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

Greenlight for Interplanetary! (Also New Trailer)

With a new trailer, Interplanetary has now been submitted to Steam Greenlight!

If you would like to see the game on Steam, go give us a vote! We would truly appreciate it.

On our Greenlight-page, there is an open link to a playable Greenlight alpha version. No codes necessary this time! This is kind of an evaluation version for people who want to give Interplanetary a try. Testers with alpha keys may still get updates to the alpha as they come, but the open version stays as it is.

Inside Interplanetary: The Resources: The Material: The Movie

Don't worry, it's just steam. Black, smelly steam.

Yo, everyone! Game Design fellow Sasu is back in action, currently testing the newest build of Interplanetary. Some key features are still missing; it's a little bit difficult to enjoy the game when buildings and cities don't even have life bars, but the game is otherwise quite playable already. Add in a couple of features and balance, balance, balance!

Today we shall delve into a central system, that isn't completely implemented in the game at this point. As such, many of the terms used will probably differ in the final game and the system itself will evolve. In spite of that, let's take a look at the basics of...

The Resources of Interplanetary: Material

We've already mentioned some things about Interplanetary's resources in these posts. There are quite a few, such as Production, Science and Power, but one of the most important ones, for you to keep your eye on, is Material.

Material represents everything, well, material that you need to build structures: concrete, rebar, currency, whatever. It's all lumped under the moniker of Material for your convenience! Along with Power, a bar showing the available Material is always shown to the player; these are the two things that need constant attention when developing your planet.

All those railguns ain't cheap.

As we've explained before, many actions in the game cost Power, the amount of which is recalculated, according to the amount of Power Plants, at the beginning of each turn. Material, however, works more like normal currency, meaning it can easily be depleted, if you consume more than you produce.

The game begins with a set amount of Material for each player, but it won't last for very long. A savvy player will construct a couple of Mines to keep their stocks full. A normal Mine yields a small amount of Material each turn, but they can be upgraded to be more efficient.

The Material doesn't just appear from thin air, though: each planet has a set amount of it, and once it's gone, it's time to start thinking about alternative means of sustaining your development. The planet's Material is divided into three parts: Normal, Aquatic and Deep. The type doesn't matter when building structures, but each of them is acquired in a slightly different way. Most of the planet's Material is Normal and is mined by Normal Mines. Aquatic Material is mined with Underwater Mines and Deep Material is gained by upgrading Normal Mines with Deep Mining capabilities.

Planet Material is like a pizza: tasty and crunchy and I'm hungry.

Initially, all Mines work quite inefficiently and a lot of the mined Material will go to waste in the process to convert it to usable resources. This can be remedied with upgrades, however.

Interplanetary warfare can take a heavy toll on the resources, and you will inevitably run out of Material at some point. When the final drop is consumed, it's time to look to the skies and attempt to colonize a nearby planet. To colonize a planet, you use your interplanetary weapons to shoot Colonization Probes, which in turn will set up a small colony on the planet they land on. The colony is able to, among other things, mine Material and send it back to the home planet.

Long matches may very well end with almost the whole planetary system dry of usable Material. Insert commentary on unsustainable development and the irony of war here.

Hopefully, a complete image on how to play Interplanetary is beginning to form for everyone. We'll be back another time with more tidbits and such. See ya!

Inside Interplanetary: Weapon Types

Game design guy Sasu, here with another post detailing Interplanetary's progress and game mechanics. Alpha is coming along nicely, even though the graphics might not show that big of an advancement. The weapon types have been basically implemented and just need to be fiddled with. A lot. This feels like a nice point to segue into the subject of this blog post:

The Weapons of Interplanetary

This time, we'll expand on our last time's subject of Targeting by taking a look at different weapon types and their targeting features.

There are three main weapon types: railguns, missiles and beams.

Railgun

Railguns are simple weapons, meant to overwhelm the enemy, but they're not exactly known for being accurate. They don't use a huge amount of Power, so it's usually possible to fire many of them in one turn.

