TIGSource Forums

Visit the official site for Dyson (http://www.dyson-game.com)

Download Dyson (http://www.dyson-game.com/download.php)

Hello everyone, we just updated Dyson to version 1.08.

For a list of changes, please visit the official site where we've listed the changes in the release notes.

We've added defensive trees and a limit on sending, done a graphical overhaul on the trees, and a bunch of other stuff was changed or tweaked or added too.

We also made a Linux version so we could do with some folk testing that if possible! Link is on the download page.

Woohoo  8)
Will you be adding some interface to sort and control the machines by asteroid of origin?
Will you fix the infinite digging bug?

The interface is still completely in the air. We don't know quite what we'll be doing with it, but we do both agree that it currently isn't ideal.

The infinite digging bug will disappear. One way or another :)

First things first, I really liked the game. Great work!

Fullscreen works fine on my 4:3 display (Didn't notice any aspect differences between that and the widescreen display).

Also, what kind of changes are you evaluating? I guess I could read the PGC thread, but it seems like a good idea to sum it up here. Myself, I would like to see some more differences between asteroids (size of the visual representation, amount of trees you can plant, max number of agents they can hold etc) ... It would also be nice to have shortcut keys for sending, say, one-half or one-quarter of the agents, but maybe these things have been said already.

Thanks Saint!


Yes, these are exactly the things we want to implement.

We also want to exaggerate the attribute factors to enhance and encourage tactical play, find some way above that to play defensively possibly, improve the interface in various ways including shortcut keys and graphical representation, and include some low-level interaction so that at least during the first phases of the game it's a requirement to play zoomed-in.

We'll also be putting up a game-specific web site at some point.

Don't worry about doubling comments, we don't expect people to plow throught all the pages that have come before. I have started collating every bit of feedback we were given (and are very greatful for) and from that and the original design we will create a coherent plan of action. Hmm it may be a good plan like you suggestged to put up a list of all that people have suggested with the obvious disclaimer that we won't implement all suggestions (as some will clash with other ideas that we have). At least that will give people an overview of what has been said already.

In regards to sending out intermediate numbers of seedlings; I have some good ideas on how to do so and that shouldn't be a problem to fix :-D

Ah, I see.

Another thing that came to mind is something that's a problem in most RTS games; once you overpower your enemy he doesn't really stand a chance but you still have to go about the tedious business of clearing out all of his hideouts before you beat the level. Varying win conditions, AI that surrenders, systems for kicking loosing teams back into the game or secondary objectives that can provide a challenge even when you are winning the main battle could be employed to counter this, I guess, but on the other hand some players (myself included) thoroughly enjoy overpowering a weak enemy's last defenses so maybe it's not a problem at all.

Something to think about, at least.

Ok first off i wanna say i saw this game on Jay is Games and I'm VERY impressed.  At first i thought it was going to be a bit bland, but i wasted a good 2 or 3 hours playing it and modding it as much as i could through the settings.xml file.  While i was playing i had just thought of some different things that i think would make the game better / more enjoyable.

First off is different kinds of gameplay.  I'm sure you are already working on this but i feel like i should point it out.  Some of the modding i did was to simply make the game 2X, 3X larger with twice as many CPU's.  IMO it made the game MUCH more enjoyable.  The default amount of enemies and asteroids makes the game too easy, once you get a few asteroids with 2 or 3 trees on them you win, it's just a matter of time.  So heres some game modes i think would be cool.  Also i was thinking for some of these you could have a menu where you could mix and match.  So you could play on a Massive level but with only 1 AI, or 20, change how many units you start with, the price of trees, etc. etc.

1. Small, Medium, Large, Extra large, Massive.  These would primarily change 3 things.  The first is the most obvious, how many asteroids there are in the map, the second would the amount of CPU's playing, and the third would be how many starting units you get.  Possibly for the Massive *when i say massive i mean like 500 asteroid games* you would also start with more than one asteroid... which leads to the next game mode.

2. Scattershot, This would work better as an option for other games but this is what it is.  Each army starts on 4 different asteroids randomly placed around the map.  It would work better for Large and up games but would work the same on each.  Nothing fancy, nothing crazy, but i feel like it would make the game much harder.  And instead of 20 units on each asteroid you only get 5 on each.  It would force players to be very careful about what they do with their units at first, and i think it would make for much more intense game play fighting on 4 and up fronts at once, conceivably much more, opposed to usually 2 or 3.

3.CTF.  Good old capture the flag.  The way this would work is that each player's starting asteroid would have some sort of seed or something *sticking with the whole tree thing* displayed on it.  The goal of the game is to go and take over that asteroid, then fly your army back to your home asteroid.  If you steal another teams seed they have say 3 minutes *change for balance obviously* to steal it back or they instantly die.  You can decide if when you eliminate the other player if all their asteroids become yours, rogue, or simply die.  *This would only work with a game play addition i will mention a little later*

4. Assault.  This would simply be that if you lose your starting, or all your starting *if using scattershot option* asteroids, you lose instantly.  You could also set up special maps for this where its a symmetrical set up for the asteroids and there is only a set number of players *2,3,4 etc.* for each map.  The same thing with whether the enemy's stuff becomes rogue or yours or just dies would have to be decided.  *again would work better with a game play addition i will mention*

5. Teams.  This is more of an option that would be turned on and off but its obvious, you would be on teams with another cpu.  All the members of a team would be different *significantly different* shades of the same color, so it's obvious they are teamed but you can easily tell them apart.  You can see what your allies see, you can help defend one of their asteroids, but you can't take them.  You can move units there etc. but they won't try and take it over, unless of course an enemy takes it and then you fight them off.  If 2 allies units are attacking the actual asteroid, the last unit that hits the core would take over the asteroid.

