Inside Interplanetary: Cities, the Lifeblood of Planets

Looks like a utopia, but they're just resources of the war, really. 

Hi, My name is Sasu and I'm a game designer. Let's discuss some Interplanetary. 

Testing, testing, testing, not much interesting tidbits to tell about. The soundtrack is proceeding nicely and we have some awesome tunes ready for different phases of the game. We're posting the soundtrack bit by bit on our Youtube channel, so take a look if you're a fan of game music, and I know you are!

I can't believe we haven't thoroughly gone through today's subject yet. It's quite a big part of the game. I'm, of course, talking about...

The Cities

I'm sure some of you have been wondering, how exactly to win a match in Interplanetary. While the exact conditions can change around, the basic idea is to reduce your enemy's civilization to ruins. You do not need to destroy all life on the planet, or demolish every single structure; all it takes is to lower the Population of the enemy's cities enough to make them unproductive.

The Cities house the real life energy of the planet: the Population. The Population of the planet is responsible for generating many resources. One of the main features of Cities is their ability to produce Projects. Each city has a certain amount of Project Slots, depending on the amount of Population in them. You may then assign different Projects on the slots and, once again, the Population amount will dictate on how quickly they will be finished. Projects grant certain bonuses. Some are perpetually active, until removed, and others have a one-shot effect.

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If a City's Population is low enough, all its Project slots are lost and the city is deemed unproductive until it manages to grow back to its former glory. When all the cities are in an unproductive state, it's game over.

Of course, it is possible to completely wipe cities off the face of the planet, but that would require quite a lot of firepower. Still, sometimes it's better to play it safe; the opponent can, after all, try to help its cities regenerate by different means. There's no thrill like overkill.

The amount of Population in Cities can fluctuate wildly, depending on many things: a catastrophic event may suddenly kill millions, but new citizens do get born all the time. It is possible to encourage the growth in different ways. For example, keeping a City connected to the rest of the world and initiating Projects to boost the Morale of the populace are good ways to give some incentives to breed. Then again, if you're so inclined, why not just clone people? Might not be the best for the Morale, but it kind of gets the job done.

The amount of Project slots, in each city, is shown as a green life bar.

So, to devastate the enemy planet, you need to be ruthless and make the lives of the people as miserable as possible. Persistent attacks give them no time to recuperate and also wreak havoc on the Morale, which in turn affects many things from Production to Population Growth. Even Technologies get developed slower if there are no people to develop them.

There's quite a lot going on there and possibly worthy of a future post, but these are the basics. Just remember to take care of your cities! Don't litter, and so forth.

Inside Interplanetary: The Music

Sasu, here! The HQ of Team Jolly Roger has been quite busy recently. Closed alpha testing is supposed to start very soon and here we are, still implementing some features! I hope we can keep up with our secret timetable.

It's been very nice to hear people reacting positively to Interplanetary. We were pretty surprised to see it featured on a Japanese entertainment blog, Damonge News! Well, it's not like we mind negative reactions either; they can offer some interesting viewpoints. So comment, praise, criticize, whatever you feel like! We might even draft the most enthusiastic people for the alpha testing.

This time, the main subject of this blog post is something that's still very much a work-in-progress:

The Music of Interplanetary

We've been struggling with the music for some time. Everyone has been very busy in actually making the game playable, so inevitably, things that give the game flavor, such as music, have sometimes ended up taking the back seat.

Music in games is, however, a very important feature. It creates the mood, keeps things dynamic and can even guide the player. In Interplanetary, we need music mainly to give the player some kind of pace: different game states, such as building and action, will have their own kinds of music, showing player their progression and making the whole experience much more powerful. As important as good gameplay is, the feelings a game gives to the player, can be considered equally important.

We managed to grab a musician, Vince Parrish, to help us with the music creation. The problem was, we didn't have a clear consensus among the team on the exact feelings Interplanetary should give to the players. The way we decided to go about with this, was to create a short teaser trailer to get a sense of the atmosphere of Interplanetary. Vince was given only vague instructions, in addition to a mock-up teaser, so he had lots of freedoms with creating the music.

Listen here!

Vince's music hit exactly the right notes, but there was disagreement with the actual feeling of the music. This wasn't surprising, considering the lack of collaboration. At this point, we begun to discuss the music more. We changed things around slightly, and managed to create a somewhat satisfying teaser for Nordic Game.

As we explained in the last blog post, we decided to redo the teaser drastically after the convention. This time, we planned exactly what we wanted the teaser to communicate. We finished the video completely, with final graphics, and then started to draw an exact idea on what we wanted the music to sound like.

Within the team, we collected reference music to send to Vince. While going through Youtube, looking for ideas, we came across the soundtrack of Inglourious Basterds.



This gave us an idea. What if the music was very serious and warlike, but in an old-fashioned way? Interplanetary itself is a bit of a mishmash: traditional gameplay combines to create something new and realism collides with the kind of a ridiculous idea of interplanetary artillery war. The music could be old fashioned, but mixed with modern instruments. It could also be so serious that it can turn a bit humorous.

The new music was soon mixed and it fit the teaser perfectly.



With the teaser to guide us, we've started to produce music for the actual game. It'll be stylistically similar and fit the gameplay situations. We haven't yet decided if the music will change a lot dynamically; it would be really cool if it would fit the actions perfectly when the missiles fly towards the warring planets, but this would be difficult to do properly. Time will tell.

I hope this was an interesting look at our process. See you next time, and meanwhile, enjoy this unfinished concept piece of Planet Building music!

Listen here!