Dream Engines: Nomad Cities News

Citizens,

I hope everyone is safe and healthy. I'd like to tell you about some of the stuff we've been working on lately, and invite you to sign up to our newsletter so you can be the first to hear when we start alpha testing. It's not far, I'm already happy with our latest internal build that provides many hours of fun.


A lot of our recent work is testing, tweaking, balancing, and changing stuff to make sure the game is more and more fun with every iteration. That's hard work, and not a lot to show for it. But there are other bigger things that we've been working on, that are a bit more interesting to show and tell.

[h2]Infrastructure upgrades - our version of a skill tree[/h2]
Skill trees are a great tool in RPGs that allow players to customize and optimize the game to make the most of their preferred play style. Some strategy games have it too, in the form of an upgrade tree, and we decided that Dream Engines, combining both strategy and player-controlled combat, could greatly benefit from one.

So, how do we do this? We decided not to have you grinding for XP by killing enemies or doing repetitive quests. Instead, you will need to build and optimize your city's industry, and produce components that allow you to upgrade your infrastructure. In other words, to level up, you need to build your city and choose to spend resources on infrastructure production.



Every time you upgrade your infrastructure, your level will increase, you will get a point to spend, and the cost in parts for the next upgrade increases. You can then spend those points in one of several infrastructure areas, such as resource gathering, economy, your mech's combat capabilities, and survival.

Every point you spend on infrastructure provides passive bonuses in that area. Once you've spent enough points in an area, you can then choose to unlock powerful perks that give more significant and unique advantages.



[h2]Building upgrades[/h2]
An option to upgrade buildings to higher levels was added. Upgrading is more expensive and requires more advanced resources, compared to just building more of the same. However, upgraded buildings are much more efficient, don't waste any more space in your city, and upgrading a building adds much less weight than building another one.

[h2]Fuel and weight[/h2]
We finally got to adding fuel and weight management. If things get too dangerous, you can pack up and fly away whenever you want, so there's nothing to worry about and you can't lose. Or can you?

We've added weight management, so whenever you build something in the city, it adds to the weight that you need to lift when flying away to a new location. Turrets and walls are especially heavy, so you may have to choose between building them in the city so you can take them with you when you leave, or save space and fuel by building them outside, abandoning them when you leave.

You can also build more engines to carry the extra weight, but those also increase the fuel costs of taking off. Oh yeah, we've also added fuel. Fuel can be produced from rare Acid Shards, if you manage to find some, or alternatively by spending Flux (the most basic resource, kinda like money in most city-building games). But it won't be cheap, so you can't really just fly from place to place, you'll have to stand your ground and defend your city for a while, searching for resources and allowing your economy to generate the resources you need.



[h2]New content[/h2]
While I'm working on mechanics, balancing, and game systems, our hard-working art team is constantly creating new content. We have new enemies, defensive turrets, resources, production facilities, and a brand new biome - the desert biome.

Here are a few images of the new content we've added.

New Enemy - Beeclops:



New Resource - Acid Shards:



New Building - Workshop:



New Desert Biome:





As we prepare for our alpha phase, we need to work a lot on UX and polish. Make sure that the players get all the information they need, and understand how to do what they want to do. We also need to make sure there's good balance and plenty of content for them to play with.

I'll post some more of what we've been up to in the near future, and show some more of our progress.

Citizens, I have some interesting news for you. After a lot of deliberation we made a big decision - Dream Engines will feature a player-controlled character (a steampunkish mech, actually).

This decision brings some significant changes to our vision for the game, and I'd like to tell you a bit more about what it means, and why we came to conclude this is the best option for us.

I would really like to hear what you think, so after reading, please post a comment and share your thoughts with us.


The main change to the game is in how you players interact with the world. Instead of having a free-roaming camera that you can move wherever you want in an instant, you will interact with the world through a single character. A good reference for such a control scheme is Factorio. The camera angle will remain strategic from above.

The main emphasis remains on building and defending your flying city, but this change adds a whole new set of systems and another purpose for you city's economic and industrial infrastructure - mech customization and progression. You'll need a strong economy to support all the weapons, armor, and upgrade modules your mech needs to survive and further your goals. There's a new crafting system (in addition to the automated resource-production in the city), consumables, active and passive abilities, and much more.


