Dyson is an ambient real-time strategy game with abstract visuals.
Remotely command semi-autonomous self-replicating mining machines to take over an entire asteroid belt.
The original game was made in one month for the TIGSource Procedural Generation competition. Much of the game’s content is procedurally generated.
We are entering Dyson into this year’s IGF! Wish us luck!
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
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.
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.
We now have a nifty “proper” game installer, which extracts and installs the game in a Dyson directory without any fuss.
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)
The options menu now allows a number of thing to be toggled on and off.
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.
Dyson version 1.05 was released.
v1.05 (2008-06-29)
v1.04 - v1.00