6. Discovery.  This would be sort of a fog of war kind of thing.  You can only actively  see asteroids that are 1 jump away from one your units are currently on.  It only takes one unit to see nearby asteroids but if you don't have a unit there it works like fog of war, you can see it but nothing ON it *much like now*.  The main difference is that this mode would randomly select the size of the map and hide the white sun... thing, in the middle of the map.  This way you wouldn't be able to tell WHERE you are in the belt, how deep it is, how many asteroids there are etc.  An enemy could slink right by your defenses and attack from behind or something.  This could be improved on with the introduction of different buildings.  Like a radar that lets you see 3 jumps from the asteroid its on etc. etc.

So like i said some of these would be standalone game types, others would be turned on and off *discovery / scattershot* but they are just some ideas to make them more interesting.  And it would be cool to get a single player game with a story line.  WHY am i commanding a bunch of... fly bug things to take over asteroids.  The single player game could incorporate all these game types.
~~~

Ok so now here are some gameplay ides that i had.  The first one is the one i kept mentioning above.

1. Being able to attack units that are flying.  There is nothing that i hate more than when 150 units go flying by 400 of mine bouncing off the asteroids, wrapping around them, and not being able to do anything about it except follow them until they FINALLY *it usually takes them like 30-40 seconds* decide to attack.  You should be able to tell units to attack ones that are flying by.  Just like drag and  instead of ending on an asteroid end on the group of units and yours would just fly off and follow them attacking.  The enemy units, depending on if they were set to aggressive or passive would either stop flying and then there would be a big swarm of units fighting in the space between asteroids.  Or  they would simply ignore the threat going to the asteroid they were told to fly to, and then carry out the standard way of fighting once there.  *This would obviously be another gameplay element of setting units to aggressive or passive, and would only effect how they fight in mid flight.  If two armies are flying through the air and pass near each other, and they are both aggressive.  They will both immediately attack.  If one is  passive and one is aggressive, the aggressive one will attack and follow the passive one.  If they are both passive, they will simply shoot passing glances as they fly by each other, but will not pursue.

2. Grouping asteroids.  This would work just like selecting multiple units in other games work, except you would do it like it is now, with whole asteroids.  You could either hold ctrl, click on the asteroids you wanna move units from, then using any of the selected ones left click, drag, and let go and all the units from those asteroids would move to where you told them too.  Then with holding shift you could free draw a box around the asteroids you want *dragging a box wouldn't work so hot since the asteroids are all scrambled* and then it would work the same.  If you have selected asteroids you could hold ctrl, and hit 1-0 and assign them to groups.  Then just hit say 1, and right click some where, and all the units from there would move there.

3. Rally Points.  This would allow you to set your units to go to a different asteroid as soon as they were spawned.  you would just hold alt, click, drag, let go, and boom.  Any new units go to the new destination.  This would be grand because a lot of the time spent in the game is simply dragging units from far away asteroids up to closer ones on the front line, it would save time and let you focus more on the attacking.

4. New structures.  Structures would be built just like they are now, with sacrificing units.  I really enjoy that part of the game, especially in the beginning when 10 units is a pretty hefty chunk of your army.  You need to decide if it's worth the gamble or would it be better to take over 1 or 2 more asteroids...  But anyways.  You could have radar systems, defense towers, structures that would boost nearby units *within a certain number of jumps*, and wall structures.  They would all take up a "tree" slot of an asteroid.  They would all also "grow" like the trees.  Each one would simply be a different kind of tree *maybe like defense ones would be evergreens, etc.*  The radar would really only be useful for the discovery game play.  The defense towers would launch little drones at any enemy units passing by or attacking the asteroid *possibly attacking enemies assaulting an asteroid one jump away as well....*  The wall one would be sort of complicated but very awesome in my opinion.  In order for it to work, 2 asteroids within 1 jump would need to have the tree growing on it.  When you select the wall to grow you would have to select a nearby asteroid.  The tree would then grow half way to that asteroid.  If you do it between 2 asteroids on both it would block that path.  If two walls are ALMOST touching it wouldn't totally block it but only a few units could get through at a time, thinning out the line and causing choke point.  The trees could be killed just like all the others so it wouldn't be a YOU CAN NEVER GET THROUGH AGAIN, sort of deal.  However it would either force the units AROUND to a more deadly route *defense towers all around* or hold them up buying you precious seconds... For all the structures the longer they have been around the more powerful they are.  So a defense tower at first may only launch one drone, eventually launching 20 or something.  The drones would but very fast with mid damage, and very low health.  So with 2 or 3 large defense trees they could rip through an army by sheer number, but a couple wouldn't do too much damage.  Radar would let you see farther the bigger it got *+1 jump, +2, +3 jumps away*.  And walls, once touching, would also get thicker up to a point over time.

5.  A way to destroy asteroids.  This would either be done through a VERY hard tree to grow. *It could work like the walls do where you need to link 5 or 6 asteroids together for it to work* or it could be done through overwhelming force or special units.  There could be asteroids that glow gold or something once they are discovered.  One in every 10 units from this asteroid will be golden, and this unit can inflict special damage to an asteroid, if 5 these units hit an asteroid it is completely destroyed, including any units fighting above it.  You could up the anty and say if it was part of a super weapon complex or maybe a wall complex, those asteroids would either also be destroyed, or all the trees would be blown off... You could do a lot with this, make it very hard to do but very devastating.  Maybe just any asteroid one jump away loses all its trees and units and its energy is dropped by 50.

6.  A way to change the units produced from an asteroid.  This would be another tree that you grow, and would effect the stats of the asteroid.  Obviously you could grow trees to effect the yellow, red, or blue of the asteroid.  Growing all 3 would be pointless but say you want an asteroid to make faster and hard hitting units you could grow a blue and red tree.  This would lower the HP of the units but increase damage and speed.  The longer the tree grows the more it affects it.  To keep units from becoming over powered you could say only one tree of each type can be grown on an asteroid.  It, of course, would take up a tree slot.

7.  A minimap.  This would just be handy so you could see what was going on far away, maybe radar could effect it in some way?

8.  A bigger alert when under attack.  Like a flashing light on the corner of the screen or something, i find that if you aren't zoomed all the way out to see what is going on everywhere you can get easily surprised.  You could use radar to help with this, where maybe you only get the alert if the asteroid is in range of radar, otherwise you get the standard red ring around it but no real message.  *More handy in large / massive games*

9.  A speed scroller.  Something to adjust the speed of the game, i don't really want it but it's just an idea.

~graphics~

I really enjoy the color of the units and everything tagged with them *asteroid background, the mine shaft things etc.*  I just wish that asteroids maybe looked a little different.  An asteroid with more energy may be bigger than one with less.  Maybe you could put like craters or some kind of texture on them just to give them a more... asteroidy feel opposed to grey blobs.

I think bigger and louder battles would be cool, just larger lasers, a bigger event when an asteroid is taken.  Maybe units with more health would make a bigger bang when killed, and units with more attack would have a cooler looking weapon and units with more speed would blur or leave some sort of small trail behind them.

Just more Eye candy in general, You guys have a great game with mediocre graphics, which i prefer over a really fancy looking crappy game.  But if you could just up the visuals a bit it would be FANTASTIC.

I thought it would be cool if units actually grew off of the trees that produce them.  Instead of just popping into existence the units would act as the "leaves" of the tree, and when ready would pop off and fly away, to be replaced with another bud that grows into another unit.

A better way to see the difference between units when zoomed out.  I noticed that faster units had longer wings, and units with more health / damage had bigger bodies, but thats really hard to tell when zoomed way out.  Especially on my modded mega map.