Read below to find out a bit more about some of the changes and new stuff we've added since my last update. It's been a while since that update, so there's a lot of new stuff. I'll only write about some of it in this post, and post additional updates in the coming weeks.

[h3]City building & economy[/h3]
City building and economy remain a main focus of the game. There will be no significant changes here, except for the way you interact with the buildings (you approach them instead of clicking on them).

Now, however, the city's economy and production capabilities will have an additional objective - produce mateials to support your mech's growing demands, and in turn your mech will defend the city and acquire the resources it needs to survive and expand.


[h3]Exploration and resource gathering[/h3]
This part of the game will benefit most from the new control scheme. Instead of right clicking and waiting for your units to move, you will be in the shoes of the explorer, you will experience every new discovery as soon as it is discovered, and you will have hands-on control over the movement and survival of your explorer.

We will also be able to add more stuff in the world you can interact with such as scavenging ancient ruins and raiding monster nests.

For now, we've added small resources that you can manually gather, and resource drops when you kill enemies with your mech. The larger resource nodes can be collected by building harvester buildings, but you'll have to guard them while they work, as they attract enemy creatures and will be attacked.

Later down the road you unlock slower, automated harvesters that yield more resources and will deliver them directly to the city. These do not attract enemy attention so you can build them and move on.

[h3]Crafting[/h3]
With the player character having its own inventory, it made sense to add a crafting mechanic, which is more fitting for crafting items in small amounts than the automated production-line of the city. Setting up conveyor-belt-style transportation to produce a single copy of a weapon just doesn't make sense.

So now, city production lines are used mostly to refine resources, ammunition, supplying your citizen needs, energy, research, and other stuff that require continuous production. Consumables & equipment are created through the crafting system using resources from the player character's inventory.

(User interface design will probably change)

[h3]Upgrade Modules[/h3]
The mech (and later on maybe the city core) will have slots where you can install upgrade modules for unique bonuses. Customize your equipment and modules to fit your play-style. For example, the beserker module increases melee damage by 50% but also increases damage taken by 75%. This module will allow you to explore and clear enemies much faster, at the cost of taking more damage.

[h3]Player-controlled Units[/h3]
This is one of the significant changes due to the new control scheme - there will no longer be player-controlled units (maybe we will add some autonomous units later down the road). You will still be able to build static defenses to protect your city, but you won't have mobile combat units. Instead, your mech will do all the exploration and offensive fighting.

[h3]Pacing[/h3]
With the new control scheme, we reduced the pacing a bit. Attacks on your base will be a bit less frequent (at least at first, until you are able to set up your defenses), and you will have more time on each map before you are overwhelmed and need to move on. The difficulty increase will also be slower, allowing for more breathing space and more time to get your city in order.

[h3]What kind of combat?[/h3]
This is far from final, we're testing and tweaking and fine-tuning and may completely change it. But, for now, we've decided to have a more survival-feeling, thoughtful combat system, and not hack-n-slash. Player skill and how you fight should play a part, but more in a strategic/tactical way than agility and quick reflexes. We want the combat to be very much dependent on how you prepare, your mech build, and your choices in combat, and less focused on pressing the dodge button at exactly the right moment (so far we didn't even add a dodge button).

Correct use of active abilities, having the right setup for the enemies that you are facing - these should be the main factors. We don't want a player with starter gear to be able to defeat high-tier enemies just because they are super-skilled with lightning reflexes.




Before I finish with this update, I'd like to share a little of what brought us to the decision of adding a player-controlled character.

The main reason, if I'm honest, was that I was having significant difficulties in getting the main game loop to flow smoothly and feel interesting enough. One of the major advantages of having a mobile city is that you always have new areas to explore, new resources to find, new locations to scavenge. But it also has the drawback of limiting the city's interaction with the environment - your city-building is mostly separate from the map, since the map keeps changing.

So we need to make the most of our advantage, and, unfortunately, an RTS-style control scheme is not the best suited for this. Exploration and scavenging is much more interesting when you control your movement directly, always seeing the new areas that are uncovered, than it is when you just right-click to send a group of units and wait for them to reach.

That was the main driver for this decision, but there were more. Having an upgradable mech adds a lot of interesting choices on how to spend those resources, a significant incentive to make your city more efficient and productive, and a lot of personalization and customization options. You get to directly feel every small improvement you make.

