🏗️ Getting Started in Hollywood Animal: Laying the Foundation

Tip 1: Don’t overspend on studio heads in the beginning.

In the (mandatory—and long) tutorial one of the first choices you will have to make is deciding who will run each of the three already-built departments: Human Resouces, Maintenance, Postproduction, and Distribution. Unless you have a very good reason, hire the cheapest person!

They will gain experience (seniority) as the game goes on. It is worth checking to see if a better value hire is available every time—whether you are hiring actors, crew, or staff. In this game, as in real life, more expensive does not always equal more skilled or better quality. You will find some real gems by taking your time sifting through the available applicants.

If you are stuck deciding between two similarly priced options, consider breaking the tie by determining who can speed up research by spending studio funds (in the image above, Judy Phillips can by 10%).

Tip 2: Use the cheaper construction developers in the beginning.

Luxta Constructions, as obnoxious as they are, provide the best value when building out your studio relative to the other options. They finish the buildings faster, getting your studio up and running (and making money) sooner. And they cost about three times less than the most expensive developers. You can always remodel later when money is less tight.

Tip 3: Fire Johnnie Payne as soon as possible.

Sure. He speeds up researching the $500k loan by 9% or so, due to his seniority, but that’s just not worth eighteen-thousand dollars a month. That’s like eleventy trillion dollars in today’s money. Just fire this guy when you can.

Be aware that firing an employee means all the progress on a particular research project will be lost. So, if you have only a couple days until the expensive employee finishes a long research task, it may be worth just waiting a bit until they’re done.

Tip 4: Save the game after you have gotten past the release of the first movie.

As of this writing, restarting the game means redoing the entire tutorial, unskippable scenes and all. It can take a long time. So, just create a bookmark—or better yet—a couple bookmarks, by saving the game at convenient times, such as the point after which you have released the starter movie (the one you start the game with), or after you have built all the main buildings.

Then, if you are ever forced into bankruptcy and made to restart the game, you won’t have to replay the very start of the tutorial: you can just reload from that point and save yourself some time.

Tip 5: Hold off on producing any high-quality scripts until you’ve built a casting department.

You won’t be able to hire new actors if you don’t build a casting department. You’ll be stuck casting your in-house talent, whose skills may drag down the film’s overall quality, if you can’t access higher-grade actors.

🎬 Early Operations: Surviving the First Few Years

Tip 6: Always be producing movies, so that every part of the production pipeline is full.

Movie studios have fixed costs—expenses you pay monthly whether or not you are making a movie. You are much better off wringing out every last drop of efficiency from the studio facilities, which are constantly costing you money whether you use them or not, by cranking out movies, rather than leaving those buildings unused.

Plus, releasing profitable movies is the only way to make money in this game. Avoid the dreaded bankruptcy “Game Over” screen and don’t be forced to reload a distant save—or worse—restart the game and have to relive the tutorial.

And if you finish a movie and it’s not the right time to release it, you can always hold off on scheduling its release.

Producing movies also levels up your employees’ skills. The more you produce, the faster your employees will improve their professionalism. Always be making movies!

Tip 7: Happy, loyal cast /crew members can be better for your movies’ quality than even those with higher professionalism.

Never underestimate the power of loyalty and happiness. These are the bars adjacent to every staff/cast/crew-member. The status bar with the thumbs-up / thumbs-down symbol represents the loyalty that person has to your studio, and the status bar by the face symbol is the employee’s happiness.

Staff that have those bars totally filled will heavily contribute to the quality of whatever movie they’re working on.

Tip 8: Try to match your cast / crew members’ professionalism to the script level.

Every script has a critical and commercial appeal level that ranges from 0 to 10. If you cast an actor with a professionalism level of 3 in the protagonist role of a movie with a quality level of 7, that differential will mean that the overall quality of the film will almost certainly decrease. This applies to all crew members. Conversely, if you cast the 1930s analog of God-actor Daniel Day-Lewis in a two-star movie, the final level of the film will go up (to an extent; even Depression-time DDL can’t make a chicken salad out of chicken sh*t).

Therefore, it’s often worth trying to match the cast / crew members’ professionalism levels to the script levels. That way, you save your best employees for the best scripts, and allow the less experienced staff to work the crappier movies and skill up. Even bad movies can make money and are worth producing.

Tip 9: Hire producers on a time-based contract, as opposed to per movie.

Producers are worth their weight in gold. They shepherd your films from pre-production to the very last days of distribution. Luckily, even really good producers are often very cheap to hire in Hollywood Animal. Hiring them on a time-based contract will get you the best bang for your buck because a) they’re cheap, b) you can keep them constantly busy, assuming you are always producing several films, and c) if they’re on contract, your rivals can’t hire them and use their skills to produce their own movies.

Tip 10: Don’t cheap out on postproduction. Cut costs elsewhere.

When deciding on who to contract with for film development, music recording, and sound recording, go with the medium option, pretty much every time. The cost difference between $36,000 for all the medium-level contractors vs $18,000 for the low-level ones is not that big a difference. Even for cheap films, cutting costs here is just not worth it.

Tip 11: Schedule your release calendar ahead of time.

In the beginning of Hollywood Animal, your studio doesn’t own that many theaters, and so you will rely on renting third party theaters to screen your movies in a lot of cases. These can get snapped up quickly by rival theaters if you don’t reserve them for your movies, which is why it’s worth scheduling your film release calendar far out into the future.

