Announcing Interplanetary Enhanced Edition Update! Have a Patch to Celebrate!

Kept you waiting, huh? Well, we’re finally back in action, and there’s a lot of catching up to do! With the help of Team17 and Advanced Interactive Gaming, we’ve had a chance to get back to Interplanetary and devise a cunning plan to finally add the fixes and features we’ve been promising...

Let’s not ignore the gas giant in the room any longer: we’re happy to announce the upcoming Interplanetary Enhanced Edition update! There’s also a small new patch out right now, just to thank you all for your patience.

Interplanetary Enhanced Edition

Interplanetary Enhanced Edition is a sizeable update with a load of improvements and various new features. At this point we are not entirely sure if the Enhanced Edition will be a normal update or appear in your library as a new product, but it will be free for everyone who has already purchased Interplanetary. The main goal of the update is to add the features we’ve been promising since forever, including Online AI Bots and Reconnect, as well as to make the game much more stable. As we explained in our previous post, we had a lot of issues with the very architecture of the game’s code, making it near impossible to add these features and fix the lingering networking bugs. So, how are we managing to do all that with this update? By completely re-doing the whole game, of course! 

  

For Enhanced Edition, we undertook a huge effort to actually rebuild Interplanetary from the ground up. It’s been surreal being able to have a second go at it, redoing the same game, but better. For you, it will be a hefty update, but for us, it’s actually a whole new game project. Development has been much faster this time around, but it’s definitely not a quick task by any means.

It will still be the same old Interplanetary in essence, but prettier and more user-friendly with new features, big and small. Here are some of the things we’ve been working on:

• Online AI Bots
•  Reconnect
•  Elliptic Orbits
•  Quick Targeting Mode
•  Tech Tree Graphical Overhaul
•  New Intel Mechanics
•  The Ability to Select Building Upgrades On the Build List
•  New Buildings
• Rebalance
• Localizations
• Planetary System Navigation Enhancements
• Improved Visuals
• New and Redone Sound Effects
• Overall UI Polish
• Overall Re-Implementation of Systems, Eliminating Old Bugs
• And more...

We’ll probably give out a few more details on the features as the development continues.
Interplanetary Enhanced Edition will be out this summer!

Interplanetary Patch 1.1.6426

 

On to the patch! We thought that it would be nice to actually give you something concrete while kicking off the wait for the Enhanced Edition. Actions speak louder than words, after all. So, we decided to go our of our way to put out a little patch for the current version of Interplanetary. It’s mostly nice little extra features and balance adjustments. Without further ado, here’s the feature list for the pre-Enhanced patch, available right now: 

• Navigation Enhancements  
•  Added the ability to pan the camera by holding Middle Mouse Button

• New Planet and Visuals
• New Player Planet: Breach
• Enabled Starfield Background Randomization

• 2nd Stage Targeting Polish and Fixes
• Defense ranges automatically visible when targeting inside their area-of-effect
• Made planet-clicking easier on Missile targeting by increasing the click area and adding a highlight
• Canceling 2nd Stage Targeting now takes you right back to Targeting View
• Fixed a bug that caused the Intel View of the wrong player to be shown when canceling 2nd Stage Targeting
•  Defense Polish and Fixes
•  Defense range visuals can be toggled on and off (B)
• Fixed bugs that sometimes caused defenses to not activate when they should have
•  Build Menu Polish and Fixes
•  Improved Build Menu highlights
•  Allowed tooltips on greyed out buttons
•  Miscellaneous
•  End Turn button cosmetic adjustments
•  Removed analytics
•  Balance Adjustments

 For the full changelog, visit the Changelog-thread on our forums!

Special Thanks to Team17 and Advanced Interactive Gaming!

Whew, it’s been awhile since we’ve had anything concrete enough to make a news update on. While there’s been a lot of preparation and on/off-work on Interplanetary, we only had the chance to get the whole team back on-board early this year. We have both Team17 and Advanced Interactive Gaming to thank for this chance.

As some of you may have noticed, Interplanetary has been moved under Team17’s label a while ago already. We’ve partnered up with them to release Interplanetary Enhanced Edition and they’ve been helping us a lot already with publishing-related business. As the release gets closer, you might also see Team17’s Jonno roaming around our forums, giving us an experienced hand with community management. Be nice to him!

As sad as it is to admit, we can’t run our humble studio with passion alone. Luckily, we also made an indispensable ally of Advanced Interactive Gaming, who stepped in to help us fund the development of Interplanetary Enhanced Edition.

