Happy New Year! Late is better than never, right? You can now play
Dyson Swarm here! The game takes less than an hour for a full playthrough.
Here's a quote that I love from MR, one of the beta testers for the game:
"As someone who does not really consume hard science fiction whatsoever, I felt delightfully bewildered by everything that was happening, and I enjoyed the gameplay, it made me feel like I was playing cookie clicker yet somehow also being productive and learning things"
This is exactly what I was trying to achieve — I want players to have fun and learn about the hard science fiction concepts I love! I based all my calculations for the game on Gerard K. O'Neill's original 1974 paper "The Colonization of Space", so the mass numbers are all fairly accurate.
I've also open sourced the game, and you can find all the source code here:
Dyson Swarm GitHub repo. It's MIT licensed, so if you're a software person feel free to build anything you want with the code.
If you're interested in the technical side, I wrote up a blog post about how I built the game
here at community.aws. I submitted the game to a hackathon that coincided nicely with development of the game.
I plan on continuing to create hard science fiction games, but one per month was wildly ambitious, so I'm not going to commit to a hard timeline for the next game. It's going to be called "Hawking Radiation Mass Energy Converter", I'll keep you posted on development.
Finally, if you find any bugs in the game please reply to this email and I'll fix! Very few people have played the game, so there are bound to be things I missed (and improvements that are still on my list to make). I hope you all have a wonderful new year.
Joe