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[SteGriff]

Excellent. Patch 2 makes this no longer crash once I have about 300 seeds. ^^
I vote you.

[MekanikDestructiwKommando]

Thanks! That is correct, Seedlings inherit the attributes of the asteroids they spawn from :-) (This is something that will be more accentuated in future versions.)

Yer.. right now that's cool to know, but I can't really make any informed decisions about this, because if I mix groups.. they get mixed and I can't control which one to send! So I either have to keep all separate (annoying), or mix and pray for the best.

[Rudolf Kremers]

Yeah the differentiation between individual "unit types" and between individual asteroid characteristics is currently too slight. The idea is to create seedlings that are good at some things and not so good at others to create more interesting choices and variation in gameplay. But in order to do so the gameworld (The other asteroids and seedlings) also need to be more diverse and that is when you star to see real depth and replayability. We know exactly what to do in order to achieve this but within the timelimit of the competition we could get no further than we did. (And I am very happy with what we achieved in that context) :-)

Once voting ends however we will implement the things I have mentioned and many other improvements as well. Many as per the original design ideas from myself and Haowan. :-) 

[muku]

I'm a bit late to the party here, I just learned of this game because of the frontpage post about the competition results. (I usually don't have the time to go through all the entries, so I just let other people do the dirty work of digging for the gems ) So let me be the first one to congratulate you here on your second place (although I think you would have deserved to win, but whatever, that's life). I'm also one of those people who registered on the forum just to comment on this game.

Let me just say I enjoyed it a lot, very slick atmosphere and gameplay that's just right on the complexity scale for a quick game (although I agree with others that the game might benefit from being a bit shorter). Just some constructive criticism from me as well:

- The send interface really needs some work. Maybe you could use the mouse wheel for that as well? So, by default, left mouse dragging would send all seedlings (or perhaps half of them by default), but by wheeling up/down while dragging you could adjust the number of seedlings sent. I think this would be much quicker than the right-click-to-increase scheme currently in the game.

- I also encountered the "C-shaped belt" bug in my game where seedlings would go all the way around the sun. Have you considered using a simple steering algorithm instead of a pathfinding grid? Every seedling would have a vector telling it in which direction to go in order to reach its destination, and asteroids as well as the sun would exert a repelling "force" on that vector with a strength inversely proportional to the distance to the asteroid/sun. This way you wouldn't need any pathfinding at all. It would also make it very easy to keep seedlings further away from planets which are not their destination, by simply increasing asteroids' repelling force. I don't know if you have any experience with that kind of algorithm, but there's a lot of articles about such stuff to be found online. Ask if you want me to go find something for you...

I also liked many other suggestions made here a lot, in particular the choice of defensive trees and auto-send for full planets. Just be careful not to introduce too much complexity into the game, I think its simplicity is a great advantage.

Anyway, I really hope that development will be continued on this game, it has a lot of potential. (Dare I say online multiplayer?)

[Magnnus]

It looks like a very interesting game. However I'm unable to play it because I get a crash whenever one of those moving lines reaches the center of my asteroid (or planet or whatever it is). Also, I do have .Net 2.0 installed.

P.S. Your download link has been giving me a great deal of trouble. I think that I managed to download it properly after about 10 tries, and I have also tried re-downloading it, but I still get the same crash.

[Alex May]

Very sorry Magnnus, I have been updating the build over the last hour. I have no idea why you're crashing after the roots reach the cores... that's most odd. I'll have a think and get back to you in a few hours.

Sorry again about the download trouble. It should be OK now.

[Alex May]

Right I totally screwed up that release - sorry Magnnus. Please update to the latest patch with http://www.deadrock-game.com/files/Dyson-patch.rar which hopefully should fix your crash. Very very sorry about that.

[Magnnus]

No problem, I'm just glad to help out.

[Paul Eres]

I'm sorry I didn't play this sooner, it's a great game. For some reason the voting process for these contests always takes place when I forget about these forums

Anyway, most of what I would say has probably been said above, so I'll simplify my thoughts on the game to a few points.

- I think the different statistics for each asteroid thing is kind of superfluous, if it were me I'd get rid of that entirely since it isn't that important to the gameplay and just complicates things.

- I found it very hard to determine how many trees were on an asteroid without holding my mouse over it. It'd be nice if there were some type of visual indication for this, so I know which ones I need to replant (my strategy was to keep the ones I conquered at 6/6 at all times).

- It'd be nice if grabbing on to a blank spot and moving the mouse "dragged" the screen, allowing scrolling left/right/up/down without the use of the arrow buttons.

- Early on, the talk of "power" and "armies" turned me off from the game and seemed to go against the peaceful aesthetic. This is only a minor tweak but I suggest rephrasing some of that stuff to "flocks" or "swarms" instead of "armies", and similar changes, to make it seem less warlike.

- I think the game needs more variety in level design -- like different asteroid fields. Some with only a few asteroids, some with more; some with only one color opponent, some with more, etc.

- When I conquered all the asteroids, a message popped up with two options. I had no time to read it but accidentally clicked on one because it appeared right under my mouse. What did that say? Did I ruin anything by clicking on it too quickly, and give up the chance for more levels or something?

- It'd be nice if the other color bird/insect things started with a few asteroids, so you could see their "base", rather than you being the only one that's actively spreading places.

- I expected the large circle in the middle to be some type of super asteroid / final boss, but was disappointed when it seemed to be nothing at all. Or perhaps that was because I clicked that message before I read it and missed out on something?

[Melly]

- When I conquered all the asteroids, a message popped up with two options. I had no time to read it but accidentally clicked on one because it appeared right under my mouse. What did that say? Did I ruin anything by clicking on it too quickly, and give up the chance for more levels or something?