See, we told you we’d figure out a way to add all those features eventually :D

In Conclusion...

The last year was busy for our team, even though we didn’t get to do much for Interplanetary and almost all we did was internal. We went into details about the reasons for that in our last devblog post. We’ve mostly been occupied with a bunch of work-for-hire-projects, keeping our operations afloat. It’s been hectic, but we’ve learned a lot about different technologies and how to work better than ever as a team. We’ve even been helping our friends at Mushroom Party to release their arcade/action game Mushroom Crusher Extreme, giving us some experience as publishers, of sorts.

It’s been partly refreshing and partly maddening to start reworking Interplanetary from the scratch. We’re very happy we got the chance to do so, since people still seem interested in the game to this day and there definitely are some things we’ve wanted to fix for a long time.

tl;dr:

• Interplanetary Enhanced Edition update is free for all owners of Interplanetary and comes out this Summer
• A smaller patch for the current version is out now

And one more for the road: Interplanetary is now 66% off at the Team17 sale on Humble Store. Looks to us like a good bargain.

That’s about it! Do drop by our forums if you have any questions or would like to find people to play with. Even if we’ve been quiet on the news front, we’ve been and will continue to check the forums and answer questions whenever we’re able.

Blast you later!

Inside Interplanetary: The Remains of the Year

Ho ho ho! The jolliest holiday greetings from Team Jolly Roger! Hope you've been well, our dear Interplanetarists, and everyone else interested in our misadventures in game development!

It's been a while since we've been actively putting out status updates, blog posts and such. But now, right before we set out for a quick Christmas holiday, would be the perfect time to quickly go through what's going on over here and write about our general thoughts on the passing year.

Interplanetary Musings and Thoughts for the Future

And so it began.

May 12th 2015, we released our first big PC game, Interplanetary, on Steam after a year of open development on Early Access. It was a roller-coaster of fun and horror, as these things tend to be! In the end, everything went much better than expected, a lot of which is thanks to the enthusiastic and warm reception of the game. You guys are the best!

That said, not all the features we planned made it to Interplanetary. As most developers nowadays, we didn't simply throw the game out there and were done with it, but had great plans of supporting Interplanetary by fixing things, adding things, balancing things... Maybe even a bit too great, it turned out.

Some bumps on road to release caused a lot of trouble with our subsequent support of the game. Shortly, we discovered some difficult online networking problems affecting some of the players around the launch time. You can read more about it in our July status update. We had to push back the bigger, funner features on the list and concentrate fully on critical fixes. We even put on hold some of our regular events, such as Whack-a-Dev's, until it was certain that no player would lose progress over a networking hitch. But, as it turned out, fixing the networking problem would require diving deep into the roots of the game, re-writing the code extensively; and the schedule was tight.

With all the patches and trouble, we blew through the time we wished to spend on more interesting things. Eventually, most of the team needed to move on to different work-for-hire-projects, thus, having to leave Interplanetary support to the background, which was quite disappointing for all of us.

Now, although we're heavily occupied by other work and can't give you any sort of sensible timeline yet, we are looking forward to continuing to support Interplanetary once we are able. We do eavesdrop on the community all the time and are very grateful to the players, who are still sending us excellent feedback!

tl;dr
Things didn't always go as planned and we ran out of time. Now we're really busy with other work. We want to update Interplanetary, but don't know when it's possible. Hopefully soon!


Of course, it wasn't all pain and disappointment. After all, Interplanetary was our first significant project and, as tough as it was at times, it let us learn a great deal of things. Not to mention the confidence we found in the friendly reactions from the critics (even got to appear in printed press!) and eager participation of the community - great morale booster!

Interplanetary in print. Next to Farming Simulator 15, no less!

Speaking of morale boosters, even though enthusiastic players are the best prize any game developer could ever ask for, getting an actual award also feels pretty great. And that's how it felt to win Nordic Game Indie Sensation Award last May in Malmö, Sweden! Unexpected and absolutely overwhelming, such recognition from peers, only days after the release gave us the strength to go on and the public attention to get Interplanetary noticed by new audiences.

The conference was fun and we got a hefty souvenir to take home, too.

Aside from the Nordic Game Conference, we got to tour inside Finland and all across Europe, showing off Interplanetary and meeting some of you guys! Among the events we got to attend in 2015 are:  Paris Game Connection, Slush in Helsinki and Unite Europe in Amsterdam. Pretty out there, huh?

