About

Our first game to test the waters was Game Dev Tycoon, a business simulation game where you start your own game development company in the 80’s. Game Dev Tycoon was inspired by Game Dev Story (by Kairosoft), which was the first ‘tycoon’ game we enjoyed playing on the iPhone; however, from the start, we wished the game would work and look differently. We wanted a game development simulation which would be less random, more about your choices and a little more realistic. We began working on what would become Game Dev Tycoon in 2011 and created the concepts and game mechanics as well as the game itself from scratch.

Our second game currently in-development is Tavern Keeper, a fantasy tavern simulator.

October 2011
– We begin work on concepts for a round-based game development simulation planned for the iPhone.

December 2011
– We change plans and re-target the game as a real-time isometric simulation for the upcoming Windows Store.

July 2012
– Greenheart Games is officially founded.
– A preview version of Game Dev Tycoon is released on the Windows 8 Preview Store.

December 2012
– The full version of Game Dev Tycoon is released and becomes the first simulation game on the Windows 8 Store.

April 2013
– Game Dev Tycoon is ported to Windows, Mac and Linux. The release causes world-wide media attention when we report our piracy rates on day one.

August 2013
– An updated version of Game Dev Tycoon is released on Steam to a great reception.

September 2013
– We release a modding API for Game Dev Tycoon and put our EULA and Modding Agreement under a CC license so other companies can adapt it. [Source]

December 2013
– We release Greenworks, our library enabling integration of node-webkit based games with Steam, under a MIT license that allows others to build upon these tools and use them for commercial purposes.

2014
– We started a number of new projects with varying success. 2014 brought a lot of challenges and after many hard lessons learned we refocused our attention on some core projects.
– As #GamerGate escalated, we Signed the Open Letter to the Gaming Community and became supporters of Feminist Frequency’s work for a more diverse gaming culture.
– We updated Greenworks to make it even easier for HTML5 games to integrate with Steam.
– We started to carbon offset our international flights as well as general electricity usage.

2015
– We wrote about our future plans and projects.
– We switched to a new game engine for Game #2.
– Reacting to the European refugee crisis, we hosted our first charity sale donating almost double the revenue from the sale.

2016
– We continued working on Game #2 and in December finally revealed it as Tavern Keeper
– Work on a mobile port of Game Dev Tycoon (developed by Rarebyte) started in secret.

2017
– Work on Tavern Keeper continued largely behind closed doors, though we did start posting more on twitter and facebook.
– Game Dev Tycoon released on iOS in December and we blogged about the results in several game reports.

2018
– We released Game Dev Tycoon on Google Play.
– We released a big free content update for Game Dev Tycoon.
– We celebrated five years of Game Dev Tycoon.

2019
– We launched the Greenheart Games Club.
– We started Greencast, the podcast of Greenheart Games.
– We launched our first merchandise.
– We opened up our Discord server.

2020
– We started sending out regular feature postcards to our Greenheart Games Club members.
– We joined the Coalition for App Fairness.
– We released Game Dev Tycoon on Nintendo Switch and added cross-platform save support.