The Design Behind Dyson, 2009 IGF Finalist

Ruldolf and Alex talk about developing Dyson, 2009 IGF Finalist

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/dyson-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]tFF8f5kW7HM[/wp_youtube]

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the IGF Main Competition and with me today is a special guest, or a couple special guests. How about you introduce yourself?

Rudolf: Hi, I’m Rudolf Kremers. I am half of the development team of Dyson together with Alex May.

Alex: I’m Alex. I’m the programmer just on Dyson.

Interviewer: You guys were nominated for the grand prize. Why do you think that was?

Rudolf: To be honest, it was a bit of a surprise to us as well. We can only guess why that is. I think it helps that the game is fairly original and has got a certain unique esthetic. The visuals are very different from what you expect from the kind of game play that it is. There’s a certain amount of IPS aspiration of game play going on, but it doesn’t look like that kind of game. I think that surprised a few people.

Interviewer: Can you talk about the game itself? Describe it, and what it’s about?

Rudolf: Sure. In a nutshell Dyson is a space complex and exploration game, which I said already. What you do is you plant biomechanical trees on asteroids. It sounds a bit big, but what it means is you grow your own units by aspiration and conquer asteroids.

This is done in competition with AI opponents so pretty quickly you get an organic looking game of cat-and-mouse while you’re conquering new places in space to explore and to use resources. But, it’s all done in a fairly ambient way. Alex can tell you a little bit more.

Interviewer: Sure. Well, can you talk about the technology behind it?

Alex: Sure, yeah, yeah. The game is written in C#. We use a lot of open source. We use STL. We use Orbis for sound and we run on the .NET framework so we can use Mono to run on Linux and Mac.

Interviewer: What were some of the designer technical challenges that you encountered as you developed the game?

Alex: We faced significant challenges the first month because that was our deadline for the indie competition. It was originally for a competition on the independent gaming source. We had come up with all of these elaborate plans for a really great game. It was going to be awesome. We had to pare it down, and that was the first real challenge to realize that we’d over planned and we had to work hard to schedule it out properly.

Interviewer: As you were developing the game, what were some – did you play test it? How did you refine it and reiterate over the interim?

Alex: Excuse?

Interviewer: As you play tested the game or as you developed the game, how did you play test it and how did you refine it? How long did it take to refine the game before you submitted to IGF?

Alex: We worked very iterately. We had sent quite a few versions to Rudolf . We sent it back and forth by messenger. He said, this was a great idea or this was no good. So, we didn’t remove features and quite rightly. Also, we got a lot of feedback from players after we released the first version. That was luck, I guess, to see how people felt about the game.

Interviewer: What did you guys use for inspiration for the game? Was there any inspiration or was it just more like you had a certain theme that you wanted:

Rudolf: It’s actually quite specific. The game’s name, Dyson, is Internet based actually on the work of Freeman Dyson. He is a theoretical physicist and mathematician. He’s quite well known but he’s also quite well known because of philosophical ideas that he had about space exploration and artificial intelligence. He came up with some concepts that we used for this game, and one of them is the tropical Dyson tree which is an exploration mechanism or robot that plants itself on asteroids and creates habitats for human beings and terra forming.

Another thing he created is called AstroChicken, which is its actual name, which is a self-replicating robot or machine that populates areas in space. Even though these are a high level scientific concept, we thought they were so gamey that they would suit themselves really well for this type of game play and together with some other things it was the main inspiration. So that’s why the name comes from.

Interviewer: After you finished the game for the jam, what did you guys do next to prepare it for IGF submission or was it around the same time?

Alex: We finished the game for the competition and that was good.. And then we thought, oh this is really nice but we can kind of take it a bit further so we continued developing. Then, after we decided to enter the IGF we did a bit of a crunch on it. We worked really hard to get a nice version in to the deadline. We have been developing it continuously since then, you know, since the competition essentially.

Interviewer: Can you talk about some of the – I guess – benefits of doing that game jam? What was that game jam a part of and you talked about TIG source or something like that?

Alex: GameSource is a community of developers and gamers who are interested in Internet games. It’s really good. There’s loads of people there. [inaudible] It’s great. They have regular competitions with a theme, and the theme for this particular one was procedural generation of content, so we thought that was us, really good. You can do so much with that inspired by people like [?] and they talk a lot about the procedure generated content. That was the most fun competition on TIGs.

Interviewer: What would you say are the top three learning lessons you’ve had as you’ve worked on this project or realizations? What are the top three realizations or understandings or learnings that you had as you worked on this project?

Rudolf: Well, I’ll pick one of them. One of the biggest ones is how much you can done with two people and a well staffed audio guy and two core developers. We have done so much work and created quite a bit of content in a relatively short time, part time, so that was a major concession right there.

Alex: Your game is better than you think it is.

Interviewer: Is this the first time you’ve worked in a team then for a game, or have you worked in a team before for games?

Rudolf: Both Alex and myself are quite experienced at this. We have been working in professional game development for larger companies and mid-sized companies for quite a while now. So, it’s certainly not the first time although it’s the first time that we’ve worked together on an independent game. We worked together on other games before, but as an indie team this is our first game.

Interviewer: Where can people find more information about the game?

Rudolf: Well, we have a dedicated website with a very busy forum which is actually a really nice place to go and so people should go to the website, but we also blog on the progress of the game. It’s at dyson-game.com.

Interviewer: How did you get a large forum? Was that while you were developing it, or did it happen after you released it for the IGF?

Rudolf: I think we started a forum during the end of the procedure of competition. I’m not a hundred percent sure how close it was to the end date, but after that it kind of developed out also because we released the information on how to make your own medals.

Interviewer: Gotcha. Great. Thank you very much.