Here we take a regular look at indie games that we're playing, and having a great time with. Be sure to check them out, because they're a lot of fun.

This week's game is Dyson, a strategy / colonization game for the PC. You can download the game for free at the game's official web site.

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Indie Gaming: Dyson

“Onward my mighty legions of seedlings, and may your menacing blue-y, purplish hue blot out our enemy’s skies. Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

I don’t know if that’s quite the tone that Dyson’s creators, Alex May and Rudolf Kremers, were going for, but I found myself thinking that from time to time while playing their nifty strategy game. When Dyson doesn’t have me going through acute bouts of megalomania, it’s actually very soothing to play.

The game has players growing armies of seedlings on a single sphere in a vast cosmos of similar circular worlds. These seedlings come from a tree called a Dyson that grows from the planet, with each world being capable of sustaining a maximum of five trees. Players can also grow defensive trees that launch countermeasure-like objects to help repel attacks from aggressive enemy seedlings that would do you harm, and are included in the maximum five tree count per world.

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After allowing a sizeable number of seedlings to be created, and orbit your world, it’s time to unleash them on other planets. Prior to this, you won’t have any idea what the CPU has been doing with these worlds. It’s only when your own seedlings arrive at a planet, and begin their attack that you’ll have any idea how many seedlings, Dyson trees, and defensive trees that

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world has. Sometimes it’s a cakewalk, and other times it can turn out that there are a hundred or so enemy seedlings there that were staging to attack you. There’s just no way of knowing until your initial forces arrive at a new world.

Seedlings aren’t just used for attacking neighboring worlds. They can be used to grow new Dyson or defensive trees on a world for 15 seedlings a pop. As of yet, I’ve not found much use for the defensive trees, as they don’t seem to damage attackers as well as seedlings, so I just grow nothing but Dyson trees most of the time. Also, the difficulty can be quite random where one round it will be easy to take over all of the other worlds on the map because there are so many CPU controlled worlds that are acting independently, so it isn’t much trouble to bump them off one by one. However, the next round may have only one or two enemy factions that need to be dealt with, and as such these groups are a lot more organized, and can build up large forces that are a huge threat to one's own territories.

The key to victory seems to be making sure that you are able to build up a huge army of seedlings before any of the enemy factions. I’ll often try to have worlds off to the side act like factories pumping out seedlings that will get allocated to border worlds that act as staging areas before launching massive attacks on my enemies. The one thing to be careful with here is that seedlings’ stats, like attack power and speed, are directly related to the stats of the planet that they were created on, so treating weaker planets like factories may yield a bunch of inferior seedlings. For the most part, though, I’ve found that stats haven’t made a huge difference so long as you rush enemy worlds with huge numbers.

With all this business of unleashing your seedling armies on unsuspecting worlds, one may get the impression that the gameplay is quite intense, but Dyson is actually a very relaxing game. The pace is leisurely, as the seedlings and trees slowly grow, with soft, ambient music playing in the background, and ultra-minimalist visuals on-screen. I like just keeping this game windowed and playing it to whittle away some free time, and just unwind. Even if I suddenly turn into Supreme Commander Nash at the head of my fleet of seedlings, the soothing aspects of the game help me relax after a long day, and makes for a great time waster.

Mr. Nash

April 5, 2009