Hello all, things have been a bit too quiet here so I decided to write a multi part update.
Here goes:
Freeman Dyson
Did we mention yet that Freeman Dyson is a rather inspiring individual? As you know the game is somewhat influenced by his work, and I am not surprised that the content of this talk features a lot that is relevant to our game.
So relevant in fact that it can almost be seen to contain spoilers for people who haven’t yet played the game.
If you like the conceptual premis of the game you should really check out the talk yourself: have a look!
Old interview
I won’t quote the whole thing but I was also interviewed by TigSource, and promptly broke their record on typos in one interview.
Here is an extract:
Leigh: Indie games are really breaking into the general gaming conscious at the moment, Indie games are more than ever in a better position to profit from this, but as they do so, do you see them changing to meet business needs?
Rudolf: To be honest, not at all. All I can see is people adhering to whatever principles they have to make games. These principles can be fiercely artistic, or specifically commercial. Indie is no more and no less than a way of creating games independently from big studios and developers and so on, it does not necessarily dictate the actual content of the game.
Leigh: Do you see this as breaking with the spirit of Independent games?
Rudolf: far from it, I think we are in an incredibly interesting period of indie game development that is go into produce more and even better games for a while yet. This wave is still growing and the added financial possibilities so far work as an enabler rather then a stifler.
Dyson
We are progressing well, there is much much more content now, and it is also much more diverse. It won’t be much longer I think before we will start some initial playtesting, and I hope that it will gives us enough to really nail the final game experience. More on that when we are ready to invite testers.
As Rudolf pointed out I made a bit of a booboo in the build 1.20 that we released the other day. I’ve updated the files without increasing the version number which is probably really unprofessional, but I kind of feel OK about it. If you had trouble downloading it in the last couple of hours, please try again now. It should be OK. Also if you downloaded the game in the last few days and want the update, but you can’t be bothered downloading the whole thing again, please download this patch, which should update your build with only the relevant files.
In other news, TIGSource posted an interview with me conducted by Leigh Ashton. I’ve quoted it here so read on. Keep an eye on TIGSource for more on the team soon
We just released version 1.20 which is the version we used on the IGF showfloor. We made it a bit smoother all around, added an attract mode, and changed the rules slightly.
To take an asteroid now, you will have to plant a tree there. It makes more sense this way and lets the belt be completely barren instead of covered in trees at the start of a game.
Also we added an attract mode, which kicks in if you leave the game in the main menu for a while. You can play while the game is in attract mode, but you’ll have the AI ‘helping’ you and the camera may take on a life of its own. Just quit out to the main menu if you want to play normally.
Hello all. The subject of t-shirts and merchandise keeps getting raised, so we decided to experiment with an online shop selling Dyson-themed apparel. We are not doing this to try to cash in, but mostly because there seems to be a demand for it, so we have only added a few bucks on top of the base price. (3-4$s only, it is mostly a service to those of you who like this stuff! )
Within a few days Alex and myself will be on our way to San Francisco on our way to what I can only describe as a “Dream come true” event. One moment we are entering a purely quality motivated small and fun competition, and a few months later we suddenly find ourselves up for several awards, including best game, at the prestigious Independent Games Festival. WHAT HAPPENED!!!??
A major reason why we have stuck with Dyson and why we feel so strongly about it is the superb and utterly supportive feedback we receive from you guys and gals. A great little community seems to have sprung up around the game and it is growing every week. We are completely humbled by the amount of people that play the game, February for example saw 50 thousand downloads from our site alone, not even including mirrors. Them’s silly numbers! 0_0
So a big thank you and virtual bear-hugs to all of you who have downloaded the game and those of you who are telling us what you think of it. Our forum deserves a special mention as it is such a fun and positive place. All we can do on our part is to try to make the game as good as we can, which something we are working very hard on.
First the festival though, and will make sure there will be photos and footage of the event for readers of the blog to peruse. If you are visiting yourself please come by our booth and say hi! We will also for the first time finally meet our audio and music genius Brian Grainger (Milieu) in person. Such are the strange ways of web-based game development.
Anyway, to finish this post we want to share some news:
First: We have picked up a distribution deal with the sponsors of the festival, direct2drive, who in our opinion are building up a very impressive catalogue of independent titles for digital distribution. We are quite honoured that Dyson is deemed to be strong enough to feature alongside the other great games in the service. (Have a look, the selection is great!)
Second: Alex and I are enjoying working together so much that we decided to do another game together after Dyson. What this game will be is not going to be known for a while (even to us) but between us we have a wealth of ideas and concepts to choose from, all sound like good fun to us.
Right, have to pack my toothbrush now and prepare my laptop for Dyson demonstrations to press and other interested parties. We may or not be able to blog a bit while we are over there, keep an eye out on the major news sites anyways in regards to the general coverage of all the great games out there, but have a peek here once in a while you never know
We released version 1.10 of Dyson! It is the public demo that will also be made available at the IGF site for the Audience Award.
This version contains new music from Brian, which is really superb. We love it. We think the new version is worth the download purely for the music.
We also reworked the font code so now the game has really smooth fonts instead of the old pixel font, which was hard to read and didn’t really fit with the theme.
This also meant we had to redo the tutorial, which is now a bit nicer again.
There is a new level (level 2), which is designed to help people understand more how the attributes work. We also changed some of the balancing in the levels.
There are a few other tweaks that you may discover if you’re a seasoned Dyson colonist see if you can spot the changes! Don’t be looking in the build log! I know your tricks!
The Bytejacker crew organised a vote for their viewers to determine which free indie of 2008 they liked most and we were more than happy to find ourself skyhigh with Dyson nabbing the 2nd spot!
You should go have a look at the countdown, check out all the great games, and see if you can guess who got first place Check it out: Bytejacker Free Indie of the year!
That news is still sinking in. But there it is: Dyson is a finalist for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. We’re really pleased, and personally I’m pretty daunted and mildly surprised! But it’s great to have Dyson acknowledged in this way, it’s an honour to be up there with the other finalists (I’ve played Blueberry Garden and it’s *awesome*). Good luck guys!
Rudolf and I were recently interviewed by Sarah from TunaSnax, who have also nabbed a finalist nomination for Excellence in Visual Art, for Cletus Clay. It was great fun, and now the interview has been put up on the Snax website for all to read VISITER LE LINK Thanks guys, and congratulations on the nomination! Looking forward to playing Cletus Clay at the IGF (finally - been waiting to play this for years now)!
Now this is very nice. Anthony Carboni and co. host a web show dedicated to reviewing and promoting indie games, and the show does it with gusto and a nice professional sheen. It is called BYTEJACKER and I have embedded the current episode at the top of this post.
They genuinely love games and review them fairly, in my opinion, so I decided to drop them a line about Dyson the other day. As it turned out they knew the game anyway and decided to include it in the current Monday episode. The Monday episode introduced three different free indie games, people can then go on an play them an vote for the one they like best on the Bytejacker blog. The THURSDAY show will then take the game with most votes and review it in more detail as the “Free indie of the week!”
Have ago at the three games yourself and pick the one you like best!
Oops! We messed up and the Linux README did not include the packages required to run the game. If you downloaded the Linux version and don’t know what packages to install, these should be the ones you need:
mono
libmono-i18n (and perhaps other basic mono stuff)
libgdiplus
libsdl
libsdl-gfx
libsdl-mixer
libsdl-image
libvorbis
libpng
Please let us know if you are still having trouble. Cheers!
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