Five Feels: Dome Keeper

The fantasy is dope

There’s something about the survival genre that taps into primal human instincts. Which is probably why it has blown up so much in the last decade on Steam. For a while, every day you logged into Steam you’d be presented with a new game about cutting trees, mining, building a base and surviving. Survival meant fighting off the elements or some horror that hunted you.

Dome Keeper uses that fantasy & it’s great. Jonas Tyroller is one of the biggest advocates for picking a strong fantasy when you develop a game. And with good reason. Schudule I blew up because it presented the fantasy of ‘Be a drug dealer’. Then you have Stardew Valley, which builds on the fantasy of escaping the busy corporate world to retreate to a peaceful village as the local farmer.

In this case, Dome Keeper takes the fantasy of crashlanding on a hostile alien planet and surviving against all odds.

It builds on the primal urge to survive when we’re put in situations where our demise seems inevitable.

It feels great.

I’m never safe & always clock watching

This is exactly what the game is designed to do. Manage your anxiety, watch closely as the aliens begin marching towards your base.

Dome Keeper is designed to throw you multiple issues to juggle. You have to tend to your mine. Digging is the only way to make progress, via finding the relic or harvesting useful resources.

But everything in this world runs in realtime.

Digging takes time, going back and forward between the dome and mine multiplies in time as you dig deeper.

You must also drag the resources from the mine back to your dome, which will bring a movement speed penalty if you get greedy.

Even the act of refining your resources to actually add them to your currency takes real time.

It’s all by design and for the most part, it works on that target audience.

Most complaints are minor, desiring a longer break between enemy waves to allow for upkeep of the mine.

For me, it doesn’t work.

There’s no opt in when it comes to the threat. What do I mean by that? Well, the threat arrives on it’s own, when the timer reaches 0. Simple enough. But let’s take a look at some other examples:

1. Thronefall. Player spends as long as desired building with no threat then manually triggers night time. Night is when the attacks take place.
2. Schedule I. Threats come from cops either a) past curfew or b) while holding illicit goods. Or players can encounter cartel members, mostly at night. Players opt in to the threat by leaving their base at certain times or under particular circumstance.
3. Left 4 Dead. You can stay in the starting safe room forever. Picking starting gear, strategizing. You open the door and fight when you’re ready.

That’s where Dome Keeper is different (by design!). The clock is always running. The aliens are always on their way to end your run. It’s by design. It’s just not for me.

Optimal move is to stand and do nothing

During my mining phases, I’d often find myself running back to the dome with resources, only to see that the aliens were almost ready to spawn. This left me with dead time.

In a roguelike, your brain is tuned to optimize.

Create the best build. Seek broken synergies. Find a way to survive against any odds.

When I had <15 seconds before the horde marched on my dome, the optimal strategy became waiting.

And that felt shit.

I won’t lie, when I encountered this, I already had several other frustrations with the game. Leading to ambient frustration.

So this small need to wait and do nothing became a much bigger issue than it actually was.

No upgrades made me excited

First of all, I needed a nudge (read nudge theory) to find the upgrades.I think I sat with about 20 gold before I actually realized there was an upgrade tree.

So, ideally, a nudge to the upgrade station, either through a short tutorial mission or a pop up box would’ve removed this frustration.

When I did finally spot the upgrade area I felt a mixture of overwhelm and underwhelm:

1. Overwhelm at the sheer number of initial choices. Skill trees often start narrow and branch out. Which gives new players a gradual intro. I appreciate that this open approach instead gives immediate control of build direction to the player. Which is a bonus itself. For me, it didnt hit me that way.
2. Underwhelm at the options available. Each card read as a +% modifier to some existing system. + dome hp, + move speed, + gun damage, + carry capacity

My underwhelm was met with frustration as I kept playing the game and found the dome gun moving needlessly slow, being able to carry a very limited capacity of goods and long dives into the mines taking an age.

It began to feel like the game started me with a handicap, which the upgrade system would help me to overcome.

Rather than:

An already competant game, which the upgrades help me to feel much more powerful and optimized.

The game also comes with gadgets, which themselves are BUMs (Build Upgrade Moment)

My first was Drillbert.

He was useful in short spells.

But his upgrade tree compounded that feeling I described a moment ago.

I’d catch him napping constantly. Leading me to weigh up whether it was even worth my time going to wake him.

Again, he felt throttled to the level that the upgrade tree felt like a mechanism just to get him back to working order.

The game is full of decisions like this, where you weigh up if things are worth your precious time.

That’s part of the appeal.

For me, they felt like chores with little pay off.

Rather than exciting jobs that pushed me forward on each shift.

I can’t describe to you the good that a small reward would’ve done for me, after defeating an alien wave.

Rather than the feeling of ‘your reward is you aren’t dead’.

But maybe that’s my dopamine thirst talking.

In general, I’m a gamer who prefers slow, methodical approaches to games.

I can wait for the pay off.

Vanilla WoW > Modern WoW for example.

So in honesty, I don’t think that’s the reason…

The controls… what am I doing wrong??

I tried to click the tier 2 jetpack upgrade about 6 times. Nothing.

No grey-out. No message. No sound.

Turned out I didn’t even own tier 1.

But like I mentioned, I found there to be so many different upgrades thrown at me from the start, that I didn’t properly take notice of where I spent my points and on what.

Also, no wonder my first couple of runs went so bad. I had no idea that the repair button was a repeatable purchase! “repair in exchange for cobalt” sounds like something that is done without my approval, once I’ve got the upgrade.

Wrong.

I needed to buy the upgrade each time I wanted to make that exchange.

But when this sits amongst a bunch of single purchases, how was I to know?

Combine that with the ∞ symbol blending exactly with the default icons style, it was an easy miss!

Also, what’s cobalt? I tried to hover over my resources, no tooltips (it clicked, of course, once I figured out I had to repeatedly purchase the upgrade).

The one action key does two jobs, depending on where you stand.

Drillbert was a helpful dude.

But shit man, he gets in the way when I’m trying to pick stuff up.

It doesn’t feel intuitive, or even like I’m fully in control.

And when time is such a valuable commodity, as it is in Dome Keeper, this stuff just feels bad.

Like the game is actively working against me. Not providing me with a platform to overcome the challenge.

Finally, the escape key.

I couldn’t get used to the Q key being used to exit.

If escape doesn’t exit a state or even close a UI panel in a PC game, I’m sorry, but you’re doing something wrong.