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 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!

Patch 7.2: New Year, New Patch

Happy new year, interplanetary warlords! It's been a hectic beginning of the year for us. Lots of planning and meetings to see how we're proceeding with the development of the game.

As you may have heard, we've had long-time plans to get the final release version out sometime in the first half of 2015. There's still a lot to do so we're pulling out all stops and developing like crazy! We won't be able to put out updates as regularly as we've used to; wrapping the game up every now and then to release something playable can take a bit too much time. We're don't know yet how many big feature updates we will have between now and the eventual release, but we will have a big one for sure and smaller ones as needed.

Even though we've had to lock in the schedule pretty tight, we're still listening to all the feedback you have! Keep it coming, there are still many ways you can help steer the development, from bug reports to feature requests.

New health bars, now in fresh green, refreshing orange and dumb old red!

Patch 7.2: New Year, New Patch

To kick off 2015, we've been doing some patching. The AI had been a bit naughty during the holiday season, bending the rules and hogging multiple superweapons for itself! We now took its toys away to level the playing field. There are also lots of other fixes, UI improvements and hopefully the complete eradication of a couple of crashes.

Some players have reported the game still getting stuck in-between turns. We've suspected for a long time that this could be due to some unexpected player behavior with missiles and lasers. To counter many possibly problems, we've changed it so that if you target a missile or a laser and don't complete the targeting by selecting the target on the planet surface, the weapons in question do not fire. Similar problems were also caused by the ability to upgrade a building and then sell it during the same turn. This should also be fixed now.

Hey, don't forget about the Codex! There's some new stuff.

Here's a proper change log to give you a good idea on the scope of this patch:

Interplanetary Patch 0.7.5470_EAC_7.2

• AI can now only build one superweapon of each kind, as intended
• Missiles and Lasers do not fire anymore if targeting is not properly finished
• Upgrade related turn processing bug fixed.
• City health bars now update properly on city icons and population bar
• Hotseat victory conditions fixed
• Intelligence View no longer cycles through dead planets
• Building health bars now change color according to the damage level 
• Added scaling indicators to health bars
• Codex updated
• Minor AI fixes
• Online Lobby UI fixes

Enjoy! If you want some more development updates, you can check out our Twitter and Facebook. For some more exclusive things (but not spammy, we promise!), you can sign up for the mailing list at www.interplanetarygame.com.

Oh, we also have a brand new Tumblr-blog.

Interplanetary is available on Steam Early Access.

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 #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 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.

Interplanetary Alpha Update: New Features

It's finally here: a huge alpha update, full of interesting new features and fixes to test drive! Might also be the final alpha update that will be available with a code, if there are no massive issues with it. We're steadily rolling out towards the beta version and we have something different in store for that.

Anyways, here's a little list of all the major features in this one:

• Intel Mechanics
• You now need to build Intelligence structures to be able to see your enemy's structures; however it's also possible to hide your activity by building counter intelligence structures.
• Tech Tree
• An experimental, simplified tech tree lets you unlock buildings and gain additional bonuses.
• Construction Yards
• Structures are now functional only the turn after they're placed on the map.
• Ruins
• Destroyed buildings leave behind ruins
• Networking Fixes
• Better stability for matches with more than two players

Full change list available here.

Unfortunately, online play still doesn't work properly for people using a mobile connection, but we're working on fixing that for later. 

The update can be downloaded for Windows, Mac or Linux from interplanetarygame.com using the alpha code. If you don't have a code, you can ping us at Facebook or Twitter and we'll get you one. 

Inside Interplanetary: Releasing a Public Alpha

Netcode! What have you done to my planet!?

Good evening, friends! Game Design Sasu, here! We're gearing up for a new alpha update, at the moment. It's looking quite nice, but there are still many interesting bugs to weed out. In addition to that, there seem to be multiple kinds of flu hanging around the TJR ecosystem. We're falling one by one!

In the meantime, I thought I could write something helpful for fellow indie devs. I already talked about this before on our IndieDB forums, but it was deemed useful enough to dedicate a blog post to it.

Today I'm going to talk about our experiences with giving out test versions of Interplanetary.

Preparation

There really is no substitute for a proper user testing. Everyone will eventually grow blind to the problems with their game, so fresh people are needed to give some perspective. We had had a couple of small testing sessions with our friends and relatives, but we needed more and variable data. Reaching out to gamers of the Internet was the answer.