Stupid gas planet, messing up a great shot.

The targeting of a railgun is very simple: choose the weapon and select the trajectory. It is, however, very difficult to hit an exact spot on the enemy planet, even with the possibility to put markers on the enemy planet in Intelligence View. Sometimes, it can be quite difficult to even hit the enemy planet, due to gravitational pull's strong effect on railgun slugs.

Missile

Whereas railguns have a bit of a luck element in them, missiles are designed to be accurate. They are not as much affected by their surroundings and it is much easier to hit specific targets with them. Missiles are a bit of power hogs, though.

The targeting of missiles actually consists of two phases. In the first phase, the camera zooms in to the enemy planet and you can get a proper look of its surface. This is basically the Intelligence View. In this view, you'll be able to click anywhere on the planet to set a target. After choosing your target, you enter the second phase, similar to railgun targeting. Now you can set the trajectory and try to hit as close to the marked spot as possible.

You can even target the opposite side of the enemy planet.

So, you've set the trajectory and also an exact target on the enemy building. As long as you manage to shoot your missile close enough to the enemy planet, it will enter its orbit. While there, the missile will travel towards the target point on the planet's surface. The longer the time spent on the orbit, the greater the chance that it will get shot down by defense guns or other hazards. This means you should try to aim as close to the target as possible.

Beam

Beams differ from other weapons in that the gravity doesn't affect them one bit. Their trajectory is always a straight line. Depending on the situation, the enemy planet can be very easy to hit, or simply impossible, because of obstacles in the way or beam weapons placed on the wrong side of the planet.

Beams also have a two phase targeting: once you set the trajectory, you can specify the exact spot the beam hits. The choice of targets is much smaller than with the missile, since you may only target one side of the planet. In optimal conditions, this makes beams the most accurate weapons by far. Unfortunately, their attack power is fairly low.

Everything's in the way!

The weapons in Interplanetary will be based on these three types. Some will have radically different stats and some will have added effects, but the basic concepts are still the same. There will also be slight tweaks to this system in the future, but the idea stays. Hopefully, this has been enlightening. See you next time!

Inside Interplanetary: Targeting System

It does look a bit better than last time.

Hello, people! Game Designer Sasu here again, chronicling our progress on Interplanetary. We are still working on the alpha test version, at the moment. The game is getting prettier and the implementation of many core features, such as placement of structures and targeting, is well on its way! It will probably still be a couple of months until we can send the alpha around for testing, but rest assured that progress is happening. Maybe we'll be able to release some interesting new material, our graphics master Jukka has been working on, soon.

Today, I'd like to go into detail about one of the major game mechanics of Interplanetary. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the heart and soul of the game: The Targeting System!

The Secrets of  the Targeting System

As you may have noticed at this point, Interplanetary is all about damaging your enemy and keeping yourself safe, using simple base game mechanics that will, hopefully, allow for a lot of strategic depth. The Targeting System allows you to target the cannons you've assembled during the Build Phase.

The Targeting Phase starts as you first choose which gun to target. Its placement on your planet's surface will determine the angle of targeting; it will be somewhat difficult to hit the enemy planet if your weapon happens to be on the wrong side of your planet. It's not impossible, however, since many things in the planetary system will affect the trajectory of the slug. All the planets, and most notably the sun, have a gravitational pull that you can use to your advantage. They can also completely mess up your targeting, unless you're careful.

This is a pretty good curve...

Now that you've picked a weapon, a curve, representing the final trajectory, will appear. By moving your mouse, you can manipulate the curve to make the trajectory to your liking; a good idea is to try and make the slug follow the enemy planet's orbit. Once you've found a trajectory that pleases you, hit the left mouse button and target your next weapon. When you and your opponent have both chosen your targets and ended your turns, the weapons fire automatically.

One more thing to pay attention to is the movement of the planets: once the weapons fire, time unfreezes and the planetary system comes alive. The planets start to orbit the sun and rotate on their axes. You just need to learn to take that into account and aim accordingly, but you can also use a slider to simulate the passage of time while targeting, and even choose when each individual weapon will fire.

