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trinsic2 3 hours ago [-]
So the trailer for 2.0 is exactly what I was thinking of for continuation of this kind of game. I was missing a lot that would have made it deep like a backstory. I was thinking it would be great to tell that back story through the logs you find on derelict ships.
Im really glad this appears as if it's going to happen. Duskers was a great game even in its limited story driven context.
michalpleban 9 hours ago [-]
I am obviously missing something here, but how is it "command line"?
pferde 9 hours ago [-]
Because while exploring derelic ships (the major part of the game), you control your drones remotely, via commands that you type into the console.
cmiles74 9 hours ago [-]
Does not at all appear to be a game you run in the console. The first video on the Steam page does include a lot of stylized Hacknet-ish looking text.
There are graphics, it's real-time, but you type commands to control the drones.
kbenson 2 hours ago [-]
It's been a while since I played, but I've picked it back up a few times, let's see how well I can explain it.
Duskers is at its core a puzzle game. It could be executed just as well with an ASCII rogue/nethack style UI.
At its core, you have a few different drones that have some basic capabilities, and you can outfit them with a few additional capabilities (modules) each if you find components. You choose derelict space hulks to salvage, and once you enter them, some rooms/doors will be locked, or unpowered. You have to choose what rooms to go to to unlock and power other rooms. Some rooms may have unknown in them, which may attack you at some point when you're in the room, or if you leave the door open move to other rooms. Some drones can detect movement, some can't (IIRC). Sometimes you need to herd those lifeforms between rooms by remotely opening and closing different doors. The drones look for scrap in rooms to gather, which is used to build modules.
The rooms are all numbered, the doors are all numbered the drones are all numbered. You control the drones and parts of the ship you have access to through command line options, which have shorthand equivalents. e.g. (the below is mostly from google/gemini since I didn't want to go look them all up to remember)
navigate 1 r2 — Moves drone 1 to room 2.
navigate all r1 — Sends all active drones back to room 1 (the docking bay).
move 3 r4 — Uses the shorthand move instead of typing out navigate.
d12 — Toggles (opens or closes) door 12.
a2 — Toggles airlock 2.
close d1 d2 — Explicitly closes doors 1 and 2.
close all — Closes every single powered door on the ship immediately.
close r3 — Closes all doors attached to room 3.
gather — Tells the active drone to harvest nearby scrap metal.
gather all — Orders the drone to systematically harvest all scrap in its current room.
generator — Connects a drone to a power inlet to restore power to a room's grid.
interface — Connects a drone to a powered terminal to extract ship logs or systems.
tow 2 — Forces drone 2 to attach to or detach from a salvageable object (like an upgrade or broken drone).
stealth — Actives the stealth utility to move through rooms undetected by infestations.
You can string multiple commands together sequentially by separating them with a semicolon (;). Each drone operates its queue in parallel.
navigate 1 r3; gather all; navigate 1 r1 — Drone 1 goes to room 3, sucks up all the scrap, and drives back to safety.
navigate 2 r4; tow 2; navigate 2 r1 — Tells drone 2 to go to room 4, hook up a towable item, and pull it back to the airlock.
brador 1 hours ago [-]
If this isn’t AI you need to set a timer before opening a browser.
LoganDark 5 hours ago [-]
many actions are performed by typing commands.
lantry 10 hours ago [-]
Duskers is a very cool game. It's very difficult and stressful, so it's easy to bounce off of; but the concept and execution are top notch.
SOLAR_FIELDS 2 hours ago [-]
I enjoyed the gameplay but it felt very much like a half finished game. It’s more of a vibey simulation than a complete game.
trinsic2 3 hours ago [-]
Agreed. It was very difficult. I bounced off it myself. But I really respect the design elements of the game.
oidar 10 hours ago [-]
Damn windows only - not on mac. I really loved the first one. Hope they port it to mac eventually.
LoganDark 5 hours ago [-]
Unity is cross-platform so it's a few button clicks to build for Mac, but for some reason nobody does it anymore
hmry 3 hours ago [-]
It's only easy if you own a mac, otherwise it's somewhere between annoying and impossible.
Last time I tried it, you needed a mac if you wanted to:
- use AoT compilation (IL2CPP) instead of JIT
- use any native libraries (or use any assets that depend on native libraries)
- sign your executable
And that was before Apple Silicon, I would be surprised if it's gotten any easier
trinsic2 3 hours ago [-]
I feel like Apple makes MacOS really difficult to use with all the unessessary security components. Plus they treat there users like idiots, they hide advanced operations behind keyboard shortcuts. Then there's the need to control the ecosystem.
LoganDark 1 hours ago [-]
I don't find the keyboard shortcuts to be inconvenient, or maliciously "hidden". I just recognize that most of the stuff I do on a daily basis is above how most users work with their computers. Besides, it's faster for me to use a keyboard than mouse anyway
wafflemaker 10 hours ago [-]
What caused the end of the world then?
I guess I might try again with the game, but asking here I could get moderate spoilers without a complete spoiler.
chaostheory 4 hours ago [-]
AI, but not the ASI or AGI kind, which makes you worry about the present since you don’t need a “god in a box” AI to end the world
derektank 4 hours ago [-]
We’ve had the ability to destroy the world since roughly 1970, maybe 1975. Nothing but biological intelligence required.
SadErn 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
yoyohello13 9 hours ago [-]
Wow! I would not have expected to hear about this game again. The first game was a lot of fun, definitely room to flesh out the game play loop but had great ideas.
