Dream Engines: Nomad Cities News

Overseers,

The outskirts update is a significant change in how you play the game. It was mainly directly influenced by feedback we got from alpha players, that there's too much focus on walking around and fighting with your character, while not enough city building. I consider dream engines primarily a city-building game, above the action and exploration aspects, so I spent a hefty amount of time trying to analyze and figure out how we got here, and what can be done about it.

The outskirts is a step in the right direction. The main idea is that you can now build most of the buildings, including your industry, outside of the city (the 'outskirts'), and that you are now able to and even encouraged to take over additional areas of the map, build there, and defend those areas. The main difficulty we faced in that aspect is that every time you fly, you are forced to abandon a good portion of your buildings, which are built outside. So I had to re-balance the entire economy, making basic buildings much cheaper and easier to build, and made map stays longer, to make it worthwhile building outside, temporarily enjoying a stronger economy, and then scrapping some of these buildings before leaving.

This change also puts more emphasis on the need to balance between short-term, cheap constructions outside the city, which you benefit greatly from, but only for a short time, and building within your city or expanding it, for slower, but longer-term bonuses that stay with you forever. It was always our intention for you to make these kinds of meaningful choices, but it was somewhat diminished along the way, and I am happy that it is now much more significant.





As always, I'd like to thank all our early supporters and all of you who sent us feedback. If you haven't joined our alpha yet, check out our supporters page to find out more.

Below is a list of the most significant changes in this update. You can see the full list of changes in this link.

Note: Since the change is so significant, saves from previous alpha versions are not supported. If you wish to continue your old games, you can still play the older version by selecting Alpha 1 or 2 from the betas tab on Steam.

[h2]The outskirts - building outside the city[/h2]
To make the city-building aspect of the game more meaningful and a part you focus more on, we needed to add more building space, and make the environment you build in have more impact on how you build, otherwise every game can turn out the same. Since the main city area is pretty much static, we turned to the outskirts - building outside your main city platform.

Almost all buildings and infrastructure (like rails) can now be built outside the city. The starting city area is now much smaller, each section you add is also smaller, but also less expensive and available earlier in the game, so long-term you can still achieve large city sizes and take more buildings with you, if you choose to spend your resources on that. Choosing which buildings to take with you when you leave is now a real dilemma, but you can move almost all buildings at any time, including moving them inside or outside your city, so your decisions are not permanent.

To support this change in gameplay, encouraging you to build more without having to feel too bad about leaving things behind (though you can scrap them and get 50% of the building materials back), we had to significantly reduce both the costs and effectiveness of production buildings. The basic production buildings such as wood-warpers, farms, flux vats and power generators are now much cheaper to build and to maintain, but also produce less (without upgrades). This encourages you to build and optimize the area outside your city, and take over & defend new areas to expand. Defense costs have also been reduced accordingly to make it easier to defend larger areas of the map.



[h2]Raids and threat levels[/h2]
Our previous balancing was high-pressure & short-time, always giving you the feeling that you need to do something or be left behind. This created two problems with our new gameplay. One, you couldn't afford to spend a lot of time in the city building, planning and re-organizing, because you were always under pressure to explore and gather more resources. The other was that if your stay in each map is so short, then you aren't able to enjoy the benefits of what you build outside before you have to abandon it, and you can't exploit much of the map.

So, while we kept some of this pressure, and you still need to progress fast enough or be unable to handle the swarms of Drep (except in relaxed mode) - we did mellow it down significantly. We increased the amount of time that you can spend in every map before you have to leave. We replaced the 4-threat-levels and the extreme threat stage (which basically meant you had to go or die horribly no matter how strong you were).

Instead, threat levels are now a numeric value, starting at 0, and increasing as long as you stay in the same map. The higher the threat level, the stronger the raids on your city, but there is no hard limit in which you must leave, as long as you still have stuff to do on the map and the defensive capabilities to survive, you can stay. Once you fly away and land in a new map, the threat level will reset according to the new map's difficulty level.

[h2]Resource Harvesters[/h2]
You can now build harvesters from the start, and they are the only way to collect resources from the larger nodes, no more running around punching huge resource nodes. You can still destroy the smaller nodes for some extra resources.