 To round up:

Patches released: 6
Events attended: 11
Coffee packs consumed: Countless.


Yeah, quite a busy year! It's been mostly behind the scenes, out of the public eye, working on secret projects and such. Makes for a kind of a boring retrospective when we can't talk much about the things we're been working on, but we hope we've been nicely transparent and answered some questions.

Thank You For Your Patience!

And now it's time for us to take a little Christmas break. We'll be back in business early next year. Enjoy your respective holidays, everyone! Take it easy, play lots of games and we'll see you again soon!

May the Blast be with you!

Interplanetary Development Update and AI Speed Patch

Greetings, Interplanetarists! Team Jolly Roger here, with another little patch that should greatly increase the joy of demolishing AIs. Also, we'd like to give you a quick update on Interplanetary's state, the pace of future updates and such. Let's get right on it!

AI Speed Up!

As some of you have pointed out, the AI can sometimes take its sweet time calculating attacks. The more AI players and the higher the difficulty, the longer it takes.

To alleviate the frustration, we've made changes that should make turn processing much faster. The AIs now start their calculations already during the player's turn, which in the ideal situation can make turns lightning fast! This is something that people on our forums have suggested, and while we initially had to keep it simple, this is obviously the better way to do things.

My God, it's full of AIs!

On top of that, we have some little tweaks, but nothing massive.

Interplanetary Patch 1.0.6378

• AI performance optimizations
• Minor Load Game performance optimizations
• Fixed typos on Event Log

For previous changelogs, head for the forums.

Situation Report

Overall, Interplanetary 1.0 launch went quite well! We got a nice burst of new players and the added features were well received. Having given it a little time, we determined that the launch was indeed successful enough for us to continue updating the game, but not quite on the scale we originally thought we might. All promised features are still planned, but the timeline had to be expanded. Of course, possible fixes of all sorts take priority over features.

Some new issues were discovered, as is customary when releasing a game, but we did and are doing our best to handle them. The most persistent and serious problems have had to do with the game getting stuck on turn processing. There have been different reasons that have caused this to happen: networking problems, AI issues or just unrelated bugs causing the game get confused.

Not this one, though! Flying buildings were harmless fun.

While we've done our best to try and eliminate as many of these problems as possible, we've wanted to also add two fail-safe features: Reconnect and Online Saving. Both features have been promised multiple times and reconnect was technically ready when we discovered a huge problem. The system, as it's currently made, works, but it is very slow. In common cases, reconnecting to a match can take over 10 minutes, which brings the match to a halt for all players. 

Needless to say, this doesn't work. Not only is it possible to accidentally get the game stuck, but this feature would also be very easy to abuse. Since Online Saving is part of this system, we've had to push back both features. Sincere apologies for the inconvenience! The features are still coming, but we've passed our internal deadline for them, so their programmers have to move on to different tasks. We can't say exactly when it will be possible for us to patch in reconnect and online saves, but it will be a while.

Basically, the pace of updates won't be what it was during Interplanetary's Early Access run. Even though many of us need to switch to other tasks, we will still keep a close eye on the forums and use every possible chance to continue work on the planned features. There's still a nice big list of goodies planned!

If you have any questions, concerns or bug reports, the forum is a pretty good place to find us! You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter or just shoot a traditional email to info@teamjollyroger.com. Another nice way to keep updated on the development is to join our mailing list at www.interplanetarygame.com.

Keep on blasting!

Interplanetary Released!

This is it! Interplanetary has spread its wings and left the cozy Early Access nest!

It's been quite a journey. Back in 2013, when we first started active development, we were still working from school, with no idea what would be in store for us. Our first alpha testing campaign, with a homemade key code system, was really the first thing that started drawing large scale attention to the game. This is where the ride started to get wild: the founding of our own company TJR Games, our Steam Greenlight adventure, Early Access release, development, development, development!

That's what two years of hard work and coffee abuse can do.

Now, we can finally say that Interplanetary has reached the point we determined to be "1.0", in the early days of development. It's actually more, since the ideas have expanded and our stay in Early Access gave us the chance to develop the game more towards the direction the players wanted.

Like we said before, we will keep supporting the game with patches and updates, as needed. There are even a couple of bigger features that we promised at various times, but which couldn't make it to the launch. Features, such as online save games, online AI bots, ranked matches, LAN game and the third superweapon, will be added in a later update.