...this is not.

When the weapons fire, the slugs follow their predicted trajectories, taking into account the changes in the planetary system. You can only hope you hit the enemy planet and not the other ones, especially your own, or that your missile won't end up drifting endlessly in outer space.

These are the basics of targeting. There's a lot more to it, of course. With the basic system, it's very difficult to, for example, pick a specific target from the enemy planet or just generally to cause a lot of damage. That's why you will be able to use different weapon types with different targeting features. Details on that will have to wait until another time!

Logos are not built in a day

Hello dear readers, it's Jukka here to serve you another post, this time on the subject of Interplanetary's logo and what went into the process of designing it.

Why do we need a logo?

The idea behind a logo is to provide people with something to recognize the product by. Having just a name for a product isn't quite enough, as there can be other things going with the same name (as long as it's not a similar product/entity etc).

A logo provides the name a unique and recognizable aesthetic. It's a building block of a brand. Brand is something that is born instantly, it's the sum of people’s thoughts and opinions of the matter at hand and those things can take time to form. A logo can give people something to base their thoughts and opinions on, when they first encounter a new brand and also a way to recognize it when they see it again somewhere.

Personally though, I feel that game logos don't need to be as thought out as traditional corporate logos and other product logos, as games have better ways of introducing themselves to new audiences, for instance trailers.

Design process

To start off, you need a name and, lucky us, we already had one. Both I and Tarita, our artist, started by sketching our own ideas.
The name “Interplanetary” was originally just a working title, but as it hadn't been used for a game yet and it did a good job in describing the game, we stuck with it (there's a scifi movie by the same name that came out in 2008).
I like to start logo designs by sketching straight in Illustrator. I combine shapes and use the pathfinder tools to cut out and merge them, looking for interesting results.

Some of the first sketches and their variants.

The world of scifi-themed logos is filled with planet shapes and crescent moons, blocky typography and carbon fiber textures. While I tried to come up with something a bit more original I also wanted to include the idea about shooting at planets... Which at first resulted in designs that mostly remind you of things you learn about animal reproduction in biology class. So in the end I made some compromises and didn't come up with the most original of designs, but rather ones I felt conveyed the idea best.

After a while we gathered up the sketches and chose four we liked most and put together a simple survey to ask for opinions and feedback from our friends in facebook. The survey provided us with good feedback and strengthened our own opinion on which design to choose.

The four candidates we chose for the survey.

After posting the survey I moved on to make a short teaser to show at the upcoming Nordic Game Conference, which ended up taking all my time. As a short time remedy we used a plain white version of the logo that was most favored. This way we had a logo, which would be pretty close to it's final form and most probably wouldn't change so much that it would be unrecognizable.

After the NGC, I postponed working on the logo for some time, while I concentrated on honing the teaser and its idea bit further. The teaser is still a work in progress, but I did finally take the time to put the finishing touches on the logo.

Final version of the logo.

And that sums it up. Hope to see again next time.

Inside Interplanetary: Turn structure

This is the game. All of it.

Welcome to another game design blog post. I'm Sasu and I'll be your host today and I promise that the topic today is much more interesting than it sounds. It's time to finally tell all you folks out there about Interplanetary's turn structure.

Interplanetary is a turn based strategy, so unsurprisingly, it consists of turns. The flow of these turns dictates the very basics of how the game is played and they can be neatly divided into three major phases: Build Phase, Targeting Phase and Action Phase.

Build Phase

During the Build Phase, your job is to manage your planet and devise your strategy. You can directly build your infrastructure, develop technologies and spy on your enemy. This phase is strongly reminiscent of the base building in most strategy games.

The placement of different buildings can have strong repercussions. How to keep up your Power Grid? How to protect your buildings? Should you spread them out over the whole planet or keep them together? The attack might come from anywhere.