Other than that, you can now build rails to send resources from the harvesters to your industry. Resource nodes also have a much larger yield, so they will last for a longer time, and once they are depleted, they still continue to generate resources, but at a much lower pace.

The resource elevator (renamed to resource drop-off) can still be unlocked to automate delivery of resources from harvesters to your industrial area, without having to build long winding rail tracks from faraway resources. It can now be built outside the city, or you could still build it on the edge of your city if you prefer.



[h2]Procedural Map Generation[/h2]
The map generation algorithm has been slightly changed, making most clearings smaller and having less exits. This means you will need to capture more areas in order to expand (since each area has limited construction space), but also makes them easier to defend. Resources are now also distributed a bit more evenly, and there are less of them (but they lost longer as mentioned before).



[h2]Refining[/h2]
In the outskirts update, you can no longer carry raw resources with you when they fly (they are too heavy or volatile). So just exploring and collecting resources will not do you much good, you must have a strong economy to support a massive industry, and refine as many of these resources before you leave. Currently there is no storage limit, so the more resources you refine the more you can take with you when you fly away.

These include purptatoes, raw copper, bloodwood logs, and raw featherstone (which you can now refine).



[h2]Building Add-ons[/h2]
Building add-ons are a new mechanic. They work somewhat similar to upgrading building levels, but they are not linear and their effect is usually more significant than just increasing production.

The flux vats and power generator are now very cheap to build and produce a much smaller amount of flux/power, but their basic recipe no longer requires any raw materials, so you can just build as many of them as you can afford outside the city. In the long-term, however, you want more productive buildings to take with you, that use less space in your limited city area. So both the flux vats and power generators have add-ons that you can unlock with research, which allow you to use more advanced recipes (using Star-Tar and other new resources) for much higher productivity.

These add-ons are much more expensive than the base building, so they are more suitable for long-term factories that you build in the city and take with you.

[h2]New Content[/h2]
We've added a few new buildings, such as the Stone Worker to process featherstone, and the Atmospheric Condenser that generates a gel substance from smoke, and can be used in more advanced power and research recipes. There's a new long-range power hub, which generates a power area around it, allowing you to build outposts without having to connect them to your main city via a vulnerable line of tesla towers.

Another new addition is a building repair kit, a consumable that lets you repair all buildings around your character, useful in a tough fight.





[h2]Got questions?[/h2]
Remember you can see the full list of changes on our website.

If you have any questions, join our discord and chat with the team!

Overseers,

The ruins update is our first major update since releasing the alpha of Dream Engines two months ago. In this update our focus was to address the main issues we identified in all the feedback our alpha players sent.

I'd like to once again thank all our early supporters and all of you who sent us feedback. It has been invaluable for improving the game, and I hope you enjoy this new build. If you haven't joined our alpha yet, check out our supporters page to find out more.

Below is a list of the most significant changes in this update. You can see the full list of changes in this link.

Note: Saves from alpha 1 are no longer supported. If you wish to continue your old games, you can still play the older version by selecting Alpha 1 from the betas tab on Steam.

[h2]Ruins, debris, and new content[/h2]
The largest change in this update is the addition of ancient ruins that you can find around the map. These ruins hold ancient machinery that can be used to craft unique equipment that can't be researched or crafted otherwise, or you can scrap the ruins for resources. Every map has one main ruins building, and every such building has a different selection of items, randomly chosen depending on the map difficulty and the type of ruins. There are 3 ruins types, and you can see which one will appear in each map in the destination selection window. You can only craft one item per ruins building (2 at higher difficulty maps), so you must choose carefully.



To craft items at these ruins, you'll need various resources, including the new "Old-world Scraps" resource. These scraps can be found in debris that we added for you to destroy all around the map, by destroying the smaller ruins around the main ruins building, or by scrapping the main building instead of crafting in it.

Some of the items that can be crafted at the ruins are unique and can have a significant impact on your game. This improves the game's replay value, by adding a random element that has significant effect on your game, yet is "nice to have", so you won't win or lose just because the gods of chance chose to give you this or that item. Some of these items include melee weapons that deal AOE damage, different variations of the starwood and copper armor that don't affect movement speed, and a repeating crossbow that has a very long range.

