Hello engineers! In just one day from now, you will be soaring through the void of space aboard your mecha Icarus, exploring the vast universe with the ultimate goal of building a Dyson Sphere. We want to make the wait easier:
we bring you today our first dev blog, explaining the origins of the game and our studio. This text was originally published in our Kickstarter campaign, but we realized that many of you here probably didn’t see it when it was posted, so we’re bringing it again to the spotlight.
We hope you enjoy the read!
Dev’s Log 01 - The Birth of DYSON SPHERE PROGRAM!
Hello everyone! We are Youthcat Studio, a five-person indie game development studio, the creator of Dyson Sphere Program, a 3D automated factory/cosmos simulation PC game.
We want to start writing our own dev blog for two reasons: one is to document the whole development process -- maybe when we grow old we’ll enjoy looking back at how we chased our dreams when we were young!. The second reason is to share with you how we approach this process, as well as interesting events and milestones in this path, so you get to witness the birth and growth of Dyson Sphere Program along with us.
How did this whole thing started? Well, as we mentioned, we’re still young – and our parents tried to convince us that working for others is the right, safe choice. But our dream was always to make indie games, and that seed had grown deep roots in our hearts. We struggled, felt lost, almost gave up – but eventually, despite all the obstacles in our way, we started Youthcat Studio and embarked in the wild journey that is indie games development.
Our team is composed of 5 people, as we mentioned: two programmer, a producer, a 2D artist, and a 3D artist. We are developers, but are also gamers ourselves. For us, games are a way to experience a million lives wrapped in one. Each game presents its own worldview, and we as gamers enter it to experience something that we may never see in real life. You can save the world with your mighty sword and become a hero, or laugh and smile with a happy story, or cry at a heartfelt one that moves you to tears. We want to create that kind of experience for our players: the purest and funniest indie games, never losing as developers the player’s point of view.
How the Dyson Sphere was born
With this ideas in mind, we started thinking of different concepts for our first game. We came up with a setting: the distant future, when the human species achieve such a high level of civilization that the consciousness of every human is transferred into a virtual reality world. Operating this virtual sub-universe needs a nigh-omniscient supercomputer, and it would in turn need a massive amount of energy. This machine (let’s call if “the Mind”) is sent to orbit the Sun to gather more and more energy. Eventually, as more and more humans join this virtual reality, the Mind would meet its own limits both in computation power and energy consumption. To accommodate more humans, the Space Management Alliance COSMO launched a new engineering project to harness a near-infinite source of energy: the Dyson Sphere Program.
And that’s where you, the player, step in! As an engineer of the agency, you are equiped with the mecha Icarus and ordered a crucial mission: travel to distant galaxies, seek raw materials and process them into components, build factories in different planets and build an interplanetary logistics network, and found a vast Transgalactic Industrial Empire. All with the ultimate goal of building a Dyson Sphere with which feeding the needs of the Mind. Are you ready to embark on a brand new journey to the unknown?
This is a description of the core gameplay loop, but there is more to the game. For example, we wanted the art style to have a unique feeling, and in the end our talented artists came up with this cartoon style, heavily inspired by hardcore sci-fi stories. Also, even designing just one universe by hand would be a massive undertaking, and on top of that we wanted every run to be unique and special, so you never grow tired of the game. Thus, we decided to create a procedural generation system for stars and planets, so each of them is randomly generated all the time. That way, the in-game universe can be considered almost infinite! On the other hand, exploring would be too difficult and time-consuming if we kept realistic scales. Let’s keep in mind that, if we think Earth to be big enough, it is a dwarf compared with planets such as Jupiter (which is about 1,300 bigger!). So to make things easier and more enjoyable we set planets to be slightly small in size.
The first technical problems we faced
Once development started for good, we found the first challenges and problems very soon. We didn’t want to go into too much technical detail, but let’s see an example. When we set up an entirely automated factory on a planet’s surface, one of the first technical problems we encountered was rendering. The traditional way – render the whole planet in one go -- would dramatically slow down the performance of the game. So we had to divide the planet surface into several parts, and render them as you get closer to them. But that sprouted its own challenge: finding the most efficient way to divide the surface of a planet.
If we blocked the surface of a planet in too few pieces, the planet surface would be too smooth. On the other hand, if the terrain is too rugged, due to the cartoon style of the game, the planet would look pretty much like a potato. There was a delicate balance to be found between our programmer and our artist. After a lot of trial and error, we finally decided to adopt the following method of division: we used the Perlin noise algorithm to generate the terrain of the planet, and then distributed it in trapezoid sections. We’re quite happy to report that our planets look like, well, planets, and not massive orbiting potatoes!
After we jumped the first technical hurdles, we came up with a new question: how will it look like when you build a factory on the surface of the planet? To test the hypothesis, we did some initial modeling in Unity to see how the factory would look like. Soon we made it some concept art models in 3D, so we could see the large-scale production line running by the small sample modeling. We soon realized te potential: it would make for a very spectacular view -- and we were so excited to make it real!
Of course, this is just an idea in preliminary stage!
As it happens in games development, solving a problem leads to new challenges and difficulties. But that’s part of the fun for us, after all – finding high-level technical solutions to every challenge that our dream-game throws at us! We are more excited than ever, and we look forward to putting the game in your hands and see the great things you can build with it. No matter how many problems are waiting for us, we will work really hard to solve them all – and Dyson Sphere Program will be the purely fun indie game we always dreamed to do!
Thanks for reading. See you at Dev's Log #2!
