Dyson

Hello everyone,

The pre-purchase for Eufloria on Valve’s Steam distribution service is now available. Get 25% off by pre-purchasing before we release the game!

Go get it!

If you can’t see a purchase link over there right now, drop by the page in an hour or so, and it should have popped up by then.

We are also working on getting our own store and new web site ready. More news soon!

Hi all,

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.

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Any questions/comments either leave them on the blog, the forum or email them to us.

Enjoy!

Hello everyone,

DOWNLOAD DYSON v1.10

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!

Have fun!

DOWNLOAD DYSON v1.08

Alex, Brian and myself have been hard at work to finish a new version of Dyson for the Independent Games Festival (IGF), and we are very pleased with the huge amount of progress we made. It is chockablock full of new content and improvements so we decided this is a good time to release it into the wild The game is still a work in progress, but there is much to enjoy nonetheless:

Gameplay

• Pods

  The game now allows you to plant defensive trees which grow explosive pods. These pods launch themselves at enemy seedlings when they get too near and can be a formidable weapon.

• Sphere of influence

  The camera is now limited to those parts of the galaxy that you have discovered. This goes hand in hand with a limit on sending your seedlings, which is now no longer unrestrained.

Help

The game now features a more sophisticated help screen that really does a much better job of explaining how the game works, yet isn’t obtrusive at all.

Levels

Dyson will consist of many levels, and here are five examples that show different aspects for gameplay. Most of the content is still procedural, so there is still huge scope for replayability. The levels will eventually be part of a much bigger campaign and will be very diverse in content.

UI

We have improved the UI specifically for this build, more and better information is presented to the player, but the UI will eventually be replaced with a system more appropriate to the visuals and style of the game.

Music and Sound

Brian (Milieu) has given us two new tracks from a bigger suite of music being written uniquely for Dyson! How cool is that? The two tracks now play after the known initial track. I personally love the new stuff to bits. He has also done a bunch of new sounds for us and the game really benefits from it.

Code

The code improvements are too numerous to all be mentioned but some major ones deserve a shout.

• Installer

  We now have a nifty “proper” game installer, which extracts and installs the game in a Dyson directory without any fuss.

• Linux version

  Thanks to KareemK and d0k, we now have a linux version. It is available from the download page.

• Fullscreen

  The game can now be played fullscreen, which is a very nice experience. Trust me!

• Scripting/levels support

  YES! This means we can now start adding tons of content to make use of all the game’s little features and mechanics. (Which we will be doing from now on)

• Options menu

  The options menu now allows a number of thing to be toggled on and off.

• Bugfixes

  Many bugs have been found and squashed, the game is getting quite slick.

Future improvements

We have some major additional improvements and features planned, for example there will be more to do ingame while playing the levels, or as I mentioned earlier the UI overhaul. Keep an eye on this site as we wil be blogging about these things in the future.

We hope you enjoy this new build, and we are keeping our fingers crossed for Dyson at the indie games festival!

As always we love hearing from you guys/gals so don’t be shy with any feedback!

Greetings from Rudolf and Alex.

DOWNLOAD DYSON v1.08

Dyson version 1.05 was released.

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v1.05 (2008-06-29)

• Added a button to the main menu that checks the Internet for new versions of Dyson. Tells the user where to get the new version if it’s available.
• Fixed resizing the window and full-screen mode. Use alt-enter to enter full-screen mode. For 4:3 displays this will cause the game to choose the next-largest available standard screen resolution to the current window size. For wide-screen displays or displays with other aspect ratios, fullscreen mode will use the native desktop resolution.

v1.04 – v1.00

• All previous versions.