Dyson 1.10 released!

Hello everyone,

Dyson v1.10

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!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Competitions, Dyson, Release. You can feed this entry. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

41 Responses

  1. Niceee!! I’m downloading it noww ;) !
    Thnks

    Júlio Esteves - February 4th, 2009 at 8:00 pm

  2. [...] Jim Rossignol from Eurogamer has posted a full roundup, explaining what he thinks about all the contenders. It would appear that he has a favourite in Dyson (screenshot above), which you can try for yourself over at the Dyson site. [...]

    Eurogamer Trawl Through the IGF Finalists « Independently-Speaking.com - February 4th, 2009 at 8:35 pm

  3. This is awesome! How did you guys know it was my birthday today? What a great gift!

    Good luck! You guys deserve the win!

    MeCHtronika - February 4th, 2009 at 10:33 pm

  4. *wooooohooo* thx…for the xtra lvl.
    awesome game, i will watch and hope for more content…
    especially the “seed-colour-change-feature” is cute :)
    take care.
    paygar

    paygar - February 5th, 2009 at 12:31 am

  5. This game looks great. If you guys manage to get a version going on the Mac, please blog it!

    Kieron - February 5th, 2009 at 12:59 pm

  6. YAAAAAAY!!
    I’m going to try it out now and see the changes.
    Keep it up guys! I love what you’re doing.

    bagar - February 5th, 2009 at 8:26 pm

  7. Great game guys, just powered through it in one go – took around four hours. I’m not an RTS guy at all, and I found the simplicity and learning curve extremely accessible. By the end I was fighting on multiple fronts, abandoning my ‘home’ asteroid to swiftly grow my forces, and extinguishing the enemy (photon birds?) with extreme relish. This is without a doubt one of the best casual games – free or otherwise – I’ve ever played. I only wish there were more levels! Best of luck with the continuing development. The game play and music are up there with flow – and much more relaxing than many similar ambient titles (I’m thinking primarily of Pixel Junk Eden). If you can get the budget to bring the graphics up to similar levels of professionalism, and expand the level selection, enemy types etc; there’s no reason this game couldn’t be huge on the Playstation Store, or X-Box market place.

    Gareth Stack - February 5th, 2009 at 11:21 pm

  8. Sweet! I’m getting owned! Its a challenge again! And the ability to move off unowned asteroids changes everything. Nice update! Hopefully I’ll stop sucking it up soon :)

    Darktrek - February 7th, 2009 at 11:17 am

  9. Very impressive, i guess that some details will be improved soon ( as a save/load possibility ! ) but this game is really great. I always have a look at IGF’s games and i’m often disappointed … Whow, and for free, incredible … I just can’t leave my computer when I begin a level …
    Well, thanks for it and i hope that you’ll still update it with new features, new levels, etc. If you need someone to make a french translation ( would be great to have a langage choice in options ), maybe i can help.
    see yoooo

    Xul - February 7th, 2009 at 9:22 pm

  10. YES YES YES

    Daniel - February 8th, 2009 at 8:14 am

  11. Thanks for the game. I installed it onto Ubuntu with no problems, following the instructions on the site. I really struggled with level 2 and had to go back to it after completing 3 so I’m not sure that it worked in explaining the attributes to me.

    Steve Bickle - February 9th, 2009 at 9:13 am

  12. Great game! Keep it up!

    You should make a level editor so you can concentrate on the game engine while another person, can create “campaigns” with many levels each. You only need to save what level the player is on each campaign.

    Great game! I would pay for this game if it had like 20+ hours of game play (campaings again) or multiplayer (lan multiplayer is a good start). Imagine the fun of raping your friends planet with 500 strong seedlings (ships)?

    Bruno Cassol - February 9th, 2009 at 9:39 am

  13. Thanks for this new game :)

    jaqdrako - February 10th, 2009 at 9:02 am

  14. Give me a random map and ill be true addict.
    Great work.

    chiqui - February 10th, 2009 at 8:33 pm

  15. Well, level 4 is rather random :-)

    We do hope to include a random map generator in the future. Mind you this is not a promise, but it does seem very likely that we will do so. :-)

    Rudolf - February 11th, 2009 at 9:24 am

  16. Hello guys,
    very nice game)
    respect)
    ~)

    Anwar - February 14th, 2009 at 4:54 pm

  17. This…. is amazing. Thank you so much.
    Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.

    Jake - February 15th, 2009 at 9:16 am

  18. Gorgeous graphics, great gameplay, excellent (and atmospheric) music, and the best and cleanest UI I recall ever seeing.