(User interface design will probably change)

And last but not least, this control scheme opens the game up for the possibility of co-op multiplayer and console porting. Multiple players, each with their own mech, their own inventory, all working together to build and defend the biggest, most powerful flying city out there. Please note that we are not currently working on or planning to launch with multiplayer, but controlling a character definitely makes it easier and more likely down the road. No promises.


In the next update I will talk about some of the other stuff that we've added, but this post is already very long. These include building upgrades, skills, a new biome, many new enemy creatures, the research system, and more.

Once again, thank you for reading, and I'd really like to hear your thoughts. Post some comments.

Loyal citizens, hi there and welcome.

Another month went by since our previous post in which I described Dream Engines' gameplay in more detail. Let me share some of what we’ve been up to since then. In this post I’ll tell you about some of what we’ve been doing and also share some insights into our thought process and reasoning behind some important design decisions.

My main goal this past month was to reach a point in which a collection of mechanics and interfaces ceases to be just that, and starts feeling like a game that is actually fun to play. I needed the game to become challenging, and allow players to create intrinsic goals (objectives that you set for yourselves, such as researching a certain key technology).

If you have any more questions, Feel free to ask in the discussions page or in our discord, and I’ll answer as best I can. And if you haven't yet, please wishlist & follow us to stay in touch!



For our first Early Access release, the main gameplay mode will be Survival mode.

In survival mode your goal is to survive, expand, and progress, playing in a different random generated world each time. While this mode will be mostly sandbox-style without a story to guide you, we plan to have one or more victory conditions which you can achieve to win the game. We plan to allow for different difficulty levels and perhaps other “modifiers” that affect how you play the game each time.

This mode makes most sense for the earlier versions of the game, since it has limited scope, is fairly easy to change, and provides a lot of replay value.




Most of the game plays on a “local map” that is randomly generated every time the city lands, until the player decides to take off and travel to a new location. One of the biggest questions we’ve had since the start of the project was “how long will players play on each map” before moving on?

This simple question shapes a lot of the game. Can players take their time, and move at their own pace? Explore a map and exploit all its resources before moving to a new one? Or should they be pressed for time, dealing with increasing threats, and always being on the move?

We finally came to a conclusion that the best way to create a feeling of threat and survival is through faster pacing. A faster pace also allows for quicker games, and more willingness to start over after losing, which is important for the game to be replayable.

Therefore each landing will have a very limited time window (10-15 minutes real-time) in which the player will race to exploit as many resources as possible, before being pounded by massive waves of powerful enemies. Every time the city travels, the game gets harder and harder, and if the city’s progress is too slow, it will very likely be annihilated before long.

Note that the game will still feature active-pause, so the faster pace doesn’t mean you can’t stop and think. It just means you have to be efficient and make wise choices.




One super important element in both making the game fun and in providing replay value is generating interesting maps. The map is one of the most critical random elements, and when not generated correctly, all playthroughs may feel similar to one another and replayability is lost.

This is a mistake I made in our previous game, Judgment, and am keen on avoiding now. While there are random maps in Judgment, they don’t really matter enough to affect your choices. Luckily we have other more interesting elements such as random survivors that make up for it.

So, I spent a lot of time this month in researching and testing new map generation methods. I needed both interesting shapes - providing interesting tactical choices - and smart distribution of enemies/resources - random enough to make playthroughs different from each other, but also making sure it’s always fair and balanced. Tough challenge.

The best solution I found was to build a map made of many interconnected “islands” of open territory, surrounded by blocked areas. This creates an interesting open-air dungeon-like map in which larger areas have limited access points that the player can defend or explore.

The way the resources are distributed on islands makes the map much more interesting and more uniform than our previous topography-based map. Players don’t just randomly move units anymore, there are now clear “paths” to explore, and points of interest guarded by enemies.




Before, the enemies that were scattered around the world and those that raided your city were there same. These enemies were fairly strong (as strong as 2 of your units, more or less), fast, and had relatively long attack range. These made for interesting raids, especially later in the game, because the enemy waves reached the city quickly and delivered a suitable challenge for the city’s stationary defences.

