Dyson

R: My name is Rudolf Kremers, a Dutch game developer living in the UK, and I am the design person although I take on other tasks as well when I can. I also design the levels for example and help with some of the audio. Because the game is solely made by Alex and myself, with Brian providing music and sound we end up working in multiple disciplines. (Alex takes the cake in this regard though he is like an indie Leonardo Davinci or something. Homo Ludis Universalis )

A: I'm Alex May, just a guy despite what Rudolf might tell you (he's under hypnosis to be my loyal designer slave ahuahua). I'm the programmer on Dyson. I've done all the art too; it's procedural so you don't get to see my shoddy drawn or pixelled artwork :) Procedural art is largely mathematics-based, so it's easier for programmers to get going with than traditional art. Rudolf and I regularly discuss the game design too, so I have input on that. Likewise, Rudolf has input on the art and visuals.

R: The atari 2600 and arcade cabinets in the late 70s early 80s. I was completely obsessed with these fantastic virtual worlds to play in and always had to get my name in the high score slots. Then my school introduced computer classes (this was in the early 80s) and I made my first game (and the first game programmed at that school) by hacking out a dubious game called "Nuke the Mouse" in PASCAL, an ancient programming language. To this day all my gamemaking efforts are fuelled by my childhood obsession with creating imaginary worlds.

A: Apparently I was walking past a computer shop with my dad when I was 5, looked in at the Commodore VIC-20 in the window and was mesmerised. I always typed in listings from magazines, and dabbled in programming on every machine I had until I finally got into it properly on the PC during my time at university. Essentially, I've always been into it.

R: It was a number of things happily coinciding in the TIGSource procedural game competition. I have been obsessed with certain aspects of the work of Freeman Dyson and John von Neuman, specifically the concept of Dyson Trees and Astro Chicken. They cover subjects like terraforming, space exploration, and self-replicating robots and to me are endlessly fascinating. Alex was already looking into procedural generation for his own game Deadrock and the competition was therefore absolutely perfect for us as a collaborative project. (We blogged the background of the game in more detail here)

A: Procedural content is a pretty vast subject and we tried to apply it to as many aspects of the game as possible to keep in with the competition theme. The visuals of the game came from wanting to do a vector-style game in the retro style, which was an easy way to get content in there without having an artist on board, but being sick of the usual glowy-vector-on-a-black-background stuff you see in so many games. So I decided to invert the palette, and took inspiration from games like flOw and Blueberry Garden to make the game look different to other games. I was also greatly inspired by a game called Circle, which is still in development, and jph wacheski's brainTooth.

A: During the original competition it was the fact we'd both grossly underestimated the amount of time we had, or overestimated the amount we could achieve, or (most likely) simply not estimated at all. I'd spent far too long on graphics and tree code, for instance. In the end we had to rush to get an actual game from what we had.

R: Yep Alex is right, although it was mostly me overdesigning things full of enthusiasm but not tempered by scheduling prowess :-) Dyson is all about minimalism, getting the most out of the least amount of mechanics, and we often have to hack at the ideas until we are left with something that fits the theme. We tend to solve this by abstracting what it that we want from the game and re-applying those goals brutally to proposed designs. They can almost always be simplified.

A: Aside from timing, which is definitely the biggest thing and something we work very hard to avoid mistakes with now, for me I guess one big thing would be bad organisation of game data. It's still a mess and it results from having rushed the initial game. Next time it would make more sense to make some time for planning out data and logic a little instead of ploughing headfirst into the mud and trying to force a trough through the field :)

R: I made level2 of the game in version 1.08 ROCKHARD. Which is somewhat off-putting for a game with such a gentle atmosphere. Having said that, most of the levels were done in a day and a half so I don't feel too guilty.

A: Another example of our collective silly-timing silliness.

A: Original time to get a game out was one month, the duration of the competition. That was in May 2008. Since then we put in a bunch of time to get the game out to the IGF in November 2008. Now in Feb we still have about 6 months of part-time work to get the game into a state where we'd be happy to sell it.

R: It isn't always easy to grasp the time needed or spent on the game as we both have other professional responsibilities. I do sometimes wonder what we can achieve if we were able to work on the game fultime.

R: Word, Notepad, Soundforge and the intarwebs. What really makes the difference though is the great tools that Alex has provided within the framework of the game. Fantastic graphs and variable tweaking at my fingertips means that I can iterate changes really fast which is essential.

A: Visual Studio Express is the IDE used. We used a bunch of open-source libraries to make this work - SDL, OpenGL, LibPNG, LibVorbis, and bindings to C# (SDL.NET, Tao Framework). The game itself is built on a C# game library a couple of friends and I have been developing for a couple of years now.

R: It is a few things working in tandem I think, but the basis of most of the fun in the game for me personally is the addictive quality of combining exploration with conquest. There is a certain Pokemon like quality to the game where you pitch you creatures against the opponent's ones and that the winner of a fight gets rewarded with another asteroid for their empire. The levels may take a while to play, but there is a whole lot of of short term rewarding going on. Plus: growing trees that grow creatures that you can send flying about is fun in its own right. :-)

A: I think scale has a big influence on the game - the number of seedlings flitting around and being able to observe them from a great distance is quite engaging.

R: Dyson is the least commercially motivated game I have ever worked on yet it is also one of the most successful ones (relatively speaking) Certainly in artistic terms. I think there is a point somewhere in there....

A: Watch Kyle Gabler's Global Game Jam keynote. I think there's a lot of value in there relevant to what we did with Dyson. The core design concept behind Dyson is very simple, but the game itself can be quite compelling. Also, let the computer fill in the gaps for you, see Introversion evangelising procedural content here

R: Dyson II: The DYSONING! (Joke) Next is to make Dyson in the best game it can be for its commercial release later this year. We are hard at work on this and have some really exciting features to add.

A: "Dyson Harder" is gonna rock your faces off next fall!!! Next up I'd really like to work with Rudolf again to make another interesting, different game. Personally, I'd like to examine exploration games. I'd also like to continue work on my procedural zombie survival game Deadrock. I guess in my spare spare time, as that's probably a less commercially-viable game - it depends on whether we can make going full-time indie a reality.