Before sending out your alpha to the masses, consider why you want to do that. Do you need testers, publicity or just people to play your game with you? Our main priority was to get useful feedback, so we took that into account when building the testable version.

We had to make sure to give the testers the features we wanted them to test. The targeting system especially was something we wanted to get a lot of feedback on. This also meant that some of the more irrelevant features would need to be polished not to drag too much attention to them, or simply left out altogether. We didn't want people to just comment: "the planet graphics suck" and leave. When giving feedback, it's easy to grab into the most obvious thing and ignore the others.

Seriously, try to iron out the distractions.

To gather the feedback, we created a survey with SurveyMonkey and put a link to it in-game. Looking back on it, we should've also given the link to each tester when contacting them for the first time - surprisingly many missed the in-game survey link and later asked how to provide feedback.

When creating a survey, it's important to think of the right questions to ask; most people won't bother writing out their life stories. You need to make the survey very easy and to the point. Try to add some very specific questions to steer the testers to concentrate on things you need comments on. The current version of our survey works well enough. People have a chance to comment on many different things, but they aren't forced to fill out every space to submit.

This system worked well until we reached over 100 answers. The free version won't show more than that, so we needed to pay a fee to access the rest.

Distribution

How to actually go about distributing the alpha version to the testers depends on many things. Interplanetary's first alpha version was a very incomplete game, filled with all kinds of issues. To say that we were hesitant putting it out there would be putting it mildly. Ease of access is the key of getting people to test a game which doesn't have an established reputation, but we still decided against simply sharing download links or using the Unity Web Player (doesn't really work out in Interplanetary's case anyway.)

This is when the idea of alpha keys came along. We would announce the alpha testing and ask hopeful testers to contact us to receive a code they can use at our website for a download link. This way there was less room for misconceptions, as we could explain to each individual tester the situation with the game. No one would just stumble across it, thinking it was the final product. We could also draw out the more serious testers; even if the process of obtaining the code is rather painless it's still a step that gets us into contact with the people most interested in the game.

For convenience, we mostly used our Twitter and Facebook to share the codes. We could then use these networks to easily communicate with the testers afterwards.

We also made code cards for live events. Spent some fun nights sticking codes on them.

The whole "system" worked manually: a person would contact us, ask for a code and we would give it to them along with instructions. An automatic system of some kind might have saved a lot of time, but I personally prefer direct contact, so it's easier to answer to questions and such. There was a period when I really wished we had a robot for this, though: the day we were noticed by RockPaperShotgun was absolutely insane! I had to spend days answering all the code requests we were getting.

Once Interplanetary landed to Steam Greenlight, we changed the system a little bit. Partially for the convenience for the users and partially for my sanity, we decided to build a special Greenlight Alpha with a direct link to it on the page. This version was less experimental than the earlier ones and the aim was to make it also work as a sort of a very early demo; a tight package with the main features polished well enough. Being in Greenlight, people would also more easily understand that it's an incomplete version. A playable version, along with screenshots, videos and description, worked well to give people a full idea on what the game was to be and also show that Interplanetary is not a mere concept. Never underestimate the power of screenshots and videos, though: no one would have bothered to download the alpha, even if it's completely free, if we hadn't given them a peek to get them interested first.

A certain website even took the Greenlight Alpha without asking and ported it for Wondows.

As of today, the PC version has been downloaded from the Greenlight page 3,513 times and the Mac version 225 times. We received 34,251 "Yes"-votes during the campaign, so not nearly everyone found their way to the download link, which is probably partially because we couldn't place the link in the main description by the way Greenlight works. We had to make a separate news announcement on the page, but they are not particularly eye catching. We should've pointed this out in the main description.

For the Greenlight Alpha, we opted to use Mediafire to host the game files. Considering the popularity of Interplanetary's Greenlight campaign, this was a good decision: having to pay about 20 cents a download on our server, would've cost us a lot. The only drawback here was that the URL pointed to Mediafire, which isn't quite as "cool" as hosting the files on your very own space. We paid for the service, however, so the link was direct and there was minimum hassle for the players.

External file hosting sometimes makes you evil.

We were and are still giving out alpha codes to people, since the Greenlight Alpha was the only version distributed by a direct link. The latter updates would require a code. This seemed to work quite well and caused relatively little confusion.

