily work early on while you are simultaneously securing your early profit.

I had collected the following new elements (not naming them for spoiler purposes):

• 3 protagonists
• 3 antagonists
• 0 support character (I keep failing these)
• 1 themes and events
• 3 finales
• 4 settings (I keep targeting these as I am bored of the initial settings)

That’s 14 successful researches within the first 4 years of game time which isn’t so bad. WIth the new elements, I can write plenty of new ideas like:

[MINOR SPOILER ALERT]

WW1 – War Film.

Train raid western with full-blown action.

And so much more

Extra Tips

Here are some extra tips not related to the step-by-step process.

If you write multi-genre scripts, put the % distribution as your title.

The game doesn’t allow you to check your % distribution after you finish the script. Use the title as your notepad for this and change it to the actual name you want to use by the end of post-production. This helps you remember your genres so you can set up the target audience of your marketing campaign properly.

Happiness Is A Resource
If you are just playing the number game (which let’s be real, is the optimum way to play a sim tycoon game), you should utilize your employees’ happiness as a resource. Instead of having them at 100 for no purpose, you spend them THEN get them to 100 again. This way you are actually burning it like a resource for your gain. After you unlock a lot of gifts, you can rush projects by forcing employees to do more than 5 days, 8 hours OR do a lot of projects per year and just pamper them with gifts afterwards. Do this every year and you are doing films at like 20% reduced time (and cost) which is super efficient!

Multiple Producers
After you have unlocked the tech for producers to multi-tasks and you can afford to hire a lot of producers, use multiple on a single movie. This allows you more rooms to put low star talents and etc. as you use your producers to carry the movie rating.