Intoduction

“Dyson Sphere Program” is a sci-fi sandbox building game that integrates elements such as space, automated factories, adventure, and exploration. In Dyson Sphere program, players take on the role of space engineers, and the player’s goal is to completing a difficult task: building the Dyson sphere, a giant structure that orbits around the star to harness all the power and energy of the star. The content of the game is very rich, and players from the third person perspective can control almost everything in the game, from collecting resources, building buildings, upgrading science, planning production, and finally achieving large-scale automated assembly line production and interstellar logistics. The high degree of freedom of the simulation game and the rich variety of technological buildings of this game make it highly playable, and subsequent combat updates are also worth looking forward to. Dyson Sphere Program is Developed by a small team of five, the game was released in Early Access on January 21, 2021.

Mechanics:

The game supports walking around via “WASD” and provides the ability to fly low Earth and interstellar voyage with “space” key but requires more advanced technology to unlock it. The game also has the ability to interact with other players, and players can see the power generated by players in nearby galaxies. The main mechanism of the game is to quantify various items to allow the factory to operate in the most efficient way. How to build more Dyson Sphere within limited resources and cram more buildings on a spherical map. At the same time, designing a more material-saving and more powerful Dyson Sphere is also a mechanism for the game.

Story：

The Story of the game is that the player-piloted robot lands on a planet, starting with a small workshop and refining until it spans the entire galaxy. Experience the complete process from metallurgical technology, to electromagnetic coils, microcontrollers, processing chips, and future space transportation, shuttling wormholes and exploring different celestial bodies, and finally using solar sails to build a Dyson sphere. During this period, players can also feel the development of technology, such as wind and solar power is not enough to maintain factories, to the production of nuclear fuel rods or artificial stars to provide electricity.

Aesthetics：

The game’s graphics tend to be realistic, with light and shadow effects produced by the rotation of each planet, and each model has corresponding animations. At the same time, the game inevitably narrows the distance between these planets, which allows players to feel the magnificence of the project more intuitively. For example, when the player starts to build the Dyson Sphere, the parts of the Dyson Sphere can be clearly seen from the planet integrated into the framework little by little, with the game’s exciting and vibrant music, so that the player is immersed in the thrill of building.

Technology：

The game cleverly uses the GPU for most of the calculations, those tens of thousands of solar sails, each of which follows gravity and calculates the amount of power generated. These massively parallel calculations are more suitable for GPUs to do calculations than CPUs.  All this computation, including the rendering of the model, is handed over to the powerful GPU that makes tens of thousands of solar sails, transport planes, and interstellar logistics possible.

The Lens of Pleasure

There are many details in the game that can make the player feel pleasure, such as when the player perfectly plans and lays out the next production line, perfectly uses a small space, or balances the items on the conveyor belt just right, which can give the player a sense of purification. At the same time, when launching the Dyson ball component into space, the dazzling light and shadow and particle effects can make players feel their own engineering head-on, bringing the feeling of Triumph over Adversity.

The Lens of Visible Progress

A lot of content in the game emphasizes Visible Progress, players can clearly see every bit of progress in the technology tree, the technology in the game needs to be unlocked with five different matrices, each unlocked and mass-produced a matrix, is a big improvement that can be seen. At the same time, the game is also equipped with a statistics panel, so player can see the production speed of each item more intuitively. And more intuitively, of course, is to change a barren planet into a planet covered in high-tech buildings. Every sunrise on the planet is visible progress.

The Lens of Simplicity/Complexity

Balancing the material in the game can show simplicity and complexity, such as how to balance the ratio of hydrogen to refined oil when refined from crude oil, and how to deal with complex formulas with simple layouts, which are left to the player to explore. At the same time, after exploring different galaxies, players can simplify the production process by finding special minerals, such as sulfuric acid can be directly extracted from the sulfuric acid sea, hydrogen can be produced from combustible ice, and so on.

The Lens of Beauty

There are many beautiful man-made objects and space wonders in the game, such as the production line that the player has painstakingly built, which is uniform and full of technological beauty. There are also various different types of planets and stars in the game, such as neutron stars, where neutron stars can be seen with magnetic inductive line particle streams and polar jets, frozen giant oceans, pink sunset of the planet Pandora, etc.