I also promise that the graphics will be much nicer.

Depending on the power of your Intelligence structures, you can also take a peek at the enemy's planet and plan your upcoming attack accordingly. Be careful, though: if you're not equipped with adequate counterintelligence methods, your enemy may do the same to you. If you're careless with your building strategy, you can soon  expect to see some missiles, aimed directly at your weakest spots.

Then there's your Technology level. You must choose what technologies to concentrate on and what route to take on your technology tree. Unlocked technologies grant you bonuses and new projects that you can develop in your cities. All in all, there's a lot of room for strategy here.

Targeting Phase

While you can enter and exit Targeting Phase at any time, you'll probably be mostly going there after you're finished with your planet's maintenance.Once there, you may target all the weapons you have built at the enemy planet. That is, if you still have some Power left over from other things to actually fire each of them.

Aiming two lasers and one railgun. 

The amount of Intelligence points you've collected determines your ability to aim at the enemy. You can always try to shoot your cannons at the general direction of the enemy, but some weapons allow you to target specific structures on the surface of the planet. Of course, you have to be able to see them first, and that's one of the main points of Intelligence.

Action Phase

This is the payoff at the very end of the turn. When you click on the "End Turn"-button, the Action Phase commences. You see the overview of the planetary system and both yours and the enemy's aimed weapons launch at their targets. All you can do now is wait and enjoy the carnage.

Argh, the planets move!

After this, the next turn starts and you may start inspecting the damage and reacting accordingly. That's all, in a nutshell. Of course, there's a lot more to discuss about each phase and the little details, especially the exact workings of the targeting system. We've barely scratched the surface here, but hopefully everyone now has a proper idea about the very basic gameplay. See you next time!

Developing Interplanetary GUI: Thoughts on Unity

More pictures from the early proto, the game will actually look good.

Greetings, dear reader. My name's Riku. I'm one of the programmers in the team, and I'll be your tour guide to the world of Interplanetary development today. We decided to try something different this time and take a little more in-depth look in the technicalities of the development process. Programmers to others ratio in the team is so skewed anyways, it's about time we take some load off the poor bastards' overworked backs and represent ourselves to the public!

As you may know, we are making Interplanetary with Unity, and started the development by creating a working prototype of the game. One function for creating the prototype was to get ourselves familiar with Unity development, as we hadn't really used it much in the past. We indeed came across several quirks that we're glad to be aware of when working on the next build of the game. One of those quirks was the graphical user interface framework Unity offers out of the box.

Our first builds of the prototype had a bug where the UI didn't take into account elements placed on top of each other. Clicking button in the GUI made everything behind the button to be clicked as well.

Not where I wanted to place that shield generator!

That's not working as intended at all! This behaviour encompassed the 3D scene used for things like placing buildings on a planet. This caused bugs where, for instance, selecting a new building from a menu also immediately placed the newly selected building on the spot behind the menu item. We fixed the issue in the prototype with a wide selection of conditional statements scattered around the code, but that wasn't really good enough for us. It was a pain in the rear to maintain, and we figured something should be done about it.

Fortunately we've had the privilege to have a programmer much more experienced than us available at hand to consult us. Jukka Jylänki from LudoCraft is no newcomer to Unity development, and offered to walk us through a solution to our UI problems.

In Unity, each script attached to a game object gets the chance to implement several methods the Unity engine then automatically calls at suitable times. One of those methods is OnGUI(), that gets called for each GUI event detected by the engine. GUI events include things like mouse buttons being pressed or a GUI element being redrawn. For each such an event, the OnGUI() method of each script implementing it gets called. In theory this offers a convenient way for each thing that cares about these events to process them, for instance for GUI buttons to check if a mouse click event caused the said GUI button to be pressed. In theory. In practice, the system has problems such as there being no easy way to enforce and determine in which order the OnGUI() of each element gets called, which makes it a hairy endeavor to implement things like buttons on top of each other. With the default Unity behaviour it's not very convenient to find the topmost thing that cares about mouse clicks and ignore all elements behind it.

