Duskers, the scary command line game, is getting a sequel
elbowgreasegames.substack.com148 points by spacemarine1 a day ago
148 points by spacemarine1 a day ago
Duskers is absolutely amazing - huge recommendation to anybody that hasn't played it. But it comes with one huge downside. In the game you play a drone commander who's guiding drones exploring various derelicts and other locations after some catastrophic event, to try to figure out what happened. But the frustrating part is that there is no answer - there's a number of various explanations that you explore in the game, but no final resolution.
The dev explained this was an intentional choice to leave it sort of open-ended and up to the player, but I think he just didn't want to commit to any single answer. Even more interesting/replayable would've been the potential for him to randomly pick one of the causes (AI, biological virus, etc) at the start of each game, and concluding that path leads to a distinct ending. Realllly hope the sequel has a more satisfactory conclusion.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed. It was very difficult. I bounced off it myself. But I really respect the design elements of the game.
I am obviously missing something here, but how is it "command line"?
There are graphics, it's real-time, but you type commands to control the drones.
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.
Damn windows only - not on mac. I really loved the first one. Hope they port it to mac eventually.
Unity is cross-platform so it's a few button clicks to build for Mac, but for some reason nobody does it anymore
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
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.
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
Presumably the dev owns a Mac, as the first one is available there.
The first game is from like a decade ago, so the same dev machine might not be able to build for today's Apple Silicon.
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.
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.
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
We’ve had the ability to destroy the world since roughly 1970, maybe 1975. Nothing but biological intelligence required.
Never heard of this. Found a 2-minute overview of the original for the curious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8AzDfEQxz0
Actual title: Misfits Attic Announces Duskers 2.0 Funded By Stray Signal
Very excited for this one!
"command line"
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
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
Doom, Quake, and assumedly your games don't use their command line as primary input like this.
a cli game that only runs on windows ... very funny
I just installed Steam on Ubuntu yesterday, and I'm impressed at the progress so far. A HUGE number of titles run flawlessly.
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.
[0] https://steamcommunity.com/app/1883920/discussions/0/6897422...
> 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.
Maybe. But also imo it happened because the author was not testing proton/crossover at all until the beta was released, and even then only later that did people started reporting it. Developing in one platform and then post-release fixing bugs in others that the game is not actually meant to be played is probably not easy.
The bug is still there, disabling assisted moves helps a lot and it triggers less but it still happens if you are unlucky.
Just to note that the author seems in general very nice and helpful, and one can choose what platforms they want to support, I just wish we could get native builds for more platforms like with duskers 1, which had native macos and linux, or at very least to have wine supported so that there is less of windows monopoly in games.
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
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.