Dyson

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!

Rudolf

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!

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