The more interesting items include "Modules" that can be installed in the character screen, but only one of each type can be active at any time. There are two types, one for the mech that provide combat or exploration bonuses (such as speed boost, beserker module, tank module, and a module that turns your ranged attacks to AOE), the other for the city (such as a module that reduces the rate at which the threat level increases, or makes your refineries "green" producing resources slower but using up less raw materials).

There are also special utility items, such as one that gives you extra infrastructure points (without increasing the upgrade parts cost of future upgrades), one that lets you expand your city area even before you research the relevant tech (and also doesn't increase the cost of the next expansion), a consumable that lets you place small turrets anywhere, and a construction kit that lets you build Tarbomb turrets - AOE turrets to protect your city.

[h2]Avoiding enemy shots[/h2]
Originally we aimed to make the combat more dependant on your equipment, abilities and stats rather than skill. However, we heard your feedback, almost everyone that played the game complained to the fact that ranged enemy attacks always hit even if you moved away. So now you can avoid enemy shots.

This has some balancing implications. Ranged enemies now have faster rate of fire (and also a small penalty in damage but overall their DPS is higher), and we also increased the walls health to make up for it (walls can't avoid shots). Your steambot's melee attacks now deal significantly more damage than ranged attacks, to make up for the inability to evade shots at melee range. Melee enemies now have faster attack animations and a lower attack range, so they always hit if you enter their range.



[h2]Fuel, glow honey, the cauldron[/h2]
Fuel now becomes a more meaningful element of your economy. Instead of just crafting it from Flux, you now need to find a new resource (Glow Honey) after researching the correct tech, in order to produce fuel at a new building called The Cauldron.

Glow honey, unlike other resources, can only be collected through a harvester that you need to research, so you can't just punch it to collect. It also never runs out, so once you find a node and build a harvester, the longer you can protect it and stay in the map, the more of it you can collect. On the other hand, glow honey is harvested much slower than other resources, so you do need to find it early and collect as much of it as you can. Fuel crafting is also very slow, much slower than collecting glow honey, so your cauldrons will continue working even when you are unable to collect the resource.

Glow honey only appears at difficulty levels 3 or higher, so you need to keep an eye on your fuel reserves before you are advanced enough to survive in those levels. When relaxed mode is on, you start with more fuel, so you can explore more landing locations before having to reach level 3 to get fuel, and you can also find fuel in some ruins to stretch that even longer.

All in all, fuel is now a more significant resource, and it will become even more significant once we implement the explorable world map system in later updates.



[h2]Difficulty customization, scoring, and Ironman mode[/h2]
We received a lot of feedback on the game's difficulty, and not all of it was the same. Some thought that it was good as it was, others felt it was too hard and preferred a bit less of a challenge when they're just getting started. A few even felt it was too easy. So it seemed there was no one size fits all solution to this - the best option was to let you choose how you want to experience the game.

From now, when starting a new game, there are many options to customize the difficulty level. These include control of the map size (larger maps are considered harder because they take more time to explore and have more empty areas), the amount of enemies you will face, how fast the threat level increases, how fast the global infestation level increases (including the relaxed mode which means that global infestation does not increase over time), and a very important Ironman mode which is on by default.

Each difficulty setting will affect your score multiplier, and at the end of every game, win or lose, you will be scored according to you achievements in the game, and that score will be multiplied by the difficulty multiplier.

The new Ironman mode will be on by default, this is how the game was meant to be played. It means that you have a single save file per game, which is automatically overwritten every time you exit the game. If you lose, the save file is deleted. Still, for those of you who prefer to have the option to save, try something, then reload if it fails - you can turn this mode off in the new game difficulty settings.



[h2]Intersections and resource controls[/h2]
There are two important additions to your resource management options. One is intersections - whenever you build two rail sections so that they cross each other, an intersection will be created to allow carts from these two sections to cross one another without creating a traffic jam. Two carts can move in the intersection tile at the same time from different directions, and this allows for much better rail system planning.

The other addition grants you the ability to determine how much of a certain resource needs to be available in the storage building before it is sent out to a specific output slot. For example, you can create an output that sends bloodwood planks to the workshop for the production of upgrade parts, only if you have at least 50 planks remaining in storage. That way you always make sure you have at least 50 planks for building walls and turrets. You can then add another output slot for planks for producing Starwood, and this time set the limit to 60. That means that if there is a shortage of planks, they will be used for upgrade parts first, and only then turned to starwood.