Thank you for playing! We hope you will enjoy the 1.0 version of Interplanetary and do keep sending that feedback. Just because it's finished doesn't mean we're going to leave it!

Get the darn thing here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/278910/

Interplanetary 1.0 Coming to Steam on May 12! Also a Trailer!

It's finally happening! After a year of hard work with Interplanetary on Early Access, we're getting ready to release the 1.0 on May 12th, 2015! Celebration!

Ah, those were the days.

Major Added Features

• Online Matchmaking
• A quick way of starting online matches with a push of a button
• Match Customization Options
• A nice amount of options to change up the rules of the game. These include the ability to choose the amount of Cities, change the size of the planets, modify the strength of gravity, disable certain weapons or gameplay elements and more.
  
• City Projects
• A new gameplay mechanic that allows players to assign Projects for cities. The projects generally have a set duration and give resource bonuses and other perks. The amount of population in each city determines the amount of projects the player is able to initiate.
  
• AI Difficulty Levels
• Four difficulty levels for the AI, including a stupid, impossible cheating AI for ultimate challenge
• Saved Games
• Matches might drag on a bit, so this should come in handy!
• Damage Area Visualizations
•  Hit area markers that show the exact area of damage dealt by the projectiles. They lend themselves to some interesting, advanced strategies.
• New Event Log
• A clearer, much less spammy event log. Also quite a bit prettier.
• New Tech Tree
• A lot of new techs have been added to house all the Building Upgrades and City Projects. Also a nice graphical update that helps visualizing the branches, paths and unlocks.
• New Building
• The Offshore Mine, an advanced resource building, buildable only on water
• New Upgrades
• A bunch of new upgrades, most of them having pros and cons to add some interesting choices and strategy paths.
• New Intel Mechanics
• Intel View UI completely redone. Players will be able to see the exact amount of Intel needed to see more of the enemy planets and also spy on their resource amounts.
• New City Growth/Science Mechanics
• The players will be able to boost their Cities' Population growth by using Projects or attaching Power Connectors to them. The amount of Population is also tied to the amount of Science generation, so the more citizens you have, the faster you will gain new Techs.
• Achievements
• 26 achievements for players to unlock. Won't be easy!
• Improved UI and Graphics 
• Lots of smaller changes

A complete visual and aural damage dealing experience.

Naturally, we have a lot of fixes and other improvements in store as well, but these are the most visible features for most players.

After the game is finally released to the world, we won't just abandon it! No, we're going to watch over it and keep up the support! There are still a couple of relatively big features, such as ranked matches, online bots and online saving, that we have wanted to add, but didn't have a chance to do that before release. It's not really too late to give us some feedback either, just like you've been doing so far.

Speaking of feedback, as we're getting closer to the end of our Early Access adventure, all of us would like to once more thank all the players and testers who have been involved with the project! Whether you came aboard last month or you've been following us since pre-Early Access public testing, you've all been a massive help, in one way or another. Giving excellent feedback, building the community or just silently supporting the development of Interplanetary are all things that we are genuinely grateful for. We hope you will enjoy the end product, and even if you don't, send some more feedback our way!

One more thing. Starting from May 12th, Interplanetary will cost $14.99/€14.99. Don't panic! There is still one more week to get the game for yourself and friends for $9.99/€9.99, before it leaves Early Access.

Thank you!
~Team Jolly Roger

Interplanetary Status Update: The Final Stretch Approaching

We're living exciting and busy times. As some of you may remember, we've been throwing around "The Early 2015" as the release date of Interplanetary for a long time. If our watch is correct, it IS the early 2015 already!

We are now scrambling to finally get Interplanetary to version 1.0 and out of Early Access! A huge amount of progress has been made since the last public version and we're hoping to get this thing released soon. We'll announce an actual release date a bit further on, but when we say "soon", we mean in about a month or so! Scary.

The reason why we haven't released a lot of patches and updates recently, is that we've been working hard on adding all the final features and fixing them in place. This means we've had to spread the game open in such a way that packing it back up into nice updates would've slowed down the development too much.

We've now managed to implement pretty much all the main features that were a part of the initial plan. Being in Early Access, however, slightly expanded the scope of the game according to player feedback.