~~~~

Well i hope you appreciate some of my ideas and I'd love to see them implemented in a future version or something.  If not at least it was fun coming up with ideas.  If you have any questions on how something would work or whatever I'd be happy to answer.  You guys have a great game here, with a little polish i think you could wrap it up and sell it if you wanted to for 5-10-15$ a pop, i know I'd pay for it once it was totally done.

~~~~

I have one quick question.  In the settings.xml file, what is the point of the min="0" max="6" or whatever, lines.  From what i can tell they don't make a difference whatever they are.  And only things that have 2 separate lines with min and max like this
actually vary.  This was just puzzling me...

~~~~
Edit:

Oh i forgot to say, the game is REALLY quiet for me.  I'm not sure if its just my system, but i need to turn my sound WAY up to hear anything.  The sound is pretty good except for one thing... what is that scratchy highpitched tone that you get when you zoom in close to the the action?  Whatever it is it gives me a headache and i can't stand it, IMO it's gotta go / get replaced... all the other sound is nice, the looping song could be better, or get looped between 2 or 3 different tracks to mix it up *preferably a lot more*

I recommend not adding too many features (such as the ones in the post above) for fear of catering to "gamers" rather than normal players. E.g. it's a very nice casual game right now, adding a million and a half features may make it have more depth but it might come at the expense of its simplicity and charm, which was what drew me into the game in the first place, and may make it feel just like another complex RTS game rather than what it is now.

Well you could always release two versions, or just make them ALL options or whatever.

Me personally i hate when a game like this comes along and then doesn't live up to the potential that it could be, i love deep games with a lot of strategy and different ways to win, different modes of play etc.  It really depends what kind of audience they are shooting for.  If they want a real simple game geared toward casual gamers then they pretty much got it, but if they want a game geared more towards RTS gamers, or just more serious gamers in general then they need more depth.

I personally would love to see this game blossom into something truly amazing opposed to just a good casual game, and like i said you can always have 2 versions or just the option to turn off all the new additions to appeal to both groups of players.

Wow an enormous amount of feedback from all of you. Let me try to address some of it at least :-)

First and foremost, we are happy with anybody caring enough about our little game to take the time to write down comments. It is really nice to have feedback and a relartionship with actual players (as supposed to producers and marketing departments )and we take on board all comments. So many thanks once again.

Saint
The game suffers badly from predictability at the moment due to the fact that you are basically creating an enormous tankrush. This is a known issue and will go away once we add a number of features that were planned anyway like defensive units and more specialised seedlings will help a lot as well as the changes that we have planned to how territory will work.

Agent
Ohhh too much to comment on right now, but all your comments HAVE been read and we always try to consider what we can.

Some general comments.
Game modes: We may well introduce specific game modes at one pint, I ahve some ideas myself ;-) but first and foremost the core game needs to be fixed. We are jsut two people so we have to prioritise. Having said that we can get away with some cheap one we may well do that.

Gameplay comments
We are putting in gameplay features that will make it impossible to just start traiping around the galaxy. This whole part of the game was always su[[osed to be MUCH more strategic and exploration play needs to become more tense and rewarding. We have plans in place for this.

As already mentioned , we will diversify existing units and add other new entities :-)

Cues will get better, both visual and audio. Infact, the audio mix needs to redone properly for the gameplay sake but also for atmosphere. Brian has done great stuff but we have hidden it a bit.

More eye candy will be added, and seedlings may well grow from trees, it was originally planned that way.

The music and sound choices (not the mix) is open to taste arguments, nobody has complained yet about the zoomed in noise. It actually has a source that is quite cool, may tell you another time. ;-) Nobody else seems to mind it..


Rinku (and Agent)
The plan is to keep the game simple, easy and intuitive to grasp, and reach strategic depth with simple and interesting variables as opposed to a multitude of confusing options. This is core to our philosphy for the game, and what sets it apart. We can however add much moddable diversity in ways that are not intrusive or even accessible to payers unless they put the effort in. To a degree that is already the case with the moddable xml file. :-) So hopefully we can reach a balance where neither type of gameplay treads on the other.

