Interplanetary: Enhanced Edition is Out Now!

 

 Surprise! The shiny new Interplanetary: Enhanced Edition is available on Steam right now!

What’s New

As we have announced earlier this summer, this is a massive update for Interplanetary. So massive, that, in fact, it is its own game. Essentially, this new version is a re-build of the entire game for the sake of making it more stable, as well as better sounding and looking. It’s still the same old Interplanetary deep down, but better.

As we are taking Interplanetary to the new level, we are also expanding the geography of our community. In this version we are introducing localization into German language. More languages coming soon!

The update also includes a bunch of new features, some of which had been much requested in the last couple of years, like Online AI Bots, Reconnect and new weapons. Find the full changelog in our dedicated Steam forum thread.

 

How To Get the Enhanced Edition

So, how do you get a hold of a copy? If you already own the original Interplanetary, then it’s all good. The Enhanced Edition should be waiting for you in your Steam library now. Find it and get to installing.

If you don’t own a copy of the original game, you can purchase the Enhanced Edition through its separate Steam page. The initial version of the game is also included in the new version and should appear in your library automatically if you purchase the Enhanced Edition.

What Happens to the Original

The original Interplanetary will no longer be on sale as a separate package. However, for the time being, the store page and the community hub will remain open.

The Future

Though the Enhanced Edition is, in a way, completing Interplanetary, it is not absolutely final as is. Rebuilding a game from scratch hasn’t been smooth sailing, as expected. While we’ve bulldozed over most old bugs, completely new issues have periodically risen. As a matter of fact, we’re already hammering away at some upcoming fixes and we’re prepared to keep working at it for as long as we can. Please bear with us through the initial roughness.

For future patching, it’s essential that you give us feedback on your game experience. As usual, the community forum is the ideal place for that. The Enhanced Edition does have its own forum already, so join the new discussions and be excellent to each other!

Also, you can reach us on Twitter and Facebook.

Our very next feature update will see the light in just a few days and it will include localizations into several more languages: French, Spanish, Russian and Simplified Chinese.

Happy blasting!
 

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!

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