These enemies, however, made poor mobs on the map. They were so strong that the players had to send all their units in one big group to minimize loss. That made for slow-paced exploration, exploring areas one by one with a lot of dead time. Moreover, they were so strong that we had to keep their numbers small, and then a lot of the map was just empty.

Instead, we now have new types of enemies for spawning around the map (we don't have their art yet, so no screenshots here). These are much slower and short ranged. You can send smaller groups to explore several areas at once, and only send larger forces to clear areas that are strategically important. These enemies will damage and destroy your units in large numbers, but in smaller numbers all they do is delay and hinder your exploration.


A month ago, early-game attack waves were repelled using your mobile units, and you didn’t need to (actually couldn’t) build walls or turrets until later on. That did not work so well.

For one, you had to recall your exploring units to base whenever you were attacked, or leave your city defenseless. This added a lot of dead time in which you just watched your units traveling from their faraway locations to the city and back.

There was also a huge jump in your defensive capabilities when unlocking stationary defenses. It was very hard to balance attack waves around this, they were either too easy once you built defenses, or too hard before you did so.

So I added lower tier defenses that are unlocked from the start. They are also cheap enough so that you feel comfortable building them outside, protecting choke points leading to the city, and abandoning them when you take off.


On the art side, our artists Yoni and Peter made a lot of improvements and performance optimizations to our visuals, and are always creating new content for future use. Here’s some concept art of ancient ruins that we’ll be adding to the game. These will provide important benefits to those able to exploit them.




I now feel that we are finally there, and when playing Dream Engines actually feels like a real game - it keeps me interested and I no longer just play because I have to, I actually enjoy the challenge. Finally!

Now we will build on top of that, add content and features that will expand on the base that we have built, add more flavor and increase the enjoyment. This is definitely a big step in the right direction, but there’s still much work to be done.

I really hope to start external playtesting soon, we’ll be sure to let you all know when you can apply. If you’re interested in more frequent updates and peeks into our progress, you can join our discord and follow us on Twitter.

- Tomer and the Suncrash team

Ahoy, citizens!

I know you've been waiting for an update for a long time, my apologies for that. It's a real challenge for me to to take a step back from the millions of development tasks and find the time to write updates, but I'll try to do it more often.

My goal with this post is for you to better understand what Dream Engines is really about and how it plays. After reading you should be able to better imagine what it will be like to play the game, and hopefully you’ll get even more hyped about it! I’ll also explain our current state of development, and give a very rough timeline for the future.

Please do keep in mind that we’re not even in alpha yet, so everything may change. We are putting quality and your enjoyment above all else, so if we see something is not working out or find a better way of doing things, we’ll change them - nothing is set in stone.

If you have any more questions, Feel free to ask in the discussions page or in our discord, and I’ll answer as best I can. And if you haven't yet, please wishlist & follow us to stay in touch!

So, what is Dream Engines about?

It’s a game about building a flying city in order to survive in a hostile world.

Sounds simple enough, but survival in Dream Engines will be far from simple. You will often find yourselves with no other choice except to retreat and fly away with your entire city to stay ahead of the swarms that want to destroy you, and surviving with a nomadic lifestyle in a dark, dangerous world is a tough challenge.




Dream engines, at its base, is a city-building & real-time strategy game (with pause). For most of the game your city will be on the ground. That’s when you’ll be able to expand it and build new structures. You’ll train units to explore the surrounding areas, searching for and collecting raw materials, and fighting nightmare-born creatures. You’ll build and manage your city’s industry, research new technologies, and tend to your citizens’ needs. All this, while defending your city from attacks.

Unlike many similar games, however, you will never be able to get too comfortable. The more you stay in the same place, the harder it will get - until you are forced to fly away. You will be pressed for time, and need to get things done in the most efficient way possible. You’ll need your wit and nerves of steel to successfully lead a Nomad City.


Enemies will come banging at your door, and the longer you stay in the same place, the stronger they will get, until your turrets and walls will no longer be able to stop them. Nearby raw materials will deplete and you will have to venture further and further away, struggling to keep your people fed and your industry running. Weather and disasters will threaten to devastate your city.

Eventually, you will be left with no choice other than to pack your things and leave - launch your city into the skies and fly in search of greener pastures.