I am convinced that part of the success so far comes from it simplicity and I want to make sure the integrity of the game is not sacrificed in that regard. :-)

omg Circle rip-off!  >:D



...joking :D i just had the time to give it a go!

congrats guys :) awesome work haowan, i love that abstract style!!!  :gentleman:

Any idea why Vista would be giving me a DEP error and crashing during initialization? And then not allowing me to change DEP settings on the exe? Sorry I can't provide more information about the crash than that, but that's really all that's happening. Program start, crash.

Hey, I'm glad to see that all my ideas were read.  I'm glad to hear that the exploration system will actually be more of a challenge.  I'm really looking forward to what you guys do with it.

I think I'm most looking forward to new units, right now i sorta feel like it doesn't really matter what the stats of the units are, just how many you have.  So this would be nice to give the game more balance and intrigue.

I just wanna say that the AI could be more aggressive *I'm sure you're working on the AI but i feel like i should say it*.  Right now it seems to be based on an aggro system or something... I was playing a game where 2 computers were dominating, and they would only attack me if i took over about 3 or 4 of their asteroids, then they'd take all but one, and then fly off.  It'd be neat to see the AI take advantage over weaker players when they can to try and knock them out of the game quickly.

I'm glad to hear that more visuals will come into play.  Including better heads up displays and stuff... An idea i had while playing last night, it would be cool if each asteroid had a number in it when you were zoomed out to the point that you can't see the mining lines, and the number was just how many of YOUR units are on an asteroid, or something like that.  It might get too sloppy though but just a thought.

Also I have sort of a glitch where when im playing with more asteroids and cpus on the larger maps, when i zoom out usually 80% of the asteroids become white instead of grey.  I'm not sure why and i mean it IS a modded game and i never had that problem playing normally but just thought I'd mention it.

About the sound, that was just my personal opinion, its not as bad if i turn down the volume or play some music while i play, so no worries on that.

I like the direction you stated you were going.  Making it simple and easy to pick up opens up the game for a lot of people, makes it one of those games you can play in school or in a 15 minute lunch break or something =p, just nice and casual.  And then i really like the idea of allowing it to be modded up, letting gamers who want just a bit more to make it for themselves.  Whatever you decide to do it will be a great game no matter what, i can't wait for the finished product.

I also wanna mention i really enjoy actually getting to talk to the developers and voice my opinion and know that at least my ideas are being heard and that you guys are listening to what the community has to say.  Keep up the good work!!!

Sorry shudmeyer, I'd never heard of DEP until just now when I googled it. I'll have a look at the details in the morning; I'm hitting the sack now.


Thanks agentd00nut :)

We'll be putting in nice standard things like sound effects / music volume, save/load game etc. So things like irritating sounds will hopefully be at least a bit configurable.

Your planet glitch is probably the batcher running out of space in the vertex arrays for triangles and forcing a flush to the screen early, before the stencil buffer's set up. So the stencil phase misses those asteroids out. Something like that.


Yeah it's stuff like this that makes us want to give our day jobs the finger and do this for a living. If we can.

I'm happy you guys recognize the danger of overcomplicating it & are proceeding cautiously, good to hear.

As for making a living on it and selling this particular one, sure, it could work if you gave it some work. The main things that would need to be improved are game length (multiple areas), interface, and graphics/sound/polish. But that's the easy (albeit time-consuming) part of making a game, you've already done the hard part.

As for making a living doing this, I don't see why not. Of course it depends on what degree of living you are comfortable with, it's fairly easy to make *some* money, but difficult to make a livable amount. As an example ID makes around $250 a month if I just sit and do nothing at all and don't advertise or anything. Not enough to live on (unless you're in a third-world country), but I can see that if I had multiple games selling at once it might eventually add up.

"our planet glitch is probably the batcher running out of space in the vertex arrays for triangles and forcing a flush to the screen early, before the stencil buffer's set up. So the stencil phase misses those asteroids out. Something like that."

Im gonna take that as "theres too much shit on the screen" XD.  <--- doesn't make video games.  Although i would like to one day, guess thats what college is for.

but yea i agree with rink, you guys could make a little bit of money off this once it's done.  Def. not enough to live off of, not even close, but maybe a couple bills or something, still nice.

Out of curiosity when could we expect the next version?  Just a rough guesstimate cause I'm pretty excited to see what you guys do with it.

We'll be releasing new versions regularly over the next four months.

The moneymaking comment was just off-hand really and doesn't necessarily apply to Dyson. There's tons of things we could be doing but just to be one's own boss on a commercial game project where you have total control is the goal.


I have no idea why this is happening to be honest. The solutions around the web don't sound too convincing either - it sounds like MS really screwed this DEP stuff up. I'll keep looking, but I don't recommend turning it off or anything, seems to realy screw the system up and stop other things working etc.

Solution to all your Vista problems:

Go back to XP. :beer:

Hey i didn't mean any offense or anything sorry about that.

But i can't wait for the next version, I'm gonna keep playing around with what i can.  Right now I'm trying to balance sort of a "speed" game, where trees grow faster, and units move and kill quicker.  The really big games can take up to an hour to play and i just thought it'd be neat to get a speed game working.

One question i did have though, does the CPU computer get any bonus to how many units they create?  because it seems like no matter what i do, they always just have a MASSIVE amount of units before me.  Like I'll have maybe 100 total, and then they'll send 2 armies at me like 70-80 units large.  This happens more in the larger games but i can't seem to figure it out.

No offense taken at all mate. The AI thing, not sure. Possibly they're just capable of moving units around at a faster rate than you or I; they "think" every few seconds or so if I recall correctly, and usually this "thinking" means moving a whole bunch of units around.

Actually I found the opposite -- I always outnumbered the enemies, and I actually never lost a single asteroid the first time I played. Maybe my experiences with 'expanding quickly' in Civilization helped.

Well in the original game, yea i never really lost anything but I'm talking about in my edited version with about 2X the asteroids.  If you wanna try it out to see what i mean then just backup the settings.xml, and replace the first section with this.As you can see nothing to special, just made it have more enemys and more asteroids.  *i used to play with like 140ish asteroids, but games took forever so i reduced it, you can make it whatever you want though.  Also if your wondering why i made the beltradius value smaller, its so the asteroids are closer to the center, aka you don't have to zoom out as far to see everything going on.