Once you start producing more movies and they start lining up to be released, try to determine which movies will warrant two months of showings and which will peter out in one month. We found that movies with a rating higher than 4.5 can often profitably continue into a second month. The higher the rating, the more demand there will be to watch that movie, so leave room for a second (or even third) month of showings of your most high-quality movies.

Tip 12: Release your best movies (or any movie) on a holiday, like Thanksgiving, Valentines, or Independence Day.

Releasing movies during one of the various holidays in the release calendar will work wonders for your movies’ attendance figures. Even if you don’t release on the holiday, having the movie play through the holiday will provide you a boost.

Tip 13: Check for cheap security employees to hire from time to time. Grab them whenever you can.

When you first build your security building, check to see if there are any cheap security staff you can hire. We consider cheap to be between $200 and $350 per month.

It’s worth assigning security to pretty much every film because they often give you options when the dreaded random events pop up. You will avoid taking hits to your film’s quality as well as to your crew members’ loyalty and happiness, which could also tank a film.

🧠 Research & Development: Smarter Studio Growth

Tip 14: Only spend studio funds to speed up tech unlocks when the research duration is super long.

When deciding to drop 100 grand to speed up research by 10%, you will want to save this for those technologies that take forever to unlock. Cutting the time it takes to research a 1,200-day tech by 10% shaves off 120 days (4 months!) whereas spending the same money to cut a 60-day research by 10% will save you less than a week. Be smart about how you spend that money! Don’t waste it on quick and easy techs.

Be very wary of spending influence on speeding up tech. It’s inadvisable to spend a massive amount of hard-to-come-by influence points, which could be useful getting you out of a random event elsewhere, on speeding up technology unlocks. Use money instead.

Tip 15: Don’t neglect researching camera and sound techs.

You will find these technologies to research in the Pre-Production building. Click on Technologies, and then begin improving the Quality, Practicality, and Economy of your camera and sound.

It’s worth doing one research chunk at a time instead of improving them all at once because you can use each incremental improvement while you research the next, and there is no time-to-research discount for doing two or three improvements at a time.

Tip 16: Research Marketing and Outreach as soon as possible.

The first three movies you release in Hollywood Animal have their marketing pre-paid and pre-planned, but as soon as you release your fourth film, it’s all on you. And if you haven’t researched Marketing and Outreach by the time you release the fourth movie, you will not be able to market it, which will severely limit your ability to draw an audience to watch it. It should be your first research project in the Distribution department.

Tip 17: Your second research unlock in the Distribution Dept. should be Theater Management.

The second research should probably be Theater Management, which will allow you to buy your own theaters and cut your theater rental costs. Plus, building out your own theater infrastructure will put you in control of your distribution strategy and avoid placing you in the uncomfortable position of having to compete against previously scheduled rival movie studio releases that coincide with your own releases. Sometimes the rental theaters are just all booked out, preventing you from playing your film in enough theaters to maximize a movie’s profitability.

Tip 18: Don’t unlock this particular research until way later. It leads to bad things.

📚 Scripts & Talent: Leveling Up Your Studio’s Creative Force

Tip 19: Build the Freelance Writer’s Office and buy great scripts from there.

Perusing the scripts available to buy in the Freelance Writer’s Office, every so often, you will happen upon an S-tier screenplay that is—for whatever reason—priced as if an intern monkey wrote it. Buy this. Don’t even think about it; if you see such a script for a strangely low price, just buy it and shelve the script until you are ready to produce it. We would even argue it is worth buying these top tier scripts for fair market value ($100k and above) because the potential returns on investment for releasing well-made films from these awesome scripts are enormous.

Tip 20: Always keep your writers busy.

If your writers are sitting around and are neither writing scripts nor researching new story elements, they are basically just wasting your money. If you keep them working at all times, they will skill up, meaning that their next project will likely come out at a higher level. It can take a bit of micromanagement but try to always have your writers working on something.

Tip 21: Highly skilled editors and composers are almost impossible to find, so develop your own.

We have personally never seen an editor or composer available to hire that had more than two stars of professionalism, and even that is rare. So, you will need to invest in skilling up your editors and composers. You’ll be tempted to focus your efforts on one person, like the editor Emma Berry, but resist the temptation. It’s worth giving your alternate editor and composer a shot too so that they can improve and you have more options in the future to pick from.

Tip 22: When producing a high-quality script, don’t be frugal. Invest so you can reap the rewards.

If you have a 9.8 / 9.9 script, don’t cast an actor with an abysmal professionalism rating (looking at you, nepo baby Wendy Carpenter) as its protagonist. They will drag down the rating of the film.

Instead, check to see what talent is unattached to another studio contract and is available to hire. You will often find great deals here if you take the time to look, but even if you don’t, it is likely worth spending the extra money to cast an actor that matches the scripts level even if it’s expensive. Hire these sorts of actors on a per-movie basis as opposed to a time-based contract.

These are the sorts of movies that—if shepherded through the process correctly—can fund the entire studio for years with their profits. It is probably worth throwing 100k+ at a superstar actor if the movie calls for it.

Do the same for the crew members, especially for top-class cinematographers and directors. Hire the producers on time-based contracts; they often aren’t expensive, and you can use them in so many projects to make it worth the investment.

💼 Gamey Tricks and Meta Tips

Tip 23: A dirty trick regarding studio landscaping.