At the start of Game Dev Tycoon you only have 4 topics available to you, which topics you have at the start will greatly affect what games you have to create to succeed. Here’s a quick tutorial to show you how to open more topics as quickly as possible.
As I said at the beginning you only have 4 topics. Below you can see one of my beginnings as you can see so I have both transport and farming at the same time which are excellent themes in case you want to develop strategy games so for me it was perfectly clear what to do and practically I was satisfied.
If you are unlucky you just have to try to make the best game out of what you have available. Because by creating a game you earn research points and once you have 10 research points available you can try the next theme of the game. In short you have to create games and create game reports to get more research points.
To explore another topic, you have to click on yourself, select new research and then click on new topic and choose what genre you want to explore. As far as I know only 4 topics are shown during research that can be explored, so you have to choose what you want to explore.
Always examine what you like or what is the least evil. Because if there is nothing you want to explore (no topic you don’t like) you will still have to try something you don’t like at all.
One final recommendation I have for you is to carefully examine how each combination of theme and genre works (it’s a lot like reality) because, for example, Government : Action won’t work at all while Government : Strategy/Simulation will be an excellent combination.
Also remember that you should never release two games in a row that have the same theme or genre.