But yea like that they always seem to have a ton more units than me... I think a cool thing for a final version or something would be a replay feature, where you can watch the entire battle but able to see all the asteroids, i've always enjoyed seeing the exact moment when you make a mistake that loses the game but when you were playing you didn't realize it until 20 minutes later, and its just cool t watch battles unfold in like 6X speed =p

*edit*
Hey i was just curios, would you care if i put a post explaining what all the different options do, i think i have most of them figured out, and it might encourage people to play around with it more if they didn't have to figure it out... If not thats fine. *Of course im talking about the stuff in settings.xml*

I tryed Dyson with Mono on Linux. But I got a System.NotSupportedException :-X
it is not The first exception i got, but it is the first one i can't handle.
I even compiled TAO for Linux to get it to work. It would be very cool, if you could handle it.

I love this game!  Great amounts of fun, slowly amassing several fleets with which to wrecking-ball through the enemy (while they do the same to me, leading to scrambling to pin their armada down in one spot and devour them).  It is that process of accumulation which inspired a few ideas I developed at work today.  These would address a few of the issues mentioned by other posters, without adding buildings or waypoints.  Might be a pain to code, though... :D

No. 1 - All asteroids owned can rally all friends from adjacent asteroids by the push of a button over in the same window as the "Plant" button.  Asteroids hosting fleets of 100+ can reach two places out, and fleets of 200+ can reach three.  You might highlight the affected asteroids when hovering the mouse over the button.  This would expedite the mustering of a fleet, whether to attack or defend, without dragging eight different groups.

No. 2 - Fleets of 300+ intercept & drag into combat 1 out of every 3 foes traveling past their asteroid, fleets of 400 catch 2/3, and 500+ will catch everything.  These abilities could be aggregate for fleets adjacent to one another, so that a 300+ and a 400+ would catch everything passing between.  Thus, no walls or turrets needed.  Static defenses left behind on an asteroid would be a bit redundant when new fighters are spawned progressively as they are.

No. 3 - 500+, the maximum on any asteroid, and what I term an armada of its own, might continually bombard nearby enemy asteroids at little or no expense.  Not planet-killing stuff, but enough to whittle away at the enemy force.

That's my bid, anyway.  Nothing too drastic, appearance or concept-wise, but a few subtleties.  Thanks for making Dyson!

I don't get what you meant in number one where asteroids hosting fleets of 100+ can reach so far etc.  That should be an option for any asteroid IMO.  And i sort of liked the idea of essentially losing the effectiveness of static defenses.  While it may seem kinda like "oh well thats dumb" it does 2 things.  It forces a player to really go "Is it worth the 10-15-whatever# units it is to build this defense, or should i take them and plant a tree or take over another asteroid?" Like it is now with the trees.  "Do i want to sacrifice 10 units for a lot more later" ESPECIALLY at the beginning of the game.  I actually played a game where i used my first 20 to build 2 new trees, 3 seconds later i got invaded and lost =p, so it adds a lot of risk / reward to the game.  The second thing i like about permanent fixtures is, at this point of the game development, where you can go to any asteroid.  It would help defend against any army going for an asteroid like 10-15 jumps away from where all the "action" is happening.  Which is quite annoying, only because you have no idea WHAT asteroid the army is heading to so you gotta just watch and watch and watch until you are like "FINALLY!" when they attack =p.

I was playing today in my "fast" mode that i made *i wanna use that term lightly cause i didn't really do much work, about 20 seconds of it actually*.  Which was lots of fun, a lot bigger battles ensue and it went back and forth but i finally won.  But theres something i do wish i could do.  When you attack an asteroid it would be great if you could force your units to only burrow into the asteroid through a certain tunnel.  I was attacking an asteroid with 4 fully grown trees, and instead of just going down one tunnel, my units destroyed each tree to get to the center.  If there was a way to pick which tree to attack it would be AWESOME.  *You could do it where you click and drag on an asteroid with a battle going on when your zoomed in and then just drag over the tree and release maybe?*

Anyways if you guys say its ok i'll put up the "speed" version i made so other people don't have to reinvent the wheel =p.

Woo, thanks for trying to make it work in Linux. I've been trying to make Cottage Of Doom work on the Mac with little success. This exception sounds like something that can be fixed, but later on there might be problems with the calls I make to QueryPerformanceCounter in system32.dll.

I've removed the dependency on System.Encoding in the CRC code - should be OK, can't imagine needing to encode from characters outside the ascii range anyway. This will go out in the next release.


By all means do this - if you want to send it to me by PM first I can correct the meanings for you before you post it.

Just a heads up though: I'm actually rewriting the settings code to be more accessible, so the file format will change. I'm hoping to support loading in of different settings files and editing them in-game (or at least from the main menu). A.K.A. mods :)

Wow, good job on this game! I really enjoyed the concept, once I got the hang of it.
Keep up the great work!

Alright so this is the code with comments on what everything does in case you wanted to play around with it.  It's all been generously corrected by Haowan to be accurate.


*Meant to say*

Also, this code is my fast / large game edited version so if you wanna give that a try just copy and paste it over the settings.xml *back up the original first* The comments shouldn't get in the way

We've just launched http://www.dyson-game.com. Please have a look around and let us know if you have any feedback. Please also join the mailing list (http://www.dyson-game.com/mailinglist.php)! And visit the forum (http://www.dyson-game.com/forum)!

Hi, I dig the game and I mostly want to point out one simple thing which I don't think has been mentioned yet. The fact that asteroids stop producing seedlings when they reach a count of 32 really adds to the "there is no such thing as defense" effect. If you play even a little defensively in any area, you're just going to block your own seedling production, so it's better to constantly be sending seedlings to enemy territory.