Conclusion

I can really recommend using an alpha code system for everyone. We've received tons of good comments and followers because of it. Semi-regularly updating the alpha version also gives you nice mile stones for development. It can sometimes be quite a chore to handle the code requests, but typically the flow is steady enough to manage. We still get a couple of  inquiries every day, but whenever there's media coverage or something else, the amount skyrockets.

Starting to run out of codes real soon, actually, so give us a holler and we'll get you yours! There's at least one more alpha update on the horizon, so expect that!

Interplanetary Wiki Launch and Networking Fixes

Like a bolt out of the blue, it's Interplanetary Wiki! Curse has been gracious enough to offer us a space on their Gamepedia and now we have our very own space for all knowledge on Interplanetary. Being a wiki, anyone can add to it and they should! So to all you wiki enthusiasts: go have a field day! Just keep in mind the usual rules of conduct.

Can't wait to see what kind of things will start popping up there! Of course, we may join in periodically to add in some super secret information...

What about the Game?

While the wiki is a pretty awesome thing, I'm sure you're curious about how Interplanetary is progressing. We are still planning on rolling out with an alpha update within the coming weeks and we haven't forgotten about you Linux users either! I'd say that the big thing causing us trouble, at the moment, is networking.

A common problem reported to us has been the non-functional "Start Game"-button in the Online Lobby. We've found the problem, and while the fix hasn't been implemented, it is possible to work around it by restarting your computer and trying again. The problem is connected to the way the game chooses a random port to use in the online game, and if the port isn't free, the game won't start. By restarting your computer, the game chooses a new, hopefully free port.

Frustration!

We were actually working on updating the alpha over a month ago, but while adding the new features, we noticed that our online game just didn't support them well enough. Back to the drawing board, then! For now, we're working on adding support for the upcoming features, in addition to fixing some of the other things. As some of you may have noticed, Defenses aren't very reliable in online games; this is not by design!

Other things that we're fixing include the addition of host migration, accurate victory screens and better data synchronization between players.

It's been a doozy, but solving the issues with networking will surely make things easier for everyone. Expect an update in the coming weeks, but be patient! There's still a lot to work out.

Interplanetary's Greenlight Stats

Hi, everyone! Game design fellow Sasu, here! Interplanetary's Greenlight campaign is over and development continues. It's a very busy time for the whole team, implementing some new features and shining up the game here and there. We've had a lot of very useful feedback and we're working hard on getting the best ideas in the game.

We've been meaning to release a new update for the alpha version for a while now, but we've encountered some pretty substantial networking problems. Hopefully, we'll have time to work them out sooner than later and put out something new for everyone to play. The Intel System and Tech Tree would really need some outside testing!

For now, I figured that we could talk some more about the mysteries of Greenlight, mainly all the stats that become available for you once you start your campaign. I'm sure many other indie developers are thinking about getting on there, so why not open up the process even more?

Miscellaneous Greenlight Mumblings

I've already gone through the basics of the Greenlight process in an earlier blog post. This time, let's concentrate more on some interesting details.

Interplanetary was Greenlit on January 7th, along with 49 other games. Valve informed us on this by e-mail and the process of applying the game for sale on Steam continues. It's basically some paperwork that needs to be done (and actually finishing developing the game).

Even though the game is through, the Greenlight page still remains. This is good, since we can keep using the page to inform its followers of game updates and other news.

One of the most interesting aspects of the campaign were all the beautiful stats we got to analyze. It was quite thrilling to see our rank rise to top 100 and eventually to #4.

This is what the main box looks like now. There also used to be a number showing our progress towards top 100 and eventually our rank among all the games on Greenlight.

It's also possible to compare your progress with the average progress of the current top 50 games. This gives a good context to the values and something to strive for. After all, the games tend to be Greenlit in big batches of 50 or 100, so once you reach the average, your chances are pretty good.

According to the averages, "yes" and "no"-votes usually go pretty much 50/50. I suppose even "no"-votes are better than no votes.

Again, a good chance to make some comparisons to other items and get an idea on what numbers you are aiming for. The comparison lines change periodically and sometimes you encounter some pretty insane graphs looking down on you and making you feel discouraged. Who's laughing now, red line?

A graph also lets you look back on your ups and downs during the campaign. October was when we first started working on our Greenlight page and the big jump signifies the moment we finally made the page public. Interestingly, there was quite a big jump again, once the Steam Holiday Sales were over.