To solve this, more control over the OnGUI() calls is needed. This can be achieved by creating a single GUI master object, which is the only object in the game that implements the default Unity OnGUI() method. It holds a collection of custom-made GUI elements, sorted by depth. When a mouse button is clicked, iterating through the elements front to back should easily find the topmost GUI element that the mouse cursor rests on top of. If we don't hit any GUI buttons with the mouse, we just let the 3D scene handle the event and do things like placing a building in the clicked position, right? Right.

It just so happens that in addition to handling mouse clicks, we are also supposed to draw the elements during an OnGUI() call when a repaint event occurs. The elements need to be drawn in the opposite order, back to front, so they properly appear on top of each other. Because of this, each time OnGUI() gets called, we need to check what kind of event caused it and iterate through all the elements on a different order depending on that. But wait, there's more! When drawing the elements, we want to highlight the topmost GUI button the mouse is resting on. So when a repaint event occurs, we need to first travel through the stack of elements front to back, testing against the current mouse coordinates, until we hit a button. This is the closest element from top that the mouse rests on, we want to highlight that. So we take note of this element, and go back to beginning. We then start drawing the elements from the other side, back to front. Upon each element, we check if it is the one we marked for highlighting and tell it whether or not it should be highlighted.

This kind of solution does solve the issue, but such a basic problem really ought to have a more elegant answer. Due to issues like this, we've found the Unity's default GUI solution somewhat lacking, and are currently experimenting with third-party GUI libraries from the Unity Asset Store. They seem to do a lot of the heavy lifting for us when building the UI for our game, so we can direct our efforts elsewhere and spend less manpower maintaining and managing our own custom GUI code.

And here ends the story of Interplanetary GUI development. We've hopefully communicated something about what actually goes on in the day-to-day development of the game. This post is kind of an experiment for us, we have no idea how interested you readers are in this type of bit more technical content. Please let us know what you think, your response may very well dictate if the boss-man lets us programmers take the wheel again!

Designing Tech & Research

When can I finally have a clone to call my own?

Hello, hello! I'm Sasu, a game designer on the most wonderful game, Interplanetary. Lately, I've been working on the technology tree and the progression of upgrades, which will be our subject this week.

One of the main themes of Interplanetary is the development of technology. Players start up with technologies that seem quite plausible to actually exist in a couple of years, but the further the game proceeds, the more incredible they become. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but we still try to make it feel at least somewhat believable. No huge science fiction star fleets, just humble interplanetary space guns. 

In Interplanetary, players gain science points that are used to research new technologies. The generated points are counted towards technological progress at the beginning of each turn. Each technology needs a certain amount of science points. When the goal is reached, the technology is usable and new development options are opened. 

Original diagram, do not steal.

Projects are construction or development operations that take place in cities and span over several turns. Researching technologies not only grants various bonuses, but also opens up the possibility to develop certain projects. For example, the technology of “Quantum Paired Sensors and Communications” allows the player to detect incoming projectiles earlier and to build facilities for “Communications Shielding” and “Faster-Than-Light Communications”. 

All the technologies and projects have certain pre-requisites. You need to research “Particle Physics” before being able to research “High Power Particle Beams”, which in turn allows you to develop “Orbital Laser Defense”-project. Sometimes, a project must be completed to unlock new technologies. No “Orbital Manufacturing” without the help of a “Space Elevator”. 

Research enough technologies and you just might reach something amazing. We might add some wildcard mechanics to the tech tree so some of the more incredible tech may be hidden and only discovered accidentally. That is, after all, how science tends to proceed. Eureka!

Alrighty, that's enough nuggets for now. I can almost promise you that the details will change in some ways, so no frowny faces if they do, okay?

It's alive!

Good news everyone! TJR has awoken from its slumber of outsourcing and school related stuff. Now that we have also been reinforced with a band of new members, the team is stronger than ever.

