Duskers, the scary command line game, is getting a sequel
elbowgreasegames.substack.com
elbowgreasegames.substack.com
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.
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 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.
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 guess I might try again with the game, but asking here I could get moderate spoilers without a complete spoiler.
[0] https://steamcommunity.com/app/1883920/discussions/0/6897422...
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.
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.
...except that the promise of Proton/Wine/Crossover is that -for user-mode stuff- it works at least as well as Microsoft Windows. Any undesirable behavior that happens in Proton/Wine that doesn't happen in Windows is a bug that should be squashed. IMO, it's generally incorrect to think of it as "a platform", as changes in Microsoft Windows absolutely introduce gamebreaking bugs.
> ...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.
When I was much younger, I held this same opinion. Now that I'm older, I'm 100% fine with the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" [0] that is Proton/Wine. I see it as yet another cross-platform library for doing development on *nix systems... albeit a very large one.
Given how incompetent and user-hostile MSFT has been proving themselves to be over the past few years, it seems quite possible to me that in ten years, the only place you see Microsoft Windows being used by "consumers" is inside an XBOX [1] or Azure.
[0] Well, it's not just for Linux, but I can never avoid an opportunity to note that Microsoft WSL is misnamed.
[1] ...assuming that the XBOX division is still making hardware...
I even found some shell constructs to work beyond what the game documented/ explained to me
title is misleading if not abusive of our time
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.