If you allow them to produce until the asteroid maxes out, it would be much more reasonable to make strongholds with high seedling counts (but still probably not very useful in the current build). I think this feature, as well as allowing the player to intercept enemy units in any of the ways discussed previously, would be enough to add some depth, but you also might need one more ability to break stalemates.

In regard to the graphics, I love the current simplicity. I don't agree with the post a while back that suggested adding craters or in any other way making the circles look like asteroids. The circles have a nice, almost meditative feel.

I'd like to suggest that you get rid of the three components, that asteroids are made of. At the moment they don't matter at all and once you start mixing armies, it's impossible to keep track of anyway.
Instead you should give each asteroid one power that effects only the swarm that is currently present.
For example, you could have defensive asteroids where the defending swarm is twice as strong as usual or asteroids that spawn new fighters twice as fast. Associate each type with a symbol or something else that is easily recognizable, so it is easy to distinguish between the types in the heat of the battle, when you're zoomed out.
It would really make the game more strategically.

We will hopefully be making these elements more important for the later game. I agree they're worthless right at the moment though. I also don't think they're a logical extension to the simplistic overarching gameplay, which is basically (and almost inadvertently) GalCon. But the gameplay we've ended up with is quite different from the game we originally had on paper, so it will be interesting to see how the game changes as we gently steer it in the direction of our plan.

Thanks for the suggestion but the only reason they don't matter much except at the beginning of the game is because the design isn't fully implemented.

Once they are implemented properly they will automatically cause very specific gameplay choices that aren't only strategically interesting, they will also still maintain the overarching simplicity of the game. Please be patient :-)

Yeah the DEP error kind of makes no sense to me either. Weirder still, once I fixed my desktop that also unfortunately runs Vista, I tried the game there and it worked fine. So I have no idea what's going on with the laptop. Anyway, excellent stuff with the game!

I habe played Dyson a vew times now, and i habe to say, it is to easy. I habe to do always the same, conquer as many asteroids as possible with all your units, because it es the cheapest way of creating new plants. All battles are the same, the one who has more Units will win. And the cool zooming is useless, because you never need to habe a detailed view of your Planets.

I never needed to knew, what those colored bar stands for.

suggested improvements:
-> make it difficulter to conquer asteroids

   - Enemy units can go into my terrytory, and i can't stop them, until they reached their destination
-> create defence Structures. maybe with Towers placed on the asteroids, or Lightnig walls connected fron one Asteroid to anothe

-> non-flying Units would be cool (plus transporter, or defence only).

When I first played through the tutorial, I thought it said you could raise animals by moving lots of seedlings to an asteroid. It may make the game too complex, but I think if there was something to develop the asteroid along (if not raising animals), then it would be pretty cool.

Overall, this is a really great game and definitely worthy of an IGF award with a little bit more polishing.

My impression of Dyson, now that I've had a chance to really play it, is it feels like dice wars or Risk, but in real time and simpler. To me that's not a good thing. The problem with these sort of games is once you start losing you're on a serious downward spiral, epic reversals are rare if they're possible at all. Then this simplifies that process so that you pretty much never lose against the computer. Where's the satisfaction in that? I'm not saying I want to lose, but I do want to at least feel like I had to try to win.

Thanks guys.

Part of the plan is to rewrite the enemy AI, which is currently a giant hack, and make the game more strategic, while keeping the interface easy to use and understand. Or rather, making it easy to use and understand. I agree it's too easy as it stands, but we didn't have time to really balance this stuff during the competition.

Yeah we are aware of the problem. The way territory and conquest works is going to be hugely improved and is going to open up very strategic gameplay with many viable strategies. There will be much more importance placed on strategic occupation and the it should become much tighter all he way to the endgame. Epic reversals of fortune due to smart gameplay is hopefully on the cards :-D

I'll repost this with clarity:
I envision the best way to manage units would be to choose from which asteroid they machines are from.
So you click on BX-13 and see

RX12 (Yellow bar 50 red bar 40 blue bar 10): 12
CY03 (Yellow bar 25 red bar 25 blue bar 50): 32

And then select from a list like that, THEN you order them around.
Possibly an "Add to current group" button, so you can select 8 from RX12, then 32 from CY03.
And of course you would be able to see the same distribution for enemy planets so you can use units whos stats counter theirs!

Mekanik, personally your post confused the hell out of me, i'd probably need like a visual to understand what you mean.  Personally i think that moving units now isn't TOO much of a hassle, you just gotta be able to move kind of rapidly, although i agree its sort of tedius.

The biggest annoyance is say all of a sudden an asteroid gets attacked by 100 guys, so you take 20 from 4 or 5 nearby asteroids and put them there.  Now you have like 80 guys on that asteroid, and it takes too long for the game to count up to 20 to move them all back so i just tend to leave them together.

I think the best thing would be you can select multiple asteroids, then sign those asteroids to a group *Ctrl 1-0*.  Once an asteroid(s) is grouped, any unit produced from there is placed in that group, so now when you hit 1 all the units from asteroid X,Y,Z are selected, and now you just click where you want them to go.  So say you take group one mentioned above, and group 2 from asteroids A,B,C, and move them all to one asteroid.  Youd still be able to move them all together like you do now.  Or you could hit 1 and move that group etc.  Also maybe if you like double tap a group number the units will go back to the asteroid they originated from, that way you can move them all to defend, then double tap and cover a lot of asteroids again.

One other thing you could do, is that when you right click, a menu appears with grouping numbers, 5-10-25-50-100-200-300 or something, maybe you could go in the options and customize the numbers *that'd be neato*.  But obviously you just click the number you want, now you'd be moving that number of guys.  And say you have 40 units, if you pick 50 or anything up it just moves all the units.

The last thing i could think of that would be nice *i think its been said a few times* is just a button that brings units from nearby asteroids to the selected asteroid.  Kind of like an "oh crap!" button that just sucks in all units from asteroids 1 jump away or something.

