Dyson
Developers: Rudolf Kremers and Alex May
Nomination: Seumas McNally Grand Prize
Platform: Windows, Linux (free)
Website
Description: Dyson is a real time strategy game about colonizing asteroid belts. The catch: this game is one of the most abstract RTSs available today, and has simple enough inputs to be played only with the mouse.

Adam’s Thoughts:
Dyson is such a gateway game. If your gaming palette prefers real time strategy, but you just can’t get friends into the genre (let’s face it, the barriers to entry are many), then this is the game you need. Dyson strips away the micromanagement and sometimes ridiculous control complexity endemic to the genre, and strips it all down to a drag and drop mechanic.

You grow little flying space seeds and send them to colonize nearby worlds. If the new world’s seeds don’t greet you as liberators (pro tip: they won’t), well, you’d better have more seeds. Once you control the new world, you can consume your remaining seeds to grow trees that make new seeds and defend the world from foreign seeds. So there’s one type of resource that also happens to be the combat unit, and you control them with a single deployment command. It’s simple to learn and teach.

Don’t mistake simple for dumbed-down, however. Dyson is like a good children’s story: accessible enough for anyone to grasp, but richly nuanced so that it grows with you. There’s a delicate balance to keeping a standing army while consuming seeds for growth. Different planets grow stronger, faster, and tougher seeds than others, too, and there’s an art to picking the right seed for the job. There’s only six easy-ish levels for now, but the game has mechanical depth that should make for rich gameplay as it develops. For now, the big things missing are multiplayer and a good tutorial. Keep an eye on this one.

Katie’s Thoughts:
Before I begin, I want to let you know that I’m biased. I’ve always been a fan of resource-management based gameplay. I like Settlers of Catan, theorycrafting in World of Warcraft, and of course, real time strategy games. Dyson doesn’t look like any RTS I’d ever seen, and doesn’t play much like one, either. It has soothing music, a mouse-only interface, and the way you go about conquering the astroid belt is by means of tree seedlings. Yet the thought processes involved and decisions you make while your playing are what make this game are what make it the RTS that it is. You can build either defensive trees or offensive (Dyson) trees on your asteroids. Dyson trees produce seedlings that can be consumed fifteen at a time for a new tree, sent off to new asteroids to colonize them, or left to orbit around the asteroid to defend against invading seedlings.

The game is clean and simple, but at the same time has deep gameplay. Each of the asteroids has different statistics associated with it, and seedlings produced on that asteroid retain those statistics, even when they go to new asteroids. The computer has a nasty habit of invading right after you’ve dwindled your population down to the bare minimum for a new tree.

Dyson is up for the grand prize, and it isn’t surprising. The upcoming release of Starcraft 2 highlights how little RTSs have changed over the years, and Dyson challenges the idea that it has to be like that. It’s great to be able to play 3D Star Trek chess, but sometimes, it’s a pleasure to play Go.

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Tags:   GDC · IGF · Seumas McNally Grand Prize1 Comment

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