This is just a simple guide on how to get started and be successful in A11.
Alpha 11 Guide for Beginners
Whether you’re choosing easy or hard, create your character with at least the following – 1 point in each skill of art, programming, design.
Then spread your skills into programming and art evenly. Everything else can be zero on the sliding skill bars.
Now choose the garage for your starting location. If you’re on hard you’ll need to take a 10k loan at the start to get enough money to buy furniture.
When the game starts up pause the game.
Now build a table, a computer, and a chair. Line the right wall with bookcases, and on the left side put another table and a server.
Your main character is a superhero. He doesn’t need to eat or drink and doesn’t get affected by fatigue or social issues. He can multi-task like no other without penalty.
So go ahead and accept all the contracts. Don’t bother designing them go straight to programming. Once the contracts get to the recommended line, wait for the day they’re due to turn them in. We want our reputation to stay low so we can stay on the easy contracts.
Now, there’s two ways to start out. You can start out by doing contracts and buying up stocks while living off dividends. To do this, you buy the stocks of cheapest companies or new ones that start up. This will cost a significant investment upfront but can pay you 100k a month if the company starts to take off.
The other way is more safe – software development.
You see your main CEO is crazy talented. He can work on a project and still do contracts at the same time, just at a slower rate.
So what you want to do is develop a software that is just all 1 star features in system/sound/2d. I would recommend starting out with anti-virus as it’s the easiest, but games are also good.
Don’t do any 2 star requirement features as it will slow you down on development and make it drag on too long. We are only burning software for two things 1. skill gain and 2. money. So we want this to be fast and easy.
Don’t worry about marketing.
Now develop the software and as your cash gets low you can pause it and do some contracts to get the money back up. Once you are on your 3rd iteration + you can start the programming phase and move to beta and out of alpha.
When doing the programming phase I recommend removing programming and only doing the art first. Then run one iteration once art is maxed out, and max out art again.
Now remove art from his skill list and do the programming. Do one iteration once it’s all maxed out.
Now set your release date and release your build to the public to start the marketing and start hunting for bugs.
This is going to be the longest phase. You want to remove as many bugs as possible because you can’t afford a huge support team to handle all the tickets, so most your time before launch will be spent on bug hunting.
When the bug fixing starts to really slow down compared to how it was at the start you will now want to buy the little room next to the garage and put a 3d printer in there and a wooden palet down and start producing 35k copies and set the limit to 35k to keep reproducing them as they sell. Also open your digital distribution (you should have the server from earlier).
Now, you’re going to launch without any marketing so release your final build version to the public and the month after that launch. With your first month sales, pause the game and move to a new building and start hiring a support staff/marketing team.
Hire mid-level on support and low level for marketing. I would start with 6 support, 3 marketers.
Each team needs it’s own rooms so that’s why you’ll need to move.
Set the marketing budget to 50k initially and 100k eventually.