I find Ctrl-grouping very hard to do. Right click to produce a number menu would be nice however. Or maybe you could change it to percentages so that you don't have to micromanage as much when the numbers of units increases.

What if holding right click over a asteroid showed a pie chart that could be changed by holding right click and dragging the cursor over the asteroid? The pie chart shows the percentage of units that will be dispatched when they are moved from the asteroid.

please no, with animals i'll have to send haowaon a cease and desist  :D

No animals  :gentleman:

No animals.

(http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/2680/mydysonideavu5.png)

1. Select an asteroid.
2. Select a group in the lower left. Current group in red text
3. Right click to increase that number.
4. Number on left shows current selected.
5. Number on right shows total nanomachines of type on that asteroid.
6. Click in empty space, or press space or some other key to deselect all

In this example ALVITAL has 108 nanomachines.
52 of them were manufactured on ALIVTAL and have the asteroid's stats.
56 of them were manufactured on ENOMEGA (and then moved here) and have ENOMEGA's stats.

In the example screenshot, I have selected 30 nanomachines from ENOMEGA and am using Right Mouse to add 20 more (if I keep holding Right Mouse I can select up to 52).

Explanation: Why bother? This assumes different statistical setups are advantageous against others. Some additional design may be required to make this really interesting.

That's really awesome, Mekanik. Thanks for the suggestion! We'll be looking into the interface and depending on how the game turns out may well need to incorporate some of this.

We were literally looking at this stuff now, I have been scribling down notes and ideas with Haowan on group selection while keeping the interface simple. SOme of my ideas are quite similar and I wan totest a few different ones so it is very helpful to see that the direction is not crazy. Many thanks for the ideas, we may use something much along those lines :-D

Cool.  :)

Hmm not sure if it is too attentiongrabberish (I know that isn't a word) but just wanted to say that we started a proper devblog on developing Dyson now. Which may or may not be interesting but hey, what the heck ;-)

http://www.dyson-game.com/ (http://www.dyson-game.com/)

Hey, I was wondering where this went. :)

We are happily beavering away on it. Doing some fundamental work on the underlying architecture first though, hence the quiet for the storm :_D

8)

With this, there should be some definite strategy with the way the attributes affect the battle outcome. Like.. 35% blue beats the enemy if they have less then 20% red but at 21% red the stats give an advantage over the blue stat..
Sort of like pokemon with HP/attack damage/accuracy -- the 100 damage 100% hit move works awesome as an instant kill until the enemy hp is suddenly 201 -- then you need 3 hits but they all go really slowly so you get destroyed by the faster, 80 damage, 90% accuracy move..

um, translate that into your three stats and adjust the weight and combat formula and i think it would lend itself to strategy just fine!

(that made sense right?)

Sweet!  I didn't know you guys were continuing work on this.  Good luck making a good game even better!   :beer:

Hahaha, yeah, that would be cool. Keep on it guys, looking forward to the next update.

Great game

Here's one problem that you need to fix. When randomly generating the colors for the armies, make sure that none of the colors are too similar to each other. I just started a game and the first planet I went to had enemies that were almost exactly the same color as me.

Hello everyone, we just updated Dyson to version 1.08.

For a list of changes, please visit the official site where we've listed the changes in the release notes.

We've added defensive trees and a limit on sending, done a graphical overhaul on the trees, and a bunch of other stuff was changed or tweaked or added too.

We also made a Linux version so we could do with some folk testing that if possible! Link is on the download page.

Visit the official site for Dyson (http://www.dyson-game.com)

Download Dyson (http://www.dyson-game.com/download.php)

Woa, that version does add a lot more to the game. I really liked the first one, and this one improved quite a bit on that. Still, there are a few things I noticed:

The influence sphere makes moving your seedlings to the front more difficult/annoying. My suggested fixes for this are to either make the influence area the union of all your planets, or add some kind of waypoint system like in Dar/Multiwinia.

Since you now have two kinds of trees, it should be possible to somehow "change" which trees you have on a planet. The easiest and fairest way IMO would be to allow destruction of trees. The reason as to why this should be allowed is that the enemy can do it for you (destroy trees) - and it's potentially frustrating if you need the enemy involved for something that *could* improve your situtation.

I really like the fact that different types of planets now have a greater significance. Maybe that was there in the original version, but it certainly didn't show as much. It kinda seemed like my seedlings had a harder time to capture small planets (mainly because they didn't hit the entrance to the core most of the time). Is that intentional?

Gameplay wise, the game still gets too easy towards the end. I suppose this is mainly the AIs fault. I think multiplayer should be added ASAP, because it'll help finding potential balancing issues faster - the most probable will be some kind of game-theoretic equilibrium, that'll just lock the game in the worst case. This will require some external intervention to unlock the situation - something functionally equivalent to the crates in multiwinia.

That's all for now. Keep up the good work - I'm already hooked!

I've played both versions 1.0 and 1.0.8, and I must say you have a very intriguing game on your hands. I really appreciate the esthetic of the game and its deliberate simplicity. Something about this game really invites player dedication, because despite wanting not to burden you, I feel oddly compelled to make yet another detailed, long post! I shall endeavor to be constructive, and if any of my ideas are off base I apologize in advance.

In order to be really compelling, there are still some fundamental issues with the arc of the game that need to be addressed. There is a brief but interesting 'competition' phase, followed by a very long, strategically uninteresting 'winning' phase. Oddly losing is fairly interesting, but winning is not. My favorite part of the game is the beginning (up to around four asteroids). I also like midgame multiple front wars where supply issues cause different outcomes on different fronts, and expanding too thinly is a constant threat. Colonization itself is not interesting, though combat is. In the late stages of the game, the major activity is endlessly collecting small numbers of seedlings from out of the way hicktown asteroids. And on a design level, I find it odd that war is the focal point in a game with such a mysterious, peaceful esthetic. Don't get me wrong, I have favorite games in both the violent and peaceful camps. But this one feels like an odd mismatch.

