In Duskers you pilot drones into derelict spaceships to find the means to survive and piece together how the universe became a giant graveyard
- Use a Command Line Interface to control drones & ship systems
- Explore procedurally generated derelict ships and universe
- Upgrade and modify drones with the salvage you find
- Discover ship logs and piece together what happened

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• Explore: You are a drone operator, surrounded by old gritty tech that acts as your only eyes and ears to the outside world. What you hear comes through a remote microphone. What you see is how each drone sees the world. Motion sensors tell you something's out there, but not what. And when you issue commands, you do it through a command line interface.
• Adapt: You have to earn everything in Duskers, scavenging drone upgrades, drones, and even ship upgrades. But dangerous creatures lurk in these derelict ships, and weapons are rare, so you may need to think of a clever way to explore a military outpost using only a motion sensor and a lure.But even if you find a way, the sensor that you rely on may break down, or you may run out of lures, even your drone's camera feed can start to fail. A favorite strategy can't be exploited for long, so you'll have to continually adapt.
• Survive: Duskers is set in a procedurally generated Universe, and when you die you lose everything. You not only need to worry about what hazards lay waiting for you in the derelicts, but also running out of fuel, or parts to modify your drones and ship. You are alone, isolated in the dark reaches of space. Only by sifting through what ship logs remain un-corrupted can you piece together what happened.

Moobabe said:

Paging Pylon_Trooper

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More_Badass said:

Played some Duskers and it's really cool and very promising.

The two games I was reminded of while playing were Capsule and Deadnaut. The former due to relying on a glitchy sensor screen to explore vessels, the latter due to the concept of exploring derelict ships from a detached distant location.

Duskers drops you into a ship low on supplies in an massive randomly-generated galaxy and you need to jump from abandoned barge to empty capital ship, exploring and gathering much-needed resources

To do that, you control a group of drones. Each drone has three equipment slots, and you can add numerous functions and abilities like a motion sensor or acting as a mobile generator.

You'll need those two. Ships can be huge and you never know what dangers lurk onboard. Perhaps alien entities or an active security system. To succeed, you need to cautiously scan rooms, choose which doors to open, block off dangers.

But the interesting and immersive aspect is that you don't control the drones directly, but by typing in commands. "Navigate 1 r3;gather all" will move drone 1 to the selected room 3 and gather all supplies there. It adds a tactile hands-on feel to the action and makes it even more crucial to plan and think ahead. Because you don't have much time to react if things go wrong.

Some other cool things:
- Locking an alien in a room then interfacing with the ship and activating the on-board defense system. Alien dead.
- Switching between the sterile tactical ship map to the grainy sensor view. The visuals and sound design really add to the atmosphere
- Chaining together a bunch of commands and watching your drones move and act autonomously. The control scheme has a satisfyingly lo-fi sci-fi vibe.

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More_Badass said:

Was he the one who was all into Deadnaut? He's going to love this

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Almost more amazing was the list of people that I'd barely met, if at all: Cliff (as Positech Games) and Tommy were there, apparently my responses to their questions hadn't turned them away. Indie Fund, true to their word, had come through and contributed to push us over the top(Jonathan Blow, Ron Carmel, Kyle Gabler, Aaron Isaksen, Kellee Santiago, Nathan Vella, and Mathew Wegner). Some Indie Funders had even double dipped and ponied up their own money in addition to the Indie Fund money: Aaron Isaksen (with John Bizzarro as AppAbove Games), Kellee Santiago, and of course, Ron Carmel. All three of whom had responded to my unsolicited requests for advice when I was making A Virus Named TOM. The universe was telling me I was heavy in indie karma debt.

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In Duskers, everything in the galaxy is dead, or seems to be. As far as you know, you’re the last person in the universe. Monsters and other horrors lurk everywhere. You have limited supplies, and the only way to sustain yourself is by scavenging what the dead have left behind, with help of your small complement of drones.

When you dock with a starship, you usually get a little log or info snippet from the vessel’s records. They are bit like the audio logs of System Shock: records from people on the brink of the apocalypse, capturing moments of dawning realization and horror.

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After you dock with another vessel, you send you drones aboard. Here’s where Dusker’s minimalism really starts to cast its spell. Each Roomba-like drone casts a small cone of watery light in front of it, and practically everything is done in the greyscale of a night-vision display or a security camera. It amplifies your distance from everything, how little you can actually see and sense for yourself. When you screw up and a drone gets in trouble, you get only the briefest glimpse of something rushing into your headlights before the feed cuts out and the drone goes dead.

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In one mission, I was slowly trying to make my way to a supply locker when suddenly hatches started failing and my motion sensor lit up with monsters moving into the adjoining rooms. Meanwhile, radiation was flooding through the ship and more hatches were starting to malfunction. I’d never seen any of this happen before, and immediately started trying to organize my evacuation.

I started slamming hatches closed using a series of simple commands “d18” “d17” “d15”. Then I ordered my robots to head back to the airlock, typing “navigate r1 1 2 3” to tell all three of my drones to head back to the to the first room they’d visited: the airlock.

Then I realized that one of my drones was carrying the portable generator that enabled me to power the hatches in this section of the ship. In my moment of panic, I’d cost myself control of the hatches and trapped my drones.

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Despite those issues I'm still enjoying Duskers quite a lot: it's a tense and spooky game you have to progress through slowly, carefully, and with a great amount of forethought. Disaster can come quickly and with little warning, but there's so much room to think creatively that even the most dire of circumstances are often salvageable.

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I think it’s about as exciting a game as I’ve played for this column, by turns offering measured, ruminative strategy and then exhilarating panic. New drone builds should provide added richness to the strategy, and, hopefully, offer more opportunity for you to successfully improvise your way out of catastrophe, but even in its half-complete state, Duskers offers quite a voyage indeed.

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Added: 2 new drone models (all drone models now have a specific view and the new ones are more rare)
Added: Ability to create J-Fuel at a trading post (always - if you can afford it!)
Added: New purchasable Magnetic Mod for all droppable drone upgrades (lure, trap, mine, stun, sensor). This also means all of them are not magnetic by default
Added: Ability to ‘flag’ rooms (visually mark them on the schematic for reference)

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- Daily & Weekly Challenges to see who's the best Drone pilot in all of space
- Robust Alias system so you can type "poop" and have it do amazing things
- Visual Atmosphere: Glitches and the ability to "degauss" your monitor (this statement is an age/nerd test, feel judged)
- Audio Atmosphere: hear muffled noises from done 2's mic that means drone 1 is toast
- Lots of new gameplay that allows you to kill yourself in new and interesting ways (teleport an explosive to a room your other drone is in!)

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