Some of the features available at release:

• Ranked Matches and Online Matchmaking
• Custom Game Setup
• City Projects
• AI Difficulty Levels
• Saved Games
• Damage Area Visualizations
• New Event Log
• New Tech Tree
• New Upgrades
• New Intel Mechanics
• New City Growth/Science Mechanics
• Achievements 
• Improved UI and Graphical Touches

And then some! This is just a little sneak peek of the upcoming features and we'll be revealing a more detail list later.

We've added a lot, but unfortunately, a few of the features we've explicitly promised to include, will have to wait until after the release of Interplanetary 1.0.

Promised features that will be added post launch:

• Grey Goo, the third superweapon. Includes some pretty unusual mechanics.
• The return of LAN Game. We had to disable LAN matches during the network overhaul. There are simply more vital features to add before launch, but we haven't forgotten about this one.
• Online AI Bots. Needed to be pushed back so we could finish other features.
  

Uncontrollable problems, such as some particularly terrible in-office flu seasons, have sometimes slowed us down dramatically, but the good news is, we will not abandon the game once it's released. We want to keep patching it and updating in the features that just couldn't make it to the initial release.

Now, this is another good opportunity to sincerely thank all of you who have been with us during our stay on Early Access! All the game testing, suggestions and bug reports from the players have definitely improved this game and we would have never been able to develop it to this point without your support. It's not too late to send us some more feedback, though, even if we are going to leave Early Access! We will have a good opportunity to add more things to the post-release updates.

Anyway, this is where we are, at the moment. We'll be making a proper release date and feature announcement sometime closer to the date. Look forward to it!

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.

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.

Interplanetary Update #6.6: Patching it Up

Can't see anything anymore!

Greetings, Interplanetarists! We come bearing glad tidings.

To ease the wait until the next proper update (it'll be a doozy!), we decided to put out a little patch to fix some big annoyances.

First of all, we've begun a great networking overhaul, one that should fix a huge amount of the current problems with online play. While the results are still a couple of updates away, today's patch contains an important network fix, sort of as a teaser of things to come: the turn processing fix!

There's nothing quite as aggravating as having your game crash in between turns because of some random reason. That random reason turned out to be lasers. Due to some hitbox weirdness, a laser blast would sometimes not reach the planet surface at all, causing the game being confused and calculating the attack forever. This should now be fixed.

Lasers, nature's little troublemakers.

Next on our list of fixes is something many of you have been waiting for: the structure graphic/intel fix.

A while ago we made an experimental intel system change that allowed players to see the locations of enemy structures, but not any of the details. This turned out to be pretty unpopular, so we're hereby changing it back! As of this patch, all the city graphics and building graphics will be hidden unless the player has enough intel to see them. Because of this change, we also made a couple of balance tweaks, mainly having to do with beefing up the targetable weapons and nerfing defense buildings to account for this added layer of defense.

That's all the big changes now, but do check out the detailed changelog for every little thing.

Interplanetary Version 0.6.4981_EAC_6.6

• Fixed online games crashing at turn processing due to Laser weirdness
• City and Building graphics are now visible only if the player has enough intel
• Camera now centers on the player planet when entering Targeting View
• Material production upgrades changed to consume Planet Material
• Cities now get destroyed when population reaches 0, as opposed to 1/6 of maximum
• Sun gravity increased
• Laser effects made slightly more visible
• Defense building Visibility increased
• Railgun Visibility slightly decreased
• Missile Population damage increased
• Laser Population damage increased
• Defense Energy consumption increased
• Upgradeable Intel amount for Data Security Hub decreased
• Upgradeable Counterintel amount for Telescope Array decreased

 And what better way to celebrate the patch than...

The previous Whack-a-Dev turned out to be so cozy, we thought of having a home-broadcast again. So, catch the whacking stream on our Twitch channel and join the discussion in the chat. Just like the previous time, a couple of us will be playing a match or two of Interplanetary and chatting around, answering the questions you post in the chat.

And, as always, for every dev you manage to defeat we release free Interplanetary Steam keys into the world. You can follow the giveaway at our Twitter and Vkontakte pages.

Blast you soon and blast you hard!

Interplanetary is available on Steam Early Access.

Interplanetary Update #6: Building Upgrades

Once again, we a delivering a fresh Interplanetary update with some new and interesting stuff. Nevermind the shortness of the changelog, it's pure business! Let's look into it.

What's New?

Good news for all of those sick and tired of waiting for long turn-processing. With the latest action phase optimization, turn-processing should go a lot faster! Down with the waiting!

To add some depth to the building phase, we are introducing a Building Upgrade Mechanic. This is what all that tweaking in the last update was building up towards.