    All I’d ask for is more levels, and possibly a routing/garrison feature to automate some of the movement [moan, moan ;) ]

    Major kudos to you for this game, and best of luck with the IGF.

    Morat - February 16th, 2009 at 7:35 am

  19. i love dyson

    this game rox!

    nate - February 18th, 2009 at 12:44 am

  20. Hey guys, I just downloaded this game last night and have played it a few times. I’m not much of an RTS player, so I thought that the difficulty jump from levels 1 and 2 was quite steep. I understand the game more now than I did the first couple of times I played it, but it seems that once I start getting some numbers, the enemy comes out of nowhere with double or triple what I’ve got. It’s fun, don’t get me wrong, but it seems like a shame to just play through level 1 over and over. Maybe add an “I’m a noob” difficulty?

    I also noticed that there is a maximum range that you can send seeds to, but the computer does not adhere to these limits. Is it supposed to be this way?

    Otherwise, great game!

    matt - February 20th, 2009 at 1:37 am

  21. Incredibly stylistic, unique and interesting.

    Awful horrible poop filled game. Incredibly repetitive.

    Nice piece of art though.

    Adam - February 20th, 2009 at 2:24 am

  22. Great Game! Thanks a lot for it. Wanna more
    Hi from KG)

    Worm - February 20th, 2009 at 12:19 pm

  23. top game, great to see the new versions roll out slowly _b

    on my wish list is what i read above, a routing or rally feature.. i spend most of my time moving guys to the fronts, can get a little tedious ;p still, big fan lol.

    stuntaneous - February 22nd, 2009 at 5:53 am

  24. Just finished the 6th level, and I enjoyed it the whole way through. It was a bit frustrating at times, but I quickly learned that I just needed to adjust my strategy a bit to win. Like someone above said, a random level generator would be nice…

    robert - February 22nd, 2009 at 2:02 pm

  25. Fun game, it’s like a simplified Sins of a Solar Empire, with all the boring bits removed.
    If it could be moved online, or the difficulty upped it would be really good; there’s not been much of a challenge for me yet, on Lvl 4; once you get a few planets secured, you start producing enough seeds to just blitz the map, especially if you’re lucky enough to get high speed and strength.

    Bear - February 22nd, 2009 at 4:39 pm

  26. I have now played level 4 about 16 hours. Died many times. Now every core has 5/5 trees (all mine).

    What to do next?

    Joni - February 23rd, 2009 at 10:25 pm

  27. That sounds like a bug, Joni, I’ll look into it. If you complete a level, the game should give you a message and take you back to the main menu. If you’ve wiped out all the other empires, then you should take it that you’ve won, and go play level 5 :)

    Alex - February 24th, 2009 at 7:02 am

  28. Ok I proceed to next level. I ran game over night and now I only have lots of seedlings but still no message :)

    Might bug be related that I conquered multiple cores at the same time, so I never had 35 asteroids but more?

    Joni - February 24th, 2009 at 9:08 am

  29. Отличная игра!!!

    Great game!!!

    Emu - February 24th, 2009 at 10:43 am

  30. Désolé pour mon français ^^ ! Je viens de télécharger ce petit bijoux et je me suis dit : wouah ! Quelle stratégie ! Quelle poésie ! Je suis sidéré par ce jeu. J’admire la variété des espèces de spores, gros, petits, fins, épais, dépendants uniquement des caractéristiques de leur planète mère ! Cela me rappelle facilement la selection naturelle de Darwin, qui disait que les espèces s’adaptaient en fonction de leur milieu. Je suis aussi agréablement surpris par le système de conquêtes spatiales des végétaux, même si je conçois que c’est irréaliste ^^.

    Une version en mode multijoueur existera t-elle bientôt en téléchargement ? Merci et encore bravo !

