View game pageLet’s gather around the campfire and tell you a story, friends. It’s the story that reveals how Eufloria got its name, and how it nearly got a different name.
Everybody cozy? Yes? Alright, let’s begin.
Did you know that Eufloria originally had a different name? If you do, you probably know it was first called “Dyson”, but you might not know why we chose it, nor why we changed it, so let’s go waaaaay back to 2008 where it all began.
In those days Alex May (Original Eufloria programmer/co-creator) was very active on an indie games forum called TigSource, run by Derek Yu, developer of Spelunky (and many other great games). TigSource regularly ran competitions for indie devs to create small games following a unique theme. Alex told me about the new one which was to make a game that made heavy use of procedural generation. Having been somewhat obsessed with procedural generation for some time I thought it was a great theme and we decided to enter it.
I was also a big fan of the ideas of Freeman Dyson – theoretical physicist extraordinaire – and figured that mixing his Dyson Tree and Astrochicken concepts in a game setting would make for an interesting, procedural playground. I set to work with gusto and pretty soon had the basic design for a game that would fit the competition theme.
The core loop features these pillars:
Self-replicating autonomous terraforming automata, mining and exploiting asteroid resources in asteroid belts and clusters
Using those resources to build Dyson Trees to grow more automata
Having done so for aeons, and lost their original purpose
Locked into a perpetual war with other colonies of expanding automata empires, vying for the same resources
And to honour the great man at the source of many of the ideas we called the game Dyson. It took us six weeks (I think) to finish a competition-ready build, and we ended up earning second place, after “Rescue the Beagles”.
During those weeks and in the period immediately after, something quite magical happened. Devs and indiegamers alike started to contact us about Dyson and the game started to attract a major following. Eventually mainstream press picked up on it, like the Guardian, Wired magazine, and others like it, which was somewhat incredible. It was becoming obvious that we had something special on our hands, so we decided to keep developing Dyson, and to enter it in the Independent Games Festival of 2009, which was a move that changed our lives forever.
Read Part 2 soon to find out why!