Each structure now has two upgrade slots on their info window. Clicking on them allows you to buy upgrades that will boost the stats of the building. Want some more "oomph" to your railgun? Buy some damage boosts or AOE upgrades!

Be careful, though; once you fill the upgrade slots, you won't be able to add any more upgrades to that building or delete the ones you've added. Specialize accordingly.

For starters, there will only be a couple of basic upgrades available and just two slots for each for each structure, so play around with them and let us know what you think! We'll be waiting for your suggestions for future upgrades or system changes. The upgrades will get more diverse further on and most of them will be tied to the tech-tree.

Interplanetary Version 0.6.4390_EAC_6.5

• Building Upgrade mechanics added
• Turn-Processing time greatly improved

That's about it for this time! Check out the update and don't forget to let us know what you think.

As for the Whack-a-Dev, everything so far seems to be on schedule and you can expect it on August 9th, 6pm GMT/11am PDT. In the meantime you can learn to use the new upgrades efficiently and blast us into oblivion when the time comes! Looking forward to it!

Interplanetary is available on Steam Early Access

Interplanetary Update #5: Loads of Data

Featuring a cameo appearance by everyone's favorite blue sun.

Once again, it's time to send a new update out into the big world. Good luck out there, try not to break down immediately! Like that ever happens, heh...

Features

This time we've updated in a couple of small features that serve as a base for something a bit bigger that's coming in the future.

First we have a new window for interacting with buildings. When clicking on a building, you'll now be greeted with a lot more info than previously. The functionality remains the same currently, but you can now easily see the numerical values of building health, visibility and production, for example. Makes it a bit easier to utilize advanced strategies.

If that's not enough data for you, we're now introducing the Interplanetary Codex. It's an ever-growing in-game database of all things Interplanetary. You'll be able to use it to dig deep into building stats, for example, or just read about the real life functionality of railguns. More entries will be coming with time, so stay on the lookout!

Since we're opening the hood a little bit and letting you in on the number crunching, feel free to comment on any values that you feel should be different. We obviously appreciate outside opinions; why be in Early Access otherwise?
                       

Aah, more reasons to showcase the awesome 2D art.

These are the main features introduced in the update, but there are still plenty of smaller things and tweaks in there. Check out the changelog for more!

Interplanetary Version 0.5.4183_EAC_6

• Codex
• New Building Window
• Misleading city lights removed from planet surface
• Balance changes
• Railgun damage increased
• Asteroid Diversion damage increased
• Weapon targeting angles decreased
• Projectile minimum targeting velocity decreased
• Planet speeds increased
• Non-player planet sizes increased
• Solar Laser distance from the sun decreased and standardized
• Missile homing range decreased
• Kinetic Defense range decreased
• Shield Defense range slightly decreased
• Mine visibility decreased
• Defense visibility decreased
• Science requirement for some technologies increased
• Build Energy costs increased for Mines, Defenses and Intel buildings

In Other News

You remember Whack-a-Dev, right? That's the event where members of Team Jolly Roger host games of Interplanetary and duke it out against the players. This Saturday we're changing it up a little bit with a surprise guest: the Interplanetary AI! We're letting the players to have a little sneak peek, by letting the AI do the battling for us, under our supervision.

Do note that the AI is still early in development and this is its first time in real action. The final implementation of the feature is still far away. Check out the Steam Announcement for more info!

Interplanetary is available on Steam Early Access

Interplanetary Update #4: Lobby Chat, Trading Cards and So Many Planets!

 

The beautiful Noxious

The time has come again for Interplanetary update! This time you're up for some graphical additions, a new place for chatting and something to trade. So, let's get to it.

What's new?

You might have guessed from the update title that the biggest news on the block is the newly installed lobby chat. Now you can chat not only in the game, but also in the game room lobby.

On the graphics side: another planet has been added for you to play with - the beautiful and warm Noxious. In addition to that, there are plenty of new non-player planets and suns. It makes this the official debut appearance of the famous Blue Sun.

And for dessert - Steam trading cards for Interplanetary are now ready to be traded any time!

Gotta catch 'em all!

Interplanetary Version 0.4.4061_EAC_5

• Lobby Chat
• New Player Planet: Noxious
• New Planets and Suns
• Steam Trading Cards, Badges and Emoticons
• Defense Building Visibility Decreased

That is all for this time. Enjoy the updated Interplanetary and don't forget to leave your comments and opinions in the survey form!