[h2]Tesla cells & acid shards[/h2]
Tesla cells are no longer crafted from Livewire (dropped by tier 2 cable snake enemies). Instead, they are produced in the workshop, and use a large amount of power plus some acid shards. Tesla cells were also made a more significant part of the economy, used not only to craft a weapon or two, but instead they are used in several building upgrades, equipment, and equipment upgrades.

Since Tesla cells are now produced from Acid Shards, and are now more widely used, we also added an acid shard harvester building to automate gathering this resource and increase the yield of each node.

Since Livewire is no longer used to craft Tesla cells, we had to find new uses for it, so we added more advanced crafting recipes for the Remote Surge AOE attack consumable, and for starwood & copper repair kits. These advanced versions cost livewire in addition to the regular resources, and deal / heal more damage. There is also a new crafting recipe to process Drep parts for flux, that uses livewire to enhance its efficiency.



[h2]Materializer[/h2]
This new building allows production of featherstone and bloodwood logs directly in the city, without having to search for resoruce nodes. It only uses renewable resources such as flux, tar and purptatoes - however it is expensive to build and maintain. If your economy is strong enough, this building can significantly reduce the time you have to spend exploring and harvesting these resources.



[h2]Moving towers?[/h2]
You can now move defensive towers between raids. As long as there is no active raid or upcoming raid marker on the map, you can move these towers and re-organize your city.

[h2]Got questions?[/h2]
Remember to check the full list of changes on our website.

If you have any questions, join our discord and chat with the team!

Citizens,

We’re very excited to announce that Dream Engines is finally entering its alpha phase! Head on to our website or discord to find out more about the alpha and how to participate. All alpha participants will get a steam key.



[h2]Official Steam Release[/h2]
We changed our release date on Steam according to our updated plan: to continue with the alpha phase - polishing the game, adding more content, and new systems based on alpha players’ feedback - for about 4 months and then release the game on Steam early access around March 2021. These plans may change depending on what we see in the alpha.

[h2]Got questions?[/h2]
Join our discord and chat with the team!

Citizens,

Welcome to the last dev update before we start our alpha phase, more on that in the next couple of weeks. Don't forget to sign up to our newsletter so you can hear about it first.

You can also follow us on Twitter and join our Discord.


Other than all the development efforts, some of which we'll describe below, since our last update we've also been working hard on preparations for the alpha phase. That includes a new gameplay trailer (which is ready and waiting to be released!) and other marketing related activities, such as preparing press lists, posts, a website, and so on.

Here are some of the main development updates since our previous post.



[h2]Research Screen[/h2]
There were several options I considered for implementing the research screen. One was a simple list of research subjects with new topics added/removed as you progress, then there were different types of graphs and trees, and I also considered dividing research to categories like we did in Judgment.

One of my favorite options was that instead of researching "Subjects", you would research specific items. So you'd research a "Power Plant" building, or a "Cannon" crafting recipe. I really liked the simplicity of this idea, and it would be nice on the eyes - a tree of simple icons, each representing something that you can unlock.

Unfortunately, I found that it wasn't a perfect match for our needs. Sometimes it didn't make sense to have separate researches for separate items (like wall & gate), and it made it that much harder to build a graph with reasonable dependencies when each node in the graph could only be one item, and every single item in the game (except those you start with) required their own node.

I did manage to maintain the idea for the most part. The idea I went with is a horizontal scrolling graph, a bit like in Civilization 5 & 6 - but for the most part, each research subject unlocks a single entity. However, many of these entities include a "companion" entity. For example, when you unlock the Smelter building, you also unlock the Copper Ingot production recipe.



[h2]The Dream Nullifier[/h2]
While I do love sandbox games with a lot of freedom, I usually prefer that this freedom be accompanied by some sort of end goal, that you can actually win the game. Even if it's a sandbox sort of victory - Civilization is a good example for this kind of victory - you can theoretically continue playing forever, but there are several goals that you can reach to achieve different types of victory.

