The core gameplay mechanic of Game Dev Tycoon appears to be centered around determining how your choices in development effect the sales and rating of your games. While it is possible to gather information about Genres, Themes, Platforms, etc by making notes of various messages like "this genre works well with this console" or "this genre works well with this theme", or "focus on this serves the game well". There appears to be no obvious feedback for features like 'joysticks', 'gamepads', 'open world', 'branching story', 'level editor', etc?
How do I judge whether a listed feature had any effect, positive or negative, on sales or rating?
Does including a useless feature make the game worse?
What is the difference between making a Text-based or a 2d game? Is there any point to including joystick support or a level editor? Etc.
I don't want a list of features and there effects, I'd like to know how I can determine them for myself.
Best Answer
Kalec's answer has some good general points but misses the actual question a bit, so here goes:
First, all features improve the game if they're included. Some are mutually exclusive, though - you can't have stereo and surround sound, for example. Obviously in a case like that surround sound would be a better boost to game quality than stereo.
BUT: Each feature costs development time to implement, and you only have a limited amount of it. If the amount of features you're pushing into a given field requires more dev time than you've allocated, the overall quality of that field decreases -- you'll see a percentile value behind the field name. When that happens, you'll have to pick and choose which features are really important, or allocate more time to that field.
Bigger games have more dev time, so can fit more features simultaneously.