Interplanetary is available on Steam Early Access.

Interplanetary Update: Sounds and Shapes

Cities, now 100% more lively!

Update time! Today we bring you a couple of small, but interesting changes.

The most obvious update is the inclusion of actual graphics for cities and buildings. This changes the intel system quite a bit, since we've decided to let players see the structure graphics regardless of their intelligence points. They just won't be able to see any details, such as the exact type of the building or its condition. Targetable weapons should now be much more useful and we've done slight changes to their values to accommodate for that. Tell us what you think!

Another visible, or rather audible, change is new music. We've added a couple of extra pieces to increase variety. You can expect many more in future updates.

Interplanetary Version 0.3.4027_EAC_4

• New graphics for cities, buildings and ruins
• Different craters for different weapon impact points
• Additional music for build phase and action phase
• Targetable weapons damage reduced
• Shield Defense doesn't block missiles anymore
• Sound effect fixes
• Networking host migration fixes

Sure, you could fire blindly, but that little dot there may well be a kinetic defense.

That's all the changes for this week. We had to skip Whack-a-Dev last week due to scheduling problems, but we'd still appreciate it if you tried out the new changes and gave us some feedback!

Interplanetary is now available on Steam Early Access!

Interplanetary Update: Pretty Things and Other Tweaks

Looks pretty dry, but it's full of interesting landscapes!

Here we go with another Interplanetary update! This time we're focusing more on graphical details, but there are some small, hopefully interesting, balance adjustments there also.


What's New?

Let's get right into it, shall we? Here's the rough changelog for this week's update:


Interplanetary Version 0.2.3983_eac3

• New Planet Texture
• New player planet added: The Shredded Dune
• Explosions!
• Redone explosions for "normal" weapons to be more visible from far away and prettier to look up close.
• Different color smoke for shots that land in water.
• Sun Graphical Improvements
• Various New Particle Effects
• Keyboard Zoom Added
• "E" and "Q" can be used to zoom in and out
• Balance Tweaks
• Damage increased for Missile, Laser and Solar Laser
• Damage reduced for Railgun and Asteroid Diversion
• Firing cost reduced for Missiles and Lasers
• Activation cost increased for Shield Defense
• Accuracy and range increased for Kinetic Defense
• Build cost decreased for Kinetic Defense
• Build and firing costs increased for Superweapons
• Science cost increased for Superweapons
• Population boost increased for "Arcologies" tech.
• Planet material drain decreased

This should help a bit...

Whack-a-Dev Part II

Along with the update, as usual, we've scheduled a "Whack-a-Dev" Day for this Saturday!

On Saturday May 17th, starting from 3:00pm GMT/8:00am PDT, we will be hosting games to challenge you in the craft of interplanetary warfare! Here's what we have planned for you this time:

• Whack the devs!
• Now's your chance to prove your superiority! Beat the devs at their own game and become a folk hero!
• Steam Key giveaways!
• We'll be tweeting Steam Keys for Interplanetary every time someone manages to beat one of us! 
• Streamers!
• Enter Elysium and Rushlock will be joining us this Saturday to stream some of their matches. You can either join the streams to spectate or play the game and get the chance to appear there yourself.
• Socialize with the community!
• Join the Interplanetary Steam Group to arrange games with other Interplanetarists or chat up the devs!

...but sometimes railgun just doesn't care.

Hopefully you can all join us to blast those planets into oblivion! This will also be a great chance to try out some of the new tweaks in the game and see how they affect your general strategy.

Interplanetary Update: In-Game Chat

Here it is, the first proper feature update to Interplanetary! The main feature this time is something that's been requested a lot.

Update #1: In-Game Chat

As you may have guessed already, that feature is the much requested in-game chat. Now you can also bash your enemies verbally! Do try to behave, though.

An example of friendly, proper behavior.

Here's the full changelog for the update:

Interplanetary Version 0.1.3960

• In-game chat
• Indicators to show which players have ended their turns
• Building unlocks in Techtree now have simple descriptions
• Added a simple reminder when trying to end turn with no active research
• New player planet texture: Jungle
• Small changes to UI graphics
• Changed the version number scheme

Have fun cursing your opponents to oblivion (but seriously, avoid nasty words, there could be kids playing!) Also, don't forget to take part in our first "Whack-a-Dev" this Saturday. It'll be the true baptism by fire for the chat system!

