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 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!

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 #6.6: 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 Whack-a-Dev Days and Update Info

Hey, everyone! Having fun with Interplanetary?

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

Interplanetary Whack-a-Dev Day!

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

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

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

In Other News: Patches and Updates

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

Interplanetary Version 0.0.3922

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

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

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