December 19, 2014

Interplanetary Patch #7.1: Holiday Cheer for the AI


Happy holidays from all of us at Team Jolly Roger! We're about to disperse for a little while and have a quick break, but before that, we have some little news for you:

Patch #7.1: Holiday Cheer for the AI

We've had loads of good feedback about the AI update last week. Many thanks to everyone reporting bugs and just giving general suggestions!

After doing some testing, we've managed to push out a little patch that should fix a couple of issues that the absolutely massive update brought with it. Unfortunately, we didn't manage to include AI bots for online matches yet. That's definitely coming in the next update, though.

Everything went so nicely, until the AI decided that it wanted to spawn hundreds of weapons on top of each other.
The AI's accuracy has now been reduced to a more human level. Some of us felt a bit bittersweet about that, so we compiled a little tribute to the AI's craziest shots.

You can go give the game a little spin and see if it works nicely. Here's a proper changelog:

Interplanetary Patch 0.7.5435_EAC_7.1
  • Shot difficulty now affects AI accuracy, which has also been generally lowered
  • Weapon damage to cities increased
  • Player turn status markers re-implemented
  • Victory screen bug fixes
  • Event log performance issues fixed
  • Action phase simulation accuracy increased (less zigzag movements for shots and the chance of appearing to go through the planets is minimized)
  • Timeout for AI calculations added, fixing AI getting lost in thought
  • Missile bug fixed
  • AI turn message spam fixed

Happy holidays, everyone! Remember to eat a lot and play many, many games! See you next year!

Interplanetary is available on Steam Early Access.

December 11, 2014

Interplanetary Update #7: The AI

Kept you waiting, huh?

Wham. That is all.

Well, not really. The AI is just the glorious tip of the iceberg of all the features we're putting out this update! It's a huge, huge splash of pure wonderfulness. Details to follow:

Update #7: The AI

The single most requested feature we've been asked for has been the single player AI. The second most requested thing has been to fix all those annoying issues with online play. Finally, after long and arduous work, we've managed to deliver and fix both of these issues! Must be some of that holiday spirit magic.

We're so happy to at last be able to add AI bots for the players to use in Single Player mode. Bear in mind, though, that the AI is still in development, even though we release it now to the public. It works pretty nicely, but there are no difficulty levels yet and there's a whole bunch of testing to be done. Looking forward to hearing your feedback!

Pretty spiffy.

With the help of the AI, people with connection difficulties can now also have some Interplanetary fun. Although, they probably could have it anyway now, since we also went and fixed the networking! All the previous connection issues should now be gone and mobile networks (in addition to all kinds of other connection types) are now supported. There's a bit of a downside to this, however, as we had to temporarily disable LAN features due to the new networking structure. LAN will be back, though, so no worries.

To help us with bug hunting and game design, we've added an optional and anonymous Game Analytics data collector. It collects non personally identifiable bug reports, hardware configurations and gameplay data, such as session length and most popular weapons. All this helps us a huge amount at identifying problems in the game. You can choose in-game whether or not you want to participate in this.

As if that's not enough, we've redone a lot of the UI. It's still a work in progress, but things should work more fluidly and look a bit prettier. There are also some bug fixes and minor changes included, but you can check out the full changelog to get a better idea on what's different:

Also, lasers got their act together and look nicer too.

Interplanetary Version 0.7.5394_EAC_7
  • Simple Single Player mode with early AI bots added.
  • Networking overhauled.
    • All previous online connectivity issues should be fixed!
    • Mobile broadband connections (and all other kinds of obscure things) now supported.
    • LAN multiplayer temporarily disabled due to new network structure.
    • Player turn status markers temporarily disabled. Will be back soon.
  • UI overhauled.
    • Menu UI graphics redone.
    • Menus streamlined.
    • Main Menu background modified.
  • Planet selection added.
  • Player avatars added.
  • Fixed the turn-processing freezing Laser bug (again!) Should be gone now.
  • Laser animation changed to a nicer one.
  • Optional game analytics added.
  • Loading screens added.
  • New music added.
  • Minor sound tweaks.

Interplanetary should automatically update once you open Steam. Fun times with the AI! The schedule for the next update is not determined yet, but we have some new features and fixes in store.

Interplanetary is available on Steam Early Access.