So, in the pre-release version of Dream Engines, we added one such victory condition - the Dream Nullifier building. This building is at the end of the tech tree, expensive to build and to upkeep, weighs a lot, and takes quite some time to activate - while having to defend it from enemy raids. But once it is built and activated and fully charged - it will create a safe zone in which you and your people can find safety. You no longer have to fly from place to place.

Later down the road we're also thinking of adding different starting scenarios - leader skills, clan selection, and other things you can unlock between games - so that even after winning the game you will still have new challenges ahead of you in the form of starting over under different circumstances and gameplay changes.



[h2]City Inhabitants[/h2]
In the visuals area, the main element that gave life to the city were the transport carts that were constantly hauling resources from one building to another. This gave it a factory feel, which is great for a steampunk industrial flying city, but it was a bit lacking in the "city" part of the aesthetics. So we added inhabitants walking around.

These little people help liven up and add some color to the city, as well as provide a better sense of scale. Almost all the elements in the game are oversized (like the transport carts that are the size of a small truck), but it wasn't obvious enough. With the small people walking around, the scale of everything is a bit more prominent.



[h2]Other changes[/h2]
Other changes include many tweaks to balance, difficulty and progress speed, but we also added quite a few changes that improved the general feel of the game. Foremost among these, we added combat sound effects to all buildings and enemies, and three new music scores. Loot from destroying enemies and resources is now scattered on the floor when destroying the asset, which you can pick up by simply moving next to it (before it went straight to your inventory).

We also added some animated tutorials, and a "Strategic View" which when toggled on switches to a top-down view and shows the levels of each building, allowing you to quickly upgrade them without having to walk and interact with them directly. We'll expand this mode in the future to include other common operations and different information layers.

There's also a new Milestones system now. This system appears when you finish the tutorial (or at the start if the tutorial is disabled), and it provides several different objectives for you to achieve (the next 3 are displayed at any given time). These objectives help guide you and teach you some of the more advanced mechanics of the game, without behaving like an actual "do this, do that" tutorial. You can choose to follow these objectives or not (you'll likely achieve many of them even if you don't follow them specifically), they're completely optional, but they do help figuring out how the game works.

Last but not least, we modified the appearance of the enemies in the game, to go for a bit of a darker, more grim look. We considered pitch-dark with glowing elements at first (shadow enemies), but that was a bit too limiting and made it hard for players to recognize which enemy they are facing, so we ended up going with darkish but still visible.




What's next? Dream Engines alpha, and then Early Access. We actually meant to start the alpha phase already, but then the Steam Game Festival came along and shuffled all the cards, so we had to adjust our plans. This will be the last dev update before the alpha, so stay tuned and in the next couple of weeks expect an announcement.

If you'd like to take part, please sign up to our newsletter, that will be the best way to remain appraised of developments in this area.

Thank you for your time, I hope you enjoyed this update, and as always, I'm happy to read your comments or chat with you on Discord.

Citizens,

Gather around, we have a few new stories to show and tell, from our latest work on Dream Engines.
Remember to sign up to our newsletter so you can be the first to hear when we start alpha testing.

You can also follow us on Twitter or Facebook.


Since our last update, we took some significant steps in the visuals department, getting ready to produce our first gameplay trailer as we prepare to start an alpha period. We also, as always, continue balancing, tweaking, and adding new content and systems. Keep reading to hear more about some of the larger changes and challenges we faced recently.

[h2]Publisher or not?[/h2]
Ever since we announced Dream Engines, we have been contacted by a fair share of publishers and investors, some large and famous, others small and boutique, asking whether we were interested in working with them. Some of these offers seemed like both sides could benefit from a partnership, and we seriously considered these options.

Being able to focus on development and having to worry less about marketing and business development would have been very nice, but as everything in life, it comes with a price. Not just a monetary price tag, but also some loss of flexibility and control over what goes on with our game, among other things.

In the end, after serious considerations and discussions, we've decided we'll be self-publishing Dream Engines like we did with our previous game, Judgment. We'll probably need to hire some help with marketing, but I believe this is the right course for us, given all considerations and offers on the table.

Not exactly an update on the game development, but this is something that I've been spending quite some time and mental resources on lately, so I decided to share. This also served as a motivating factor for us, because many of the organizations we've been in touch with received a build of the game and liked it enough to want to invest in it, which is a good sign that the gameplay, though far from final, meets the expectations.