Interplanetary Whack-a-Dev Days and Update Info

Hey, everyone! Having fun with Interplanetary?

Since the game is currently multiplayer only, it needs a strong community to stay alive and well. To help bring all the players together, we've planned something we hope everyone is happy to take part in.

Interplanetary Whack-a-Dev Day!

Fanfare! Starting this Saturday at 3:00pm GMT, we're kicking off the first Interplanetary Whack-a-Dev Day. We're planning on making this a semi-regular event, timing it with new updates to the game. Here's what we have planned for this Saturday:

• Whack the devs!
• Team Jolly Roger will be hosting games of Interplanetary! If you have a beef with any of the devs, now's the time to get out there and break their planets!
• Steam Key giveaways!
• We'll be tweeting Steam Keys for Interplanetary every time someone manages to beat one of us!
• Screenshot Competition!
• Share screenshots to Interplanetary's community hub, with the text "Whack-a-Dev" in their description. The one with the highest voted screenshot at the end of the day wins a little prize.
• Streaming!
• Enter Elysium and Rushlock will be joining us this Saturday to stream some of their matches. You can either join the streams to spectate or play the game and get the chance to appear there yourself.

With screenshots like this, we have high hopes for the competition!

In Other News: Patches and Updates

As you may have noticed, we released an online connectivity patch for Interplanetary this Tuesday. If you previously had some problems connecting to other players, they should hopefully be fixed now. Here's a proper changelog of the major things in the patch:

Interplanetary Version 0.0.3922

• Online connections more stable 
• UPnP settings added 
• Port selection option added
• Passwords added to online games 
• Defeated players' orbits are now greyed out 
• Minor fixes to the tutorial

We're also planning on giving Interplanetary a proper feature update this Friday. Among the features we're hoping to add is in-game chat, a popular request by the players. 

Hopefully, we can finish implementing the chat until Friday so you can also bash us devs verbally, if you want! Hopefully, you don't want to.

Interplanetary Released to Steam Early Access!

It's here! Interplanetary has now been released on Steam as an Early Access title. If you're ready for some interplanetary warfare, you can go get the game here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/278910

What a ride! We'd like to thank everyone who took part in the alpha code testing phase. Your feedback has been valuable and we hope you'll follow us onto the next step of Interplanetary's journey!

Since Interplanetary is in Early Access, we will keep developing it while you can play it, taking advantage of Steam's features. Don't forget to send us your critique, bug reports and ideas so we can keep making the game better and better.

You can still use our survey to report your experiences or simply go to the Interplanetary Discussion Board on Steam.

As a final note, don't forget to check out our Facebook and Twitter these days. We may have some additional surprises in store for you! You can also join us at QuakeNet #Interplanetary for matchmaking or casual chatting.

Thank you! Let's all have fun blasting each other to bits!

Interplanetary Arrives to Steam Early Access This Friday!

Surprise! It's finally time to move to the next level: the Steam Early Access version of Interplanetary will be released April 18th, which is this Friday!

We decided that going Early Access was a natural continuation of Interplanetary's journey, as we've already had close collaboration with its players during development. By continuing on to Steam, we'll be able to reach a much wider audience than ever before, which helps the development a huge amount.

Like usual, buying the Early Access version at a reduced price will also give you all the future updates until the game is finished and you'll be able to better influence the direction of the game through your feedback.

New Features

For the Early Access release, we've prepared an exciting new feature: Superweapons. These are unlockable through the Tech Tree and will wreak serious havoc with your enemy's planet.

This planet's going to have a bad time.

Currently, we've implemented two superweapons:

• Asteroid Diversion
• Diverts a group of asteroids towards the enemy planet, causing massive damage. Works similarly to the railgun, except that the starting point is the asteroid field at the edge of the planetary system and you'll be shooting a cluster of space boulders instead of one small shot.
• Solar Laser
• An accurate and powerful weapon, the Solar Laser is fired from it's own orbit close to the sun. Unlike with normal lasers, it can shoot to any direction, unless there are other celestial objects blocking its line of sight.

These weapons are pretty devastating, so make sure you get them before your opponent does!

In addition to superweapons, we've been doing a lot of smaller updates all across the board. Some of the major ones include the ability to have hotseat matches with up to 4 players and many graphical and UI-fixes. There are also plenty of balance adjustments, so make sure to weigh in with your opinions.

Time to get hyped!

Hop onto www.interplanetarygame.com and join our mailing list for timely updates.