Well, last week when I said I'd release Dyson Swarm in a week I was being wildly optimistic. It's an occupational hazard.
At this point I'm going to be talking about where the game is at, progress-wise, which is going to contain some mild spoilers. If you want to go in knowing absolutely nothing about the game, delete this email (or close the browser tab) now!
The game is an incremental-style game with four stages: starting a game company, starting a space company, building a single O'Neill cylinder at the earth-moon lagrange 5 point, and finally the eponymous stage, building the Dyson swarm.
I've got the first two stages built completely, and I've got most of the elements of the third and fourth stages built as well, they just need assembling. After that, there will be a bunch of tuning of the buttons to make sure the gameplay feels correctly calibrated.
This game has three major challenges: making sure the narrative elements are entertaining, keeping the incremental mechanic from being too quick or too slow, and making sure that all the science and engineering is plausible.
I think I can dial those elements in far enough for the game to be fun, but this is an experiment! You will be the judge as to whether I've succeeded.
Because I'm trying to merge short story elements into the game, there's the danger of having the gameplay elements conflict in some way with the narrative elements. I was talking to a friend recently about these concerns, and he told me there's a great piece of terminology in the game industry to describe this:
ludonarrative dissonance. In Dyson Swarm there's inevitably going to be a little bit of this form of dissonance, but I'm trying to reduce it to as close to zero as I can. It's tougher than I expected, but a fun challenge!
I only work on this in the evenings after my family goes to sleep, so I think two more weeks to finish up is realistic. I'll talk to y'all in the beginning of November.
Joe