First and foremost this means we have been able to finally resume the development of Interplanetary. The project was quietly moved to the notorious slow lane at first last spring and ultimately shelved for a couple of months. This was not something we wanted to do, but by switching to outsourcing for a while we managed to ensure steady supply of ramen while having some time to focus on the remaining school related things and smaller projects. Some of us even managed to graduate while we were flying under the radar, so, success!

Interplanetary has evolved quite a bit when we paid less attention to it; the game is now 3D and based on Unity engine instead of the slowly fading XNA. This should allow us to make the game even more beautiful than we originally planned with the option to go multiplatform with relative ease. Here's a bit of a sneak peek to a description we wrote for the upcoming Kavio cluster website. If you are all "what the heck is Interplanetary??" at this point, this should get you on track of things:

Interplanetary is a turn based strategy game about warfare between two planets. Setting of the game is a fictional planetary system where two planets have evolved intelligent life and ultimately become planetary civilizations. These two planets have fallen into a conflict for the natural resources of the planetary system they share. 

Technology level in the game is not too far from ours, and instead of stereotypical sci-fi starfleets, war is waged with massive, planetary weapons and other megastructures, built right onto the home planet. As the game progresses, technological advances allow more and more options to protect your people and defeat the enemy.

Main part of the game is managing the limited natural resources of player's home planet, developing its infrastructure and researching new technology. Each turn ends with action phase where player gets to target the weapon systems at the enemy planet and unleash his military might. The game supports various different tactics from a planetary broadside of railgun slugs to few, but deadly precise strikes of interplanetary lasers.

If you enjoy games with similar elements, like DEFCON, Civilization series or even the old artillery games, we will definitely have a game for you! Interplanetary will be available in most digital distribution channels.

While actual gameplay screenshots still have to wait a bit, we are proud to present some concept art. Stay tuned, there will be more to follow regularly now that we're back in business.

Interplanetary progress, starweek 38

Progress on Interplanetary has been a little slower than we hoped this week, mainly because part of out team wasted some days being ill. Shame on you!

However, we did get part of the core code structure done, and also made progress on the design front. We also had out graphic artist Jukka Kivijärvi working with us this week, so have some concept art. Full version available here: http://goo.gl/7r2pf

We are still working on Interplanetary and some other projects during this weekend, and next week we're hoping to really get going with Interplanetary programming.

Help yourself to some media:

As promised we now have a little video illustrating the idea that will become Interplanetary in the coming weeks, check it out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STqvdu_MtqQ
(I will not embed it since it's more awesome on Tube.)

The demo seen in the video is also available now, grab it here:
http://goo.gl/KOPVG

It is just a fraction of what Interplanetary will be, but fun nevertheless! Music in the demo and video is composed by Jukka Kivijärvi.

Say hello to Interplanetary artillery!

Interplanetary, as we call the game at the moment, is the biggest and most ambitious project of Team Jolly Roger so far. We've had this idea of a strategic artillery game featuring interplanetary warfare for over an year now, and it has slowly taken shape. Now we finally have a change to make it reality, as it will form the base of final thesis for three of our team members. This means that for the next few months we finally have time and commitment for the project.

The game itself revolves around the theme of interplanetary warfare, as mentioned before. Players are based on different planets in a solar system, and the goal is no less than annihilate all enemies by any means necessary. This involves not only some skilfully aimed shots in the everchanging sea of gravitational fields, but also strategic perspective and careful planning in improving the Home Planet with various buildings, upgrades and projects. The game will be developed solely for PC using Microsoft XNA 4.0. If you just rolled your eyes, go google and find out how many succesful games have been made with XNA lately. :P

We aim to keep the people who are interested in out project well posted via this blog, Twitter and Facebook. We aim to provide new versions of the game every two weeks or so (pleace notice that we will probably need more than that for the initial version), and new info and material on a daily basis. We are also open for ideas and suggestions, so please let us know what you have in mind! :)

We will post a playable demo of the original concept and a short trailer soon, stay tuned!