It's a message telling you that you're victorious and asking you if you'd like to quit or keep playing.

- I expected the large circle in the middle to be some type of super asteroid / final boss, but was disappointed when it seemed to be nothing at all. Or perhaps that was because I clicked that message before I read it and missed out on something?

I guess that could be the sun.

Then again, you'd have to ask Haowan and Borsato to be sure.

[Alex May]

I'm sorry I didn't play this sooner, it's a great game. For some reason the voting process for these contests always takes place when I forget about these forums

Anyway, most of what I would say has probably been said above, so I'll simplify my thoughts on the game to a few points.

Thanks for the great feedback rinkuhero, I've been wondering where you've been for a while now

- I think the different statistics for each asteroid thing is kind of superfluous, if it were me I'd get rid of that entirely since it isn't that important to the gameplay and just complicates things.

I agree that it makes next to no difference as it is. We plan to make it a lot more exaggerated. The original idea, which we may still try to strive for in some way, was that the overall makeup of your output from an asteroid would be determined by what kinds of things you'd mined from it, so the properties of your seedlings would change over time.

- I found it very hard to determine how many trees were on an asteroid without holding my mouse over it. It'd be nice if there were some type of visual indication for this, so I know which ones I need to replant (my strategy was to keep the ones I conquered at 6/6 at all times).

Yes, also I personally find the popups intensely annoying and think that they jar with the game's atmosphere along with the rest of the UI. I would rather represent these things graphically.

- It'd be nice if grabbing on to a blank spot and moving the mouse "dragged" the screen, allowing scrolling left/right/up/down without the use of the arrow buttons.

The middle mouse button does exactly this, but who really likes to press their mouse wheel? Not me; I would like to put this in I think. It fits in with some of the plans we have to vary the size of the asteroid and generally make them bigger anyhow.

- Early on, the talk of "power" and "armies" turned me off from the game and seemed to go against the peaceful aesthetic. This is only a minor tweak but I suggest rephrasing some of that stuff to "flocks" or "swarms" instead of "armies", and similar changes, to make it seem less warlike.

That is great feedback thank you. The tutorial wasn't written in a terribly considered fashion but it really hadn't occurred to me that it was very contradictory. We'll have to redo the tutorial anyway as it's not a very good guide - only one step abve a readme or a page full of text really.

- I think the game needs more variety in level design -- like different asteroid fields. Some with only a few asteroids, some with more; some with only one color opponent, some with more, etc.

I'm constantly bothered by the idea that the ring-based gameplay might limit the true joy of this game, but we haven't experimented with different fields. Something for the list.

- When I conquered all the asteroids, a message popped up with two options. I had no time to read it but accidentally clicked on one because it appeared right under my mouse. What did that say? Did I ruin anything by clicking on it too quickly, and give up the chance for more levels or something?

It said "Congratulations. Your kind has prevailed against all others. You may continue playing if you wish.". We were going to remove this option as continuing to play is pointless, but I forgot / couldn't be bothered.

- It'd be nice if the other color bird/insect things started with a few asteroids, so you could see their "base", rather than you being the only one that's actively spreading places.

We'll be limiting expansion depending on the size of the asteroid you're on / how many trees you've grown/built. This should make the game a little bit more manageable and give the enemies a better chance to develop a base. The AI is a total hack at the moment, needs a rewrite.

- I expected the large circle in the middle to be some type of super asteroid / final boss, but was disappointed when it seemed to be nothing at all. Or perhaps that was because I clicked that message before I read it and missed out on something?

Yeah it's just a sprite It's supposed to be the star.

Thanks again for the feedback. We'll be starting a thread in Feedback soon for the next version of the game.

[Alex May]

We're "Internet game of the month" in this month's Edge.

[Terry]

Bloody hell - congrats, man

[Bezzy]

Nice one Haowan and Boratso! Your hearts are not at all cynical right now!!!

[Lim-Dul]

Holy cow! Somehow I wasn't too interested in this competition and while I tried several games Dyson escaped me for some time. Now I have played it, however, and man, this is EXACTLY the kind of game I like.

It's the kind of gameplay I call "Konquest-like". There are quite a few projects of this kind - Pax Galaxia, Mayhem Intergalactic and one game that has been posted on the IndieGames Blog or TIGSource the name of which I can't recall - but this one is very, very stylish.

At first it crashed after ~10 seconds of gameplay but luckily everything is alright now. ^^

Geez - it'd be so great if you managed to make the game multiplayer (like e.g. Pax Galaxia, which I played a lot on the internet).

Several "real" suggestions, though:

- the number of trees isn't displayed in the "big" statistics, that is the ones displayed when you click on the planet, not hover the mouse over it

- maybe you should add some "control keys" to the clicks. While holding down the right mouse button is OK, I'd like to have the option to e.g. ctrl+click or alt+click on an asteroid to select increments of 10 and 50 seedlings respectively - I know that other games of this kind do it that way

- as to the visibility of trees - maybe they shouldn't scale as fast as the rest of the objects, so that while completely zoomed out you'd see a small asteroid with (comparatively) large trees on it?

- while I agree that so far the asteroid stats don't have much impact on the gameplay, you could make some visual indicators as to what type of asteroid you are dealing with - a similar system is in place in Pax Galaxia. What I have in mind is e.g. coloring the asteroid a bit in the shade of its most dominant statistic. E.g. if the asteroid were to be slightly reddish (its ownership is displayed by a halo anyways) you'd immediately know that its "strength" stat is dominant.

That's all for now, I think.

P.S. Does anybody know more "Konquest-like" games (turn-based or real-time)? I'm talking about games where you have planets and send ships (other stuff) around. I kinda collect them. Many years ago I started my first Linux-dual-boot setup only to get access to KDE and Konquest. ^^