[h2]Mech appearance[/h2]
Designing a mech that would serve as your main character was a struggle. As a small team, our resources are limited, so we wanted something that would be visually appealing, but not require too many resources to manage and animate. We also wanted it to support our wacky, steampunkish style. This is what we eventually came up with.



This design allows us to replace the mech's arms, according to the weapons you have equipped, and it allows for whimsical movement animations. I hope you like it, let us know what you think.



[h2]Active abilities[/h2]
To make combat and character building a bit more interesting, we added a new system for active character abilities, abilities that you can trigger manually when you choose to. In addition to the repair kits (aka med-kits) that we had from the start, we now added a system that lets us add any kind of active ability, each with its own audio, visual effects, and gameplay mechanics.

Teleport to city

There are currently two ways to gain active abilities. One is through consumable items that you craft or find, and that you then spend to activate the ability. Repair kits are a great example, but we also have a decoy to attract enemy fire, an AOE attack, and more. The second option is to acquire abilities through our infrastructure upgrades (similar to a skill tree in RPGs).

Both types have a cooldown, and I am still considering whether to add a way to limit the latter through some kind of mana-like mechanic - an energy bar that charges over time and is required to use abilities. This limitation can help balance but also add some interest into character-building and lead to interesting ability-based builds.

Surge AOE attack

[h2]User interface design[/h2]
Up until now our user interface was something temporary that was quickly designed internally. While we have two talented artists in our team, none of them specializes in user interfaces, so we kept it minimal and functional. This is the main reason we rarely shared user-interface elements in our screenshots and videos.

In the past month we've worked with a graphic designer that is experienced in user interface design, who finally helped us achieve a properly designed UI - both functional and visually appealing, and we can finally share it in our screenshots.

We're also changing the way our research tree works, replacing the list of currently available techs with a proper tree, so stay tuned for some more updates on that soon.



[h2]Making raids more interesting[/h2]
One of the gameplay / balancing challenges that we've been facing is how to make attacks on your city interesting and tense without becoming too much of a chore. We want to keep players on-edge, we want you to worry about the safety of your city, but we also don't want you to have to micro-manage and manually defend the city with your mech character.

We took several steps to improve this aspect of the game. First, we removed the progress bar that previously showed exactly when an attack would happen. Adding some uncertainty encourages players to make sure their city is always defended. There is still some advance notice so you can prepare, but you don't know exactly when it will happen.

Second, we reduced the amount of attacks, but made them more meaningful. Each attack will now consist of several waves one after another, instead of a single group. Just making the attack stronger would break the balance, but making it stronger while also spread over a longer period of time makes the attacks more meaningful without breaking the balance. If your defenses are too weak, the damage you will suffer will be more significant, because the first few enemies will weaken them and the second wave will wreck havoc. On the other hand, if your defenses are powerful enough to handle attacks without taking too much damage, then additional waves will not make them more likely to fall.

Last, we worked on balancing and tweaking the defenses. Mainly, we made them a little less expensive and decreased their weight, allowing you to build more of them in the city that would move with you as you fly.



[h2]Enemy AI[/h2]
We're keeping the enemy AI fairly simple, but we did make some significant improvements. Before, the enemies raiding your city would follow the path towards the city core, and attack anything that enters their attack range. You could attack them from outside their range and they would just move on. Now, enemies will move as a group, slowly, towards your city so the fast enemies won't arrive before all the others. In addition, they have an "aggro range", and if a target (building or unit) moves into it, they will break up, chase, and attack that target. This also adds the need to defend any resource collectors that happen to be on near the raiders' path.

We also added some additional tweaks and improvements, including many performance enhancements so we can support more enemy units on the map, and improved the behavior of the wandering enemies. There's still more we can do and plan to do with the AI, but we aim to keep them fairly simple for the most part, with predictable behavior that you can learn and adapt to. The challenge comes mainly in their numbers.


This covers some of our more significant changes and challenges we faced since the last update. Of coruse there's plenty more that we've done in the past two months, but this post is already long enough.

As for what's next - stay tuned, and in the next few weeks we'll let you know of our plans to start alpha testing. If you'd like to take part, please sign up to our newsletter, that will be the best way to remain appraised of developments in this area.