    Saddened for my French ^^! I have just downloaded this young jewels and I said myself: wouah! What a strategy! What a poetry! I am bewildered by this game. I admire the variety of the sorts of spores, big, smalls, fine, thick, dependent only on characteristics of their planet mother! It calls back to me easily the natural selection of Darwin, which said that the sorts adapted themselves according to their environment. I am so pleasantly surprised by the system of conquest of space of vegetables, even if I conceive that it is unrealistic ^^.

    A version in mode multiplayer will exist soon in download? Thank you and still bravo!

    Aje - February 24th, 2009 at 9:13 pm

  31. Very cool concept and graphics. One issue though…I pause the game my just bringing up the menu. I noticed in that situation Dyson was still running one CPU at 100%. It doesn’t seem like it should ever run a 2.66 (Intel E6750 core2 duo) at 100%, and certainly not while the game is essentially paused.

    Now that I finished that level I am just sitting at the level selection menu and it’s still consuming 20-30% of one of the core.

    Bryon Sutherland - February 25th, 2009 at 8:13 pm

  32. Wow it’s really cool!! A random map should make it great! And a multiplayer mode would be really nice! :D

    Keep up the good work!

    Brother Baul - March 2nd, 2009 at 7:18 pm

  33. It would be really awesome if as development of dyson progresses you could incorporate online play into it. I think that would a cool feature.

    Garrett - March 3rd, 2009 at 7:21 am

  34. Anyone heard of Galcon?

    http://www.galcon.com/

    Keith Weatherby II - March 6th, 2009 at 5:11 am

  35. Great game, I’ve been recommending it to all my friends that aren’t into computer games… and they all seem to really enjoy it. Online play would also be very intriguing… but I can understand that would be a little more difficult to set up

    Also in the future, if you were to expand the dyson world in an “expansion pack” with new introduced seed types it would keep the adventure going… but this could also betray the simplistic spirit of dyson though.

    Dave - March 6th, 2009 at 11:51 am

  36. Uhm, I’m not sure if you noticed it, but on level 6 you mistyped strong, “Crush them swiftly before they grow too stromg”.

    Andrew - March 11th, 2009 at 4:22 pm

  37. Oh, I like this! A great example of something appearing simple, yet having emergent complexity. Very nice look; I don’t mind a well-executed _primitives_-based game, and think the level of graphical detail is pitched just right.

    If you wanted direction on improvements: 1. Maybe the mouse panning needs work? 2. This would work well as a multi-player if players can start with appropriate (lack of) advantage. 3. Invite level contributions and an add-in structure for user content. 4. Procedural level generation, to provide longer appeal. 5. Does the strategy need another dynamic to overcome the ‘threshold of seedling production’? 6. If adding more objects to the game (‘new rules’) in future, have new ones introduced to the player at the start of a level.

    I make the odd game myself, and was impressed by the structure of the data in the distribution (boring point, but is appreciated on some level by developers). It looks user-customizable (hopefully you woudn’t regard this as hacking!)

    Elegant! Good work!

    John Valentine - March 18th, 2009 at 2:29 pm

  38. “I also noticed that there is a maximum range that you can send seeds to, but the computer does not adhere to these limits. Is it supposed to be this way?”

    i experienced this too, and wonder if it’s supposed to be so as well. it’s quite frustrating when the AI does no need to adhere to the same rules: you can’t strategise if they do that.

    Nathanael - March 25th, 2009 at 12:54 pm

  39. I should correct my above comment: there is procedural content; I just didn’t notice it :o ) I grew accustomed to the mouse movement. The RMB (hold to increase seedlings to send) could do with being faster beyond 18 seeds, and a shortcut to select all wouldn’t go amiss.

    I have more – have mailed you (contains spoilers).

    John Valentine - March 25th, 2009 at 6:35 pm

  40. Hey if you guys get a version done for Mac, please let me know. I really want to play it.

    John - April 2nd, 2009 at 4:45 am

  41. I have the same issue that has been reported already with level 4 – I have conquered all planets and nothing happens!

    randomboy - August 11th, 2009 at 2:06 pm

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