On to another topic: I think the unit statistics really aren't in keeping with the simplicity of the game at all. It really feels like an idea that somehow migrated over from more stereotyped RTS games, rather than something that grew in place and fits within Dyson. It would be a lot more impressive if the game relied on natural strategic depth rather than creating false depth via that old erroneous RTS idea:

more fiddly = more interesting

Of course I don't think detail is inherently bad. Even though I'm kind of against them on principle, I'm sure you'll work the statistics into the game in a meaningful way.

Since it seems like you're actively working on making the statistics more meaningful, I'd like to note that it seems the statistics you have chosen are a bit odd. Speed works neatly. It's a clear case of a specialization that is good for some things, and bad for others. But the other two statistics seem sort of wobbly strategically. They both make seedlings better in combat. But one makes you win faster, and the other makes you.. lose slower? This really doesn't create interesting decisions for the player.

I propose keeping attack strength, but either removing energy altogether, or replacing it with something more interesting. Very tentatively, perhaps extra damage when defending would be interesting. That seems like it would be redundant with your new defensive trees, though? Hmm.

On a more minor note, I'm still seeing the AI fly fleets unscathed by occupied asteroids. I've tried to do the same thing myself, and my seedlings always engage any hostile asteroids. It seems like either the player should be able to skip over asteroids without engaging, or the AI shouldn't.

Another issue is that my seedlings seem unresponsive when I tell them to disengage. The normal move UI (arrow, range circle, etc.) does not show up, though the 'number moved' indicator on the destination asteroid appears. I'm getting mixed messages. What is going on here?

One thing I like about the new build is that it seems like the asteroids are more interesting now. In 1.0.8 I find myself frequently weighing the cost of new trees against the quality of an asteroid, and deciding not to build past the first tree.

The new range limit seems to work nicely, though it clashes a bit with your stage layouts. The randomization + range limit combination sometimes gives the player three or four safe colony options, yet other times it places the player with only one piddling colony and two or more hostile neighbors. This makes the difficulty vary significantly.

I hope some of what I said is useful to you. I write this not through a desire to disagree with or correct you, but in the hopes of sparking interesting lines of though and opening things up to discussion. I wish you the best, and look forward to future builds.

Great feedback thanks. We are hammering out the next additions and improvements and once we have done that I hope we have arrived at a more coherent and balanced place.

There is quite  alot to come so it is a bit too early to comment on a lot of the specifics before they are placed in the context of a more mature and deeper game.
We read all your feedback though and it is massively helpful!

Don't really have any useful crit, but my friend watched me playing Dyson for about three minutes before he decided to copy it off my laptop when my back was turned.

That is great :-D
People seem to react well to it which is of course exremely gratifying. Thanks for sharing that!  :beer:

I lub lub love the visual style!  :beer:

Did you use opengl for the rendering?

I played all the levels, and love the game.  A few requests:
A custom levels folder that autodetects custom levels, and put them in a menu, possibly under a new button on the main menu.  I would love to make custom levels, but there currently is no way other then to override default levels.  I'd also be nice if a list of events and actions where given, I can figure everything else out.

Second, it would be nice if holding down both mouse buttons, and then dragging to another planet would cause Dyson to automatically move from that planet, to the targeted one, both when they are spawn there, or when they fly to there.  That way one could create chains of planets that automatically move the Dyson to the front lines.

Also, as a note on how the AI work, after you get going, there are no real challenges.  I think if AI would fight harder against each other, then it would be more fun.  Personally, I think by the time that you have taken a third of the asteroids, then there should be two other AI that have taken the other thirds.  That way when your a titan, your facing other titans, instead of going from a weakling to a titan, and only facing small AI the whole time.

We are DEFINITELY supporting user made levels in the future and will adopt the UI to cope with this :-D

Not sure yet what we are going to do EXACTLY but improvements on seedling deployment are onthe way.

The idea is to create AI that is more diverse in tactics, goals and motivations so you end up with some serious thought being needed to progress, in stead of just learning the limitations and exploiting them. We have some good ideas on how to do this so this will definitely improve.

Thanks for the reply, I'll definitely be watching for the next release.

Played this off and on for a while, was terrible at it, and kept uninstalling and reinstalling it. Great game, though. I like the atmosphere. Just managed to beat level two.

Requests:
- Mention the pan/zoom capability in How-to-Play
- Record on the main menu if a level has been beaten
- Option to adjust the visibility/darkness of game colors
- Chance to cancel a new tree
- I took a boatload of screenshots, pausing the game. Any in-game screen capture?

It seemed that the enemies only attacked when aggravated. True? Is aggression an adjustable variable for each level? Though if you're planning different AI strategies, it's pointless for me to ask.

Was also concerned about the enemy being too close to the player's starting point, but if they only attack when bothered, we players should figure it out soon enough.

(http://img176.imageshack.us/img176/7039/copyofdyson10ap2.th.png) (http://img176.imageshack.us/my.php?image=copyofdyson10ap2.png)
And some lag when moving a swarm of 552. Mixed batch of units. Were they all slowing to match the slowest astrobug, or was three swarms of 500, uh, too much for my comp?

Hey thanks for the feedback and the requests, we'll see what we can incorporate in the next version.

In regards to the AI retaliation thing, it doesn't exist but people often think this is how it works. This is really fascinating to me as we never planned on this. AI strategies will be more diverse in the final game though.

This looks really beautiful, I love minimalistic games...

I'm very happily surprised to hear this'll be making an appearance on steam in the future :)  Good stuff, guys!

Really nice job, enjoyed it thoroughly. Haven't played the latest version so it might be implemented; but I was thinking a way to tell what stats the seedling were made with beyond their appearance might be helpful if it won't detract from the game. I remember having trouble connecting up the various things and what they meant for stats on the fly.

Otherwise, thumbs up, sir.