Pretty nifty, huh? The page still receives new views and comments daily, although it's nowhere near as active as it used to be.

I hope this was enlightening for some of you aspiring Greenlighters. If you have time to dedicate on all the preparation, I definitely recommend going for it. Even if we hadn't passed, we still would've had our community grow and received a lot of good feedback.

Interplanetary has been Greenlit! Huzzah!

We did it! Huge thanks to everyone who took the time to check out the game and voted for it!

Now that our pathway to Steam is finally open, we can continue to concentrate on finishing the game. Interplanetary is steadily approaching it's beta state, but there's still a lot to do.

As you may know, you can also help by trying out the current alpha version of the game and giving out some feedback. Once you have an alpha code (available by pinging us on Twitter or Facebook), you can move out over to www.interplanetarygame.com and grab the test version!

Thanks again, everyone! We literally couldn't have managed this far without you!

Inside Interplanetary: How to Greenlight?

As you may have noticed, Interplanetary is now on Steam Greenlight! It's doing pretty well too: as of this writing, we have 7,375 "Yes"-votes. Our goal of 10,000 is getting ever closer!

Today I thought I might give a little runthrough of our Greenlight process, so any other hopefuls may benefit from it. So, let's get started with...

Interplanetary's Greenlight Process

We unveiled our Greenlight page on December 2nd, but we've been building the page for a long time before that. The first thing we needed to do, was to pay Valve $100 to get access to the page. This payment mostly exists to stop trolls from sending in garbage. After we gained access, we needed a couple of things:

• An icon
• A video
• At least 4 screenshots
• A description
  

Mostly quite straightforward. Our artist whipped up a beautiful animated gif as an icon for the game. This icon shows up when people search for games on Greenlight, so it needs to be eye-catching. We ended up animating a planet under attack with the game's logo on top. It communicates the idea of the game pretty well and is flashy enough to get people interested.

The trickiest part was the video. We decided to produce a new trailer and a simple gameplay video to accompany it. The trailer is the first thing that plays when people open the Greenlight page, so it needs to be attention grabbing, interesting and explain the game fairly well. Our earlier trailer was very fast paced and full of information, but this time we decided to slow the pace down a little bit, so that a new viewer might have easier time digesting it. A slower pace also gives a more realistic image of the actual game.

The trailer tells a little story using gameplay footage. A couple of turns of gameplay, two planets warring with different strategies, "filmed" cinematically. Combined with fitting music, it seems to be a success; people seemingly get the idea right away.

We also wanted to make an in depth gameplay video for those who want more details. We simply filmed a match between team members and narrated it, explaining game mechanics and strategies. The video ended up being over 50 minutes long, but it was never meant to be watched all the way through, necessarily. Curious people may skip through the video to get a feel for the game. Some have been interested enough to actually watch the whole match.

We also wanted to actually give people something to play, so we released a version of Interplanetary alpha on our Greenlight page. No codes needed this time. This added a lot of value to the page, since people can immediately get their hands on the game and discuss its features and arrange online matches right there on the discussion page.

Publish!

When all the content was collected for the page, we published it. We had heard that there would be an approval process afterwards, and it would take some time before the page would go public - wrong! It was up immediately! Now we had to hurry to get the word out and to handle the initial flow of people. Comments started dropping in, and luckily, they were all pretty positive!

At this point, we got access to some very interesting statistics on the page. All the important stats were available: the amount of visitors, favorites, followers, votes. In addition to that, we could compare our process with the average stats of successful Greenlight projects. A very useful meter is a percentual value that shows how far are we from the top 100. At the moment, we've gone 90% of the way! We could also determine that approved games need about 10,000 votes. Unexpectedly, we're already quite close!

The mere existence of a Greenlight-page does draw a nice amount of visitors, but we wouldn't have been as successful if we hadn't had any kind of community around the game already. After the first week, Interplanetary has disappeared from the first page of Steam Greenlight. The flow of people will obviously slow down a little bit, but luckily we've managed to get some gaming press interested. Now we'll just concentrate on working on the game and spreading awareness. It's not over yet!

Big thanks to everyone who has voted for Interplanetary! If you have any questions about the details of the Greenlight process, ask away! We'd be happy to answer!

Check out our Greenlight-page here!