At first, I tried to make a game, but was unable to get one rated high enough to even get the initial investment back (despite using all the proper slider settings for the game type). When that didn't work, I decided to save up some cash, research some features and release a game engine. Since the only income I had was from small jobs, it took so long to save enough money to release an engine that the features were all outdated, and nobody bought the engine. So I then tried to research some features, then take out a loan and release the game engine. This allowed me to get a good bit of sales from the engine, but the interest rate on the loan is so high, I was never able to make the $250,000 back to repay the loan in one lump sum, and my company went bankrupt.

So I decided to become a publisher. In order to make this playthrough work, you will need to use the unlock everything option when starting the game. I wanted to keep my expenses down, so I never hired anyone else, and I never moved to anything bigger than the large garage. I initially started with only a 3x3 development room with the highest quality desk to take jobs. After saving up $200,000+, I made a production room as big as possible, and started saving for a machine to put in it. The machines below $180,000 are all worthless, and unable to keep up with even small production jobs, so it takes a while to get there. Once you have your first machine, start taking all the jobs you can, and save up for a 3x3 storage room, and buy the highest quality storage shelf, which you will need to start accepting publishing gigs. Yes, you developer will be wearing diapers... there's no place to put a bathroom.

You are now a full fledged (though tiny) publisher! You will now need to save about another $200,000 to get your first publishing gig. Do not take a loan out, it will likely cripple you after all the hard work you have gone through to get to this point. Speaking of all this hard work, save the game! The first few publishing jobs you get will make or break you, so save the game before accepting each one. If it doesn't work out for you, try again.

I don't recommend taking any publishing gigs over $1,000,000. In order to maximize your profits, you will need to develop patches for the game. The more expensive the game is to publish, the more expensive the patches are, and the longer they take to make. Since you are a one man army, you likely won't be able to release even the first patch for a $1,000,000 game before interest wanes and it is taken off the market. When making patches for the game, I recommend selecting everything, as this will raise the value of the game, and you'll make more money off of it when you re-release it later. I also recommend removing all the bugs when you are done patching the game. It will not create much demand for the game right now, but it will pay off when you re-release it.

After two or three good publishing jobs, your company will be well established, and you will be able to afford making a mistake here or there, so if when you feel comfortable in that respect, you can stop saving the game before every publishing deal. Save up about $1,000,000 and you'll be ready to move to the Big Garage! The goal of this play through was to keep my expenses as low as possible, which is why I didn't move to a bigger office, or hire anyone else, but you may be able to make your trillion more quickly if you choose to take on extra expenses.

In the big garage I built a 3x3 development office, a 3x3 bathroom, a 3x3 research room, about 1.2 million units worth of storage, an office and the rest was turned into a large production room. Looking back, maybe I should have tried to produce two publishing rooms so I could take on more jobs, but in this play through I stuck with the one room, and 6x $320,000 production machines, which allowed me to produce very quickly.

By the time I had gotten to this point the year was about 2020, so I moved my developer to the research room, and researched every feature and genre. I then proceeded to create an engine for every genre. I priced them at $0 for purchasing, and 10% of the profit of the game. The engines sold quite well, but making an engine for every genre was probably overkill. Market saturation lead to a few of the engines not selling a single copy. Keep producing as many games as you can during this process, but stick to the $200,000-$300,000 games, as your developer will be too busy to make patches for the games.

After I was done making engines, I moved my developer back to research, and researched all game topics (just in case I decided to develop my own game, which I never did) and I researched all the top tier console components. Once I was done with that, I deleted the research room, and replaced it with a 3x3 console development room. I then proceeded to save the $150,000,000 required to develop my own console. It might seem counter productive to spend so much developing a console, but in the end I made nearly 30% of my trillion dollars from the profits of that one console. For the first few years I left the price at $599, and then I switched pricing to automatic. I sold a lot of development kits at $10,000 a pop. Keep producing as many games as you can during this process, but stick to the $200,000-$300,000 games, as your developer will be too busy to make patches for the games.

At this point, I moved my developer back to the development room, and just started producing as many games as possible. The $200,000 - $400,000 games with 4 stars were the sweet spot for me, but I would take on games as expensive as $600,000-$700,000 if nothing else was coming along. More expensive than that, and you'll likely lose money on them. If you don't have a trillion by the time your console sales start to slump, then develop another one, which will likely make even more money than the first one. It takes a long time, but at this point in the game you're pretty much guaranteed to make your trillion dollars if you stick with it.

Good luck!