next »

[DanLomez]

I enjoyed this game. I ended up taking over the whole asteroid belt after a few tries. I don’t even remember how ships or bugs I had at the end of the game, but it was quite a bit. I don’t know if they were supposed to be bugs or ships, but I will call them bugs for the remainder of this post.

The game is fun, but I do feel that there could be some work on the interface. For example, on the first play through, I didn’t realize the strategy in building up bugs from different asteroids would yield bugs with different strengths. The color indication shown when selecting or mousing over an asteroid only became apparent the second time I went through the tutorial. Some sort of icons representing the different attributes of the asteroid may have been better than a scrolling color bar and it would have been nice to be able to glance back at the tutorial for a quick refresher, it either wasn’t there or I missed it. Either way, a clear way to bring the tutorial back up and review would be helpful to first time players.

One thing that felt hacked in was the sending of a certain number of bugs from asteroid to asteroid. I think the reason for this was because clicking and dragging an entire asteroid of bugs was very smooth, where as dragging a set jumped directly to the planet instead of dragging. This may be fixed in a newer version, the version I played was from a few days ago before the new patch. If it is fixed, great, if it isn’t, I think it should be. It seems to break the interface by changing the default feel of deploying bugs to something more jumpy that kind of takes away from the smooth interface of this game.

Other than those few interface problems I found, I think the game is nice. I would like to see it developed further, maybe different Dyson trees you can plant, some that can perhaps be like “auto torrents” to help protect against swarms of enemy bugs or the ability to upgrade trees to produce more bugs with different attributes. I think Dyson would benefit from some improvements to the game to give it more depth. Good work.

Dan

[monoRAIL]

Great game - just the right combination of relaxing ambiance and a little tension.

[Jordan]

Brilliant entry. There is enough potential here for at least 2 or 3 really good games. Will definitely be keeping my eye on this one. Well done!

[MekanikDestructiwKommando]

Quick note: the scroll out/in seems a bit buggy, sometimes it doesn't scroll in to the planet I have selected and I have to scroll out before batck in again, a few times.
Like the ambience a lot! Haven't figured out if it is supposed to be challenging or not (?), I'm just growing trees and then sending out armies of seedlings. Nevertheless, it's very nice to look at. Good job!

EDIT: I spoke too soon! An asteroid has been attacked and overtaken!
What are the "green" friends/points btw.. a different type of seedling?

Holy shit I am being out-numbered fast! Takes a bit to get into it (timewise).. but looks like I found the challenge

[MekanikDestructiwKommando]

Hi, I seem to have encountered a bug. The machines are making a lot of noise around a planet, and one of them is floating motinless outside the root surface but no going in. Trying to send any amount of machines to another planet is not working .
It looks like they are getting stuck trying to move//enter. Maybe change it so they can easier find their way in (eg. a state change) or automatically remove them from navigating into a planet if you tell them to leave?

[Alex May]

It seems I never did get rid of the infinite root digger bug. Sorry man. We'll be updating the game at some point so this will go away at that time. The competition version will have to just Be Buggy I guess.

[Rudolf Kremers]

Quick note: the scroll out/in seems a bit buggy, sometimes it doesn't scroll in to the planet I have selected and I have to scroll out before batck in again, a few times.
Like the ambience a lot! Haven't figured out if it is supposed to be challenging or not (?), I'm just growing trees and then sending out armies of seedlings. Nevertheless, it's very nice to look at. Good job!

EDIT: I spoke too soon! An asteroid has been attacked and overtaken!
What are the "green" friends/points btw.. a different type of seedling?

Holy shit I am being out-numbered fast! Takes a bit to get into it (timewise).. but looks like I found the challenge

Did you win in the end? :-)
The current game can lul you into a false sense of security and then strike with AI armies that have been amassing out of sight. It is a lesson that you only have to learn once ;-)

[Alquesm]

I've been 'eavesdropping' on this forum for some time, but after playing this game several times, I HAD to register so I could tell you guys that your game is GREAT! It's really tense in the beginning of the game, when you don't know where the other players are. Unfortunately, after taking over about half the galaxy, it's rarely a problem to beat the game.

I think there has been some great suggestions on how to improve the game (Defensive trees etc), so I can't wait to see how this game will turn out! I'll definately keep an eye on it.

Thanks again for a great game!

[Rudolf Kremers]

Aw thanks man, that is an incredibly nice post. :-)

[Entar]

This is a pretty fun game, nice real-time strategy elements, while remaining very simple and easy to learn.  One thing I wished it had was a save button; that would be a really nice improvement.  Music was nice and subtle, too.

[MekanikDestructiwKommando]

Naw, I got my ass kicked the three times I played it (but the third was the infinite root digger). Haowan, maybe a simple timer check? If its trying to dig a root for more then 10 seconds just help it along and place it inside?
Game is fucking hard  , I like.
Edit: Save & quit would be great. But reloading erases your save game
And I should stop playing this at work 

[Entar]

This would also be really, really fun multiplayer, over LAN or internet. 

EDIT: Also, make the number of asteroids a variable option you can set.

[MekanikDestructiwKommando]

Yes, multiplayer would ROCK.
My new game.. control about a third of the asteroids and seem to be expanding quite well . Fantastic game you guys have got here.. any chance of a multiplayer sequel?

Also, if I understand correctly the machines grown from an asteroid inherit the stats of the asteroid? Being able to sort these would be nice..

[Rudolf Kremers]

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.)

[jbrodack2008]

Interesting game. Kind of a more relaxing strategy game. I need to play this more cause I really like the design.  I probably won't find it so relaxing though once I really try to start to win   

[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.