When a game is on sale, what does the green line mean

It appears that this is true.

When I play the game, I try to have multiple employees with high numbers in a certain stat (I have 2 high level sound people, 2 high level graphics people, etc). As you get farther into your companies career, you'll be able to hire hackers and other people with very strong skills across the board, making this even easier.

Also, when choosing somebody to work on a job, make sure to note the Prev symbol that appears to the left of In or Out. The Prev means that that person has done that job on the last game you made - this allows you to cycle people without having to remember who worked on what last.

Basic Jobs

There are three basic jobs that you need to make a game:

• Writer: Excels at the 'scenario writing' phase of developing a game.
• Designer: Excels at the 'character design' phase of developing a game.
• Sound Engineer: Excels at the 'soundtrack' phase of developing a game.

Using the appropriate person for the job early on seems to get you more development iterations each time you tackle that part of a game.

Coders don't too too well at any of the phases. In my experience, if you try to get a coder to do any of them, you get about 2 iterations of development.

Complex Jobs

I toyed around with this a bit and basically tried to get each of the complex jobs (director, producer, and hacker) to do each phase of a project just to see what would happen. I had this preconception that producers did better at graphics and sound and directors did better at scenario writing. In practice, I saw results that were all over the map in terms of number of iterations the worker would go through, even when I did it multiple times with the same person (while also swapping people every time to make sure they didn't get penalized for doing a job too much).

The number of points a worker generates seems to be based on a combination of stats and iterations. However, it would seem that the titles only really affect you early on in the game.

I noticed that hackers kind of fell flat on sound more often than not, but my sample size wasn't exactly large.

Hardware Engineers

Hardware Engineers allow you to make your own console. I toyed around with having one own all parts of a game and the results were similar to the complex jobs in that they varied. Given the stat distribution of a hardware engineer, though, they didn't contribute a lot of points to the graphics or sound portions of a game. I did notice a few times where they contributed less than three iterations to graphics. In terms of scenario writing, I saw it go from high amounts to low ones.