But in the world of Dream Engines, there is no such thing as greener pastures. There are many different biomes, each darker than the other. Everywhere you go, you will meet new challenges, but also opportunities to find rare resources, forgotten mysteries, and ancient technologies.

When traveling, you’ll be able to choose your destination from a world map, taking into consideration the risks and opportunities in each area, the different biomes, distance, and available fuel. Every time you land, a new random map will be generated, and you’ll be able to explore it in search of resources and special locations such as ruins of ancient civilizations, trading partners, and mysteries to uncover.




After landing, you will have a limited amount of time to search and gather raw materials. There are many different resources that undergo elaborate production chains before they can be used to expand your city, train units and research new technologies.

Gathered resources are sent back to your city, where you set-up automatic transport networks to move them between storage, factories and consumers. You will have full control of transportation by placing conveyor-belt style rail networks, on which automated minecarts will travel and deliver resources. Weight is an issue and space is limited in the flying cities, so efficient construction will be a priority.




The city’s flying ability, however, is not unlimited. Heavier cities need stronger engines which have to be researched and use more fuel. You will always face hard choices in balancing between long-term and short-term benefits. Will you spend more resources to expand your city and manage the extra weight, or will you build outside, knowing full well that those buildings will soon be left behind?




We’re planning a fairly fast pace to the game, but which will also include an active-pause system, so you can always stop time to think things through and give commands. The goal is to challenge your wit, not your reflexes, but we do plan it so the game will not have “slow periods” where you just want time to pass faster - and so no speed controls other than the active-pause.

You will always be exploring the area around you, controlling units in battle, defending your city, managing your industry, your resources, and making other life-or-death decisions.


The history and lore of the Dream Engines universe is something I am particularly excited about. As you play, you will discover new information and hints about the history of the world. It is an original world, fictional, dark and wacky, inspired by Tim Burton’s works among other things.

The game takes place many centuries after the destruction of the ancient civilizations by the nightmares that now infest the world, and all that remains are small wandering tribes, struggling to live another day. You’ll play the leader of the world’s first Nomad City - an entire mobile city that is also your last, best hope for survival.

I’ll elaborate more on the world’s lore in a future post, we’re still thinking much of it through, and some of it will only be revealed as you discover it in the game..

Development Progress

Now that you know a little more about the game, here’s a small update on the state of development. We’ve been working on Dream Engines almost exclusively since we released the full version of Judgment in May 2018. While progress is fairly good, the scope of this project is large, and we are a very small team (of 3).

At this point we do have a playable demo, but not fun enough to be called a “game”. All the systems such as production, transportation, upkeep, and construction are there. Procedural generation, exploration, combat, unit control - all these are in place. We already have a lot of visual assets ready, including two biomes, several units, and many different buildings and resources. We’re a bit behind with enemy design, as we only have one enemy creature so far.

For the moment, our main focus is to balance the early game content so that the first few hours of gameplay are a fun and thrilling experience. In order to get there, we started doing some very small-scale internal playtesting sessions where we physically stood behind players and watched them play.

Unfortunately, we discovered that before we can get meaningful insights from playtesting, we need to work on usability. We tried focusing on gameplay and fun before UX, but we found that players were unable to properly experience the gameplay when they were too distracted with struggling against controls they did not understand.

And so, we turned our attention to UX and teaching players how to play. We’ve just completed a basic and short standalone tutorial that explains the most important aspects of the game - namely how to build your industry and transport network - a crucial part of the game that is also the most non-trivial. We also added a hints & tips network that will explain more advanced aspects of the game, improved our UI, and added tons of in-game indicators and tooltips.

We now believe that new players will be able to quickly understand the basics and we hope we will now be able to get more insights about the gameplay itself and the balancing. We have another playtesting session in the next couple of weeks.

Our mid-term goal is to begin closed pre-alpha playtesting with you guys. We still haven’t decided how we will organize this, but if you’d like to be considered for these tests, don’t forget to join our discord and sign up to our newsletter. We hope to start this in the next few months and are preparing for an Early Access launch in 2020 - but our highest priority is quality, and we will only launch when we feel the game is ready and polished enough to be enjoyed by you guys in EA.

I hope you liked this update and better understand what the game is about. If you’re interested in more frequent updates and peeks into our progress, you can join our discord and follow us on Twitter.

- Tomer and the Suncrash team