Hey guys, been a while eh?

Thanks for those of you who played Dyson, and thanks for the feedback. I would like to iterate some important points however.

Dyson is a game made in 1 month in the spare time of 2 people only, for a compettion to create a proecedurally generated game indie game :-) The design is not fully implemented, we are still worrking on things like defensive units and better Ai and a better distribution of the attributes of in-game objects and entitis. To even get the game in this state within the limited timeframe was a triumph imo :-0

The contest has about ten days to go and then we will see how well we have done, and as importantly can start releasing updates with all the originally planned features in them.

www.omni-labs.com for news on this.

Anyway, how is everybody? :-D 

Good to hear from you.
Any word on when a new version of the game will see release? I threw it around at work (after seeing a collegue playing Nanowars, a slightly similar flash game, dunno if you've seen it) and quite a few people enjoyed it, but we all wanted to play multiplayer.

Good luck with the procedural contest. 

Thanks Bal! Good to hear from you.
Nothing will happen until the competition is done, after that we will start updating it incrementally with all kinds of features. Not sure when multiplayer will happen, it is incredibly useful to do so of course. I can't wait for that myself :-) 

Quit running drugs to the dutch soccer team and get cracking already! 

Not when they are polaying this well!! :-)

(I mean ok, sure) ;-) 

And it is awesome:
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/35246.html 

Good stuff. 

pretty groovy, not as annoying as I thought it might be. More later. 

Kids will love it!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-689194118682834081&hl=fr 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg-E2WZzQxE

This looks pretty cool! The most convincing eviromental damage I've seen yet...

Also seems to have a TF2-esque quality to the graphics overall! 

I did have a quick play on the creature editor and its pretty fun. I'm kinda tempted to buy the full game, we will have to see how the demo is.

The 35 minute demo on youtube had me really interested, and its funny to boot :) 

The creature editor is a pretty neat toy, but I remember getting bored extremely quickly with Black and White.

Have to wait and see. 

Yeah I'm not really so interested by this game, will try it though.
But imagine having your kid playing it, and he reaches a planet populated by the creature I posted above (cause iirc your creations are propagated randomly online to appear on planets in other peoples games), that would be quite a laugh. 

Seems very cool but I think for many people the seemingly huge scope of the game might end up being a turn-off. 

I can see where your coming from, but I think a fairly major area where Spore is different from B&W is that the gameplay changes dramatically with each stage of evolution of your creature(s).

I imagine this will keep things fresh for a lot longer than in B&W, where in all fairness, after the first level you had kinda seen it all.

Its a neat concept for a game at least, perhaps a tad "kid friendly" for my tastes but im definitely going to give it a shot and see what happens.

Now the moral difficulty is "do I give EA my money"... BLEUGH! 

Well I'll probably read the reviews (carefully ignoring any numerical values) to see if I buy it or not.

I was a big fan of Populous (especially :the beggining) because although you were a god you weren't omnipotent and unkillable.

Black and white just got boring for me because there was no apparant goal or a way to fail - the belief continued to inscrease and expand no matter what I did.

It had its moments (I wasted alot of time teaching my tiger to throw its shit around) but the lack of a straight line progression lost me.

So its a balence between concept (good) gameplay (wait and see) and giving EA money (can I give money to islamic extremists instead?) 

For me the problem with B&W was that it felt like either you spent time on playing with your creature or you focused on getting through the missions - the two aspects of the game never really mixed well together. 

omg so fun :D

still using the free version with only 25% of the bits too.

Genius marketing to be honest - releasing a cool mini-game for free where you can make stuff to import into the full game. This is going to make a shitload of money. 

B&W: creature = fun, building villages etc = fun, pissing around with all the options and spells and stuff = fun.

doing the missions and trying to progress != fun.

Better as a sandbox than a game. Still had some amazing features tho. 

I think my greatest achievement in B&W2 was teaching my creature to throw my villagers at the enemy army. It was a lot of fun but I agree that the game kinda failed to link all its elements together.

In other news, I tried out TF2 with the new Pyro update that just got released, the rebound ability of the flamethrower is awesome! But currently there are so many players choosing the pyro class the game is kinda broken :(

Valve should really release a few class updates at a time to avoid this behaviour, the game atm is no fun :( 

Yeah, as much as I enjoy this new content, it does always break the game for a week.
Try playing Engineer, sentries still own pyros. 

ok, finished it, quite short really although I suppose it takes a long time to do each mission due to the nature of the game.

stealth gameplay isnt my thing but I was surprised to like this more than I was expecting. The AI, as usual in stealth games, is a bit spotty so some scetions got annoying pretty quick.

Otherwise fairly solid, if unexceptional stuff. 

Try playing Engineer, sentries still own pyros.

Yeah, if you can get one built in time. Every time I've tried this I'm banging away at it as four pyros come at me, and as soon as it's done it fires two bullets and then we're both dead in a horrible inferno.

Fucking pyros. 

ie "a game about the one color of the rainbow nobody needs"

http://www.lunaran.com/page.php?id=198 

pretty cool so far although I dont really get the combat. How long is this game? Just want to get an idea of the hours I'll be wasting :)