Dyson

Hello all! With the Steam Pre-Order under way as well now (YAY 25% off!) I wanted to emphasize an important point:
The Official Demo has not yet been released!
I suspect that many people don’t realize that the current demo is the old Independent Games Festival showfloor build. Which is not really representative of the current quality of the game and all its new content, UI, play modes, AI, and tons of other things. (We are still very proud of the old demo though)
We will release an official demo soon, one that includes many of the improvements in how the game plays. This will most likely be on the day of the full commercial release.

Hope that clarifies things!

Rudolf

At long last, we have a winner!

Alex and I have gone through over 400 names, and there were some very interesting, entertaining, baffling, horrifying, charming, and “almost right” entries out there… However, we feel there is one that stands out for a number of reasons and that is the delightful:

“Eufloria”

We love the name as it nicely sums up the general mood of the game, and ties it in with the “flora” theme that sets our game apart from many other titles. It is also easy to remember, nice to say and hear, and nicely compact. In short: an excellent name!

Looks good in a screenshot too:

It was quite hard to choose initially, We liked a range of other entries like: Arborealis, Bloom Automata, Flowbotica, Starboretum, Bloom (or variations thereof) and others.

We were especially thrilled by the fact that somebody submitted “Panda Box” as a name. It is an intriguing choice as it has the distinct quality of a brilliant name, yet there is no connection to our game whatsoever. We are tempted to create a game solely for the use of the name, but haven’t decided yet one way or another. What kind of game would it be?

Either way, Eufloria it is, so congratulations to our winner: Vernon Sydnor, for providing the winning entry and many thanks for helping us out. Enjoy your free games!

Special thanks to the lovely people at IGN and Direct2Drive who have done so much to make this contest a success. And finally, extra special thanks to all the great people who have submitted a staggering amount of names for us to pour and puzzle over.

You guys/gals are the best.

So, October 20th (aproximately) will be Eufloria Day, but meanwhile, you can purchase the pre-order for 25% off now until launch date!

UK link here.
US link here.

 

Had I posted this yet?
We have been offered a booth at this lovely indie games event and gratefully accepted. The main event will bee pretty cool, as there will be some great games on offer, but the big deal for us is that we wil be showcasing Dyson at the Indie Games Arcade 

which is a real opportunity to show Dyson to loads of people and to meet some of our fans. Please drop in if you can! I suspect it will be loads of fun!

Rudolf

UPDATE II

We have enough testers for now, sorry for those we can’t accomodate, and many thanks for all who have sent in an application. If we need addititional testers we will pick from the many people whose emails we have received but could not include in the Beta. The response was very good, my inbox is a disasterzone at the moment.

Thanks all!

UPDATE

Whoa! Nice response people We will need some time to sort through all the emails we have been getting, so don’t worry if you have had no reply yet. Also, even more diversity would be great, so non males are encouraged to reply as well.

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Hello friends,

We are getting pretty close to our release date, and the game is shaping up rapidly. In fact there is so much content now that we feel it is a good time to start getting some feedback on all the new stuff. The game is nearly content complete with regards to levels, and most of the gameplay features are in, so we are about to hit beta. In our excitement we decided to let people test the game now, while we still have some time to make changes, and in honour of this optimisation process we are not calling this a beta, as that would be too boring. Instead, we are calling this beta:

“OPTIMUS!”

So, in order to make our Optimus BETA a success and get a good range of feedback we are going to pick some testers from people who have already volunteered previously, and some additional people responding to our call for help. We are looking to get a good mix of people, so we want to encourage people of all persuasions, newbies and veterans, to help us out. So, We would like to assemble a small group of very diverse Optimus testers, whose work will be very important to making the final game as good as it can be.

Testing takes a fair bit of time, so any participant needs to be aware of this and other challenges. The process will mean exposure to bugs, placeholder narrative, missing help screens, crashes, and other creaky pitfalls of a title that is in development.  If you are interested nonetheless please drop us an email titled:  “Optimus Beta Tester”

The email should include the following info:

 - Tell us a bit about yourself, and if you have any experience playing our game (It is fine if you don’t)
 - List your hardware specs
 - Tell us why you want to participate
 - How long you can participate
 - What games you normally like to play

 

Once the Optimus testers have been assembled we will let people know not to send in more requests. Regrettably we won’t be able to take on all volunteers, so please don’t hate us if you don’t get picked from the hat. At least you won’t hear spoilers about the game.

Thanks everybody! More news soon.

Rudolf

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.

And here is the interview:
http://tigsource.com/articles/2009/04/18/tiginterview-rudolf-kremers

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.

Hello friends,

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

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the official Dyson website.

Dyson is Edge’s Internet Game of the Month for August, in issue 191. We’ve scanned the short article. You can read it here.