6 hours ago [-]
crtasm 10 hours ago [-]
Actual title: Misfits Attic Announces Duskers 2.0 Funded By Stray Signal
psawaya 9 hours ago [-]
Very excited for this one!
syngrog66 5 hours ago [-]
The video for Duskers 2 in the linked article was of a very graphical, real-time engine style game with sound, music and animation
title is misleading if not abusive of our time
kbenson 2 hours ago [-]
Title is not misleading, you're just misinterpreting what they mean by command line. It's not a terminal game (in that you don't play it on your terminal and it's not limited to ASCII), it's a game where all the actions are carried out by typing out the commands for what actions you want to happen in a simulated terminal in the game.
I have another comment on this post which goes into more detail about what those commands look like if that's interesting to you at all.
I found the original game to be quite fun. It's mostly about solving logical puzzled about how to safely navigate the wrecks, and given you have very limited signals about what's going on, can be stressful and engrossing.
azhenley 10 hours ago [-]
"command line"
none_to_remain 6 hours ago [-]
There's a terminal window in the game which you use to control your robots
I even found some shell constructs to work beyond what the game documented/ explained to me
syngrog66 5 hours ago [-]
Doom and Quake had drop-down command consoles too that let the user change the game's state -- I've included such features in some of my GUI, realtime engine games too. but I would never promote any as a "command line" game
itishappy 5 hours ago [-]
Doom, Quake, and assumedly your games don't use their command line as primary input like this.
chaostheory 4 hours ago [-]
The primary way to play Duskers is via scripting in a CLI
raffael_de 9 hours ago [-]
a cli game that only runs on windows ... very funny
tibbon 9 hours ago [-]
I just installed Steam on Ubuntu yesterday, and I'm impressed at the progress so far. A HUGE number of titles run flawlessly.
freehorse 7 hours ago [-]
Author's latest title has enormous memory leaks in linux through proton (and in macos through crossover) [0]. I hope the author puts effort in non-windows platforms for this one during development, because the first duskers was indeed a great game.
> Author's latest title has enormous memory leaks in linux through proton...
If this is something the dev can reasonably fix by changing their game, then it'd be good for them to do so. Looking at the discussion in the thread, it looks like the dev is actively working to fix this for everyone, and not just the subset of folks that he fixed it for.
However, if this doesn't happen on Windows, I'd argue that it's a bug that needs to be reported against and fixed in Wine/Proton/Crossover.
Im really glad this appears as if it's going to happen. Duskers was a great game even in its limited story driven context.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/254320/Duskers/
Duskers is at its core a puzzle game. It could be executed just as well with an ASCII rogue/nethack style UI.
At its core, you have a few different drones that have some basic capabilities, and you can outfit them with a few additional capabilities (modules) each if you find components. You choose derelict space hulks to salvage, and once you enter them, some rooms/doors will be locked, or unpowered. You have to choose what rooms to go to to unlock and power other rooms. Some rooms may have unknown in them, which may attack you at some point when you're in the room, or if you leave the door open move to other rooms. Some drones can detect movement, some can't (IIRC). Sometimes you need to herd those lifeforms between rooms by remotely opening and closing different doors. The drones look for scrap in rooms to gather, which is used to build modules.
The rooms are all numbered, the doors are all numbered the drones are all numbered. You control the drones and parts of the ship you have access to through command line options, which have shorthand equivalents. e.g. (the below is mostly from google/gemini since I didn't want to go look them all up to remember)
navigate 1 r2 — Moves drone 1 to room 2.
navigate all r1 — Sends all active drones back to room 1 (the docking bay).
move 3 r4 — Uses the shorthand move instead of typing out navigate.
d12 — Toggles (opens or closes) door 12.
a2 — Toggles airlock 2.
close d1 d2 — Explicitly closes doors 1 and 2.
close all — Closes every single powered door on the ship immediately.
close r3 — Closes all doors attached to room 3.
gather — Tells the active drone to harvest nearby scrap metal.
gather all — Orders the drone to systematically harvest all scrap in its current room.
generator — Connects a drone to a power inlet to restore power to a room's grid.
interface — Connects a drone to a powered terminal to extract ship logs or systems.
tow 2 — Forces drone 2 to attach to or detach from a salvageable object (like an upgrade or broken drone).
stealth — Actives the stealth utility to move through rooms undetected by infestations.
You can string multiple commands together sequentially by separating them with a semicolon (;). Each drone operates its queue in parallel.
navigate 1 r3; gather all; navigate 1 r1 — Drone 1 goes to room 3, sucks up all the scrap, and drives back to safety.
navigate 2 r4; tow 2; navigate 2 r1 — Tells drone 2 to go to room 4, hook up a towable item, and pull it back to the airlock.
Last time I tried it, you needed a mac if you wanted to:
- use AoT compilation (IL2CPP) instead of JIT
- use any native libraries (or use any assets that depend on native libraries)
- sign your executable
And that was before Apple Silicon, I would be surprised if it's gotten any easier
I guess I might try again with the game, but asking here I could get moderate spoilers without a complete spoiler.
title is misleading if not abusive of our time
I have another comment on this post which goes into more detail about what those commands look like if that's interesting to you at all.
I found the original game to be quite fun. It's mostly about solving logical puzzled about how to safely navigate the wrecks, and given you have very limited signals about what's going on, can be stressful and engrossing.
I even found some shell constructs to work beyond what the game documented/ explained to me
[0] https://steamcommunity.com/app/1883920/discussions/0/6897422...
If this is something the dev can reasonably fix by changing their game, then it'd be good for them to do so. Looking at the discussion in the thread, it looks like the dev is actively working to fix this for everyone, and not just the subset of folks that he fixed it for.
However, if this doesn't happen on Windows, I'd argue that it's a bug that needs to be reported against and fixed in Wine/Proton/Crossover.