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!
 

Creative process and GUI design #2

Hello again!

Tarita here, the artist who has been tasked with the challenge of creating a passable looking UI for Interplanetary.

So, last time we were left with a combination of UI styles, right? I promised I would show you where the UI is currently heading, so here's a mockup:

Please keep in mind that the look of individual elements is far from being set in stone, and that the image above is just a mockup and does not accurately represent what the in-game UI currently looks like. We have just begun alpha testing, and in the light of the new feedback we may have to adjust some things.
The mockup should, however, give you an idea of what kind of style I'm aiming for.

Overall, the style is pretty simplified, and I like having some empty space between stuff. Even when adding detail, I'm trying to keep things simple and stay consistent with the limited amount of colours and light effects. I prefer not to add any extra fluff that doesn't have a distinct function or a reason to be there.

The elements in the mockup are somewhat large. This is partially because they have to work with a variety of different screen sizes, and still stay readable. I think that the increased size complements the simplified style nicely, but some people have told me that it makes the UI look "cute", which may or may not be problematic.

Earlier I told myself that the boxes would be neither blue nor gray, but in the end I had to go with gray.
Why? Because I found that only gray was neutral enough for the rest of the game.
I wish to leave the main stage for the planets and the space background, so the UI can't be too colourful or pop out too much. I don't want the player to miss the subtle details of the starfields on the background just because I insisted on having screaming, bright- yellow boxes on top of everything. This is, incidentally, also one of the reasons why I favour transparency and lack of boxes whenever I can.

Sometimes things pop out too much.

The other reason for the gray main colour is that I'd like to introduce some colour-coded information to the UI, such as icons and text, which are more visible on a muted background. Having a few splashes of colour is a breath of fresh air that also makes the dark graphics of Interplanetary feel slightly less grim and murky.


That's all for today, thank you for reading! In the future I may write more about the individual elements and the design choices and concerns behind them.

You can follow the progress on Interplanetary on Facebook, twitter or the game website.

Inside Interplanetary: The Resources: The Material: The Movie

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

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

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

The Resources of Interplanetary: Material

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

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

All those railguns ain't cheap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post-Assembly disassembly

False advertising, we admit. The pizza was a lie.

Hello people of the Internet! We are sorry to have sneaked on vacation without announcing it properly, but we now are back, refreshed and running. This is Niklas, bringing you a few words on the process on Interplanetary and some more on my trip to the Assembly Summer '13 with the rest of the KAMK crew.

Before the well earned holiday we worked Interplanetary to the point where we could start working on in-team alpha testing. Some bugs and gameplay issues popped up immediately as usually happens with tests like this, so we will now focus on making things better. After that, it's time to start dragging in test users outside the team. If you're interested in being one of them, drop us a line and there's a good chance we will include you! Notice that unless you have a friend to play hotseat with, you may need a VPN client and end up playing against one of us.

This is what it's all about to many of us.

Now then, Assembly Summer '13. I will take the liberty to write from more personal perspective as I was the only member of TJR to travel this time. We originally intended to bring a two-man strike team, but Jukka succumbed to a nasty stomach bug prior the trip. But I still had a chance to take part, thanks to the very generous people at KAMK. The event itself was of course awesome as always, but this time I didn't quite manage to get the best out of it.

Here's what lacked, so you can do better!

We did not enter the game compo. This was a decision we made pretty early on. Interplanetary is not the sort of game that fits very well in a compo like this. It takes at least half an hour to really get into the game, and that's simply too long, we thought. However, games are presented to the audience in a game trailer form, which would have been doable for us and the compo is really good publicity. M.A.D, a KAMK game we had running at the stand got a lot of attention, and many people mentioned they had found it through the compo.

We did not bring a game demo with us. This is something we actually planned on doing. The demo wouldn't have been exactly Interplanetary, but instead a modified version of the early proof-of-concept version you can download from right there on the right hand side. We planned on having the game run on a touch screen we had on the stand and have people compete for small prizes. The modifications didn't make it in time though, as we prioritized finishing the alpha. In hindsight, the demo version would've been a better choice.

We did not direct our marketing to the players. I was seeking out professional contacts as usual, even though there weren't many around. This is something we should have considered earlier: Assembly might be one of the best places to reach the target audience directly when you are making a game for fairly hard core PC audience.

We didn't prepare well enough. The event was too fast upon us, and we had decided some time ago to have our vacation right before the trip. Because of simple mistakes like this, we didn't have enough time to think through what would be our goals, prepare marketing material etc.

I neglected social media. Like mentioned in the guide I made earlier, events like these provide excellent content for social media, and it's also a good chance to communicate with people who are either present or just interested in what's going on on site. Unlike Nordic Game Conference and Free Your Play, this time there really wasn't  a good reason behind as we had both working wifi and native 3G to work with.

I brought those awful shoes I had at NGC again. Ouch.

Nevertheless I still consider the Assembly trip well worth the time. I met new people and got to spend good time with some fellow nerdy people. Next year TJR will be there again in one form or another, and we will make the best out of it. See you there!

No matter what the locals say, Pasila can be quite pretty. Next year again!

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!

Inside Interplanetary: Targeting System

It does look a bit better than last time.

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

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

The Secrets of  the Targeting System

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

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

This is a pretty good curve...

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

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

...this is not.

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

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

Inside Interplanetary: Turn structure

This is the game. All of it.

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

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

Build Phase

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

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

I also promise that the graphics will be much nicer.

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

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

Targeting Phase

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

Aiming two lasers and one railgun. 

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

Action Phase

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

Argh, the planets move!

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

Inside Interplanetary: Cities, towns, colonies and buildings

Beautiful day in the city of Ars Konsepth. What could go wrong?

This time we have a couple of lines (read: wall of text) about the role and functionality of Cities, Towns, Colonies and Buildings in Interplanetary. Again there needs to be a disclaimer: Much of the design described here may change during development. If you have thoughts, ideas or even suggestions, feel free to share in the comments.

Cities are one of the key elements of Interplanetary: They hold majority of the planet's population and generate resources like Production and Science. Each city has 1-6 production slots for different Projects that  provide either one time bonuses, such as population growth boost, or permanent ones like Space Elevator. Permanent bonuses occupy the production slot they are built in.

Cities cannot be destroyed in a single turn, but if their population is reduced enough, they will turn into Towns. It's theoretically possible to destroy an enemy city by precision strikes across two turns by turning it into a town , but considerable amount of firepower is needed as Cities are quite resilient.

Towns could be described as placeholders for potential cities. They appear on the globe from the beginning, but cannot be interacted with directly. Towns hold some population just like Cities, and when the population grows large enough, the town becomes a City. Player can speed up the growth by protecting a city with a  defensive building or building other structures near it. Unlike cities, Towns can be destroyed.

Colonies come into play a bit later in the game. A sufficiently advanced civilization can develop a Project for colonizing another planet in the same planetary system. The main function of a colony is to provide precious material for the player, but Colonies also act as forward platforms for some useful Projects and upgrades that cannot be built elsewhere.

Buildings are megastructures that serve a single purpose like producing resources, defending Home Planet or gathering intelligence. Players can choose fairly freely where they place the buildings, as long as they are not built in water etc. However, placing a building has almost always a tactical side to it. For an example, building in tight clusters makes buildings more defensible, but also makes them vulnerable to splash damage. Some weapons require line of sight, so building them all around the globe might be a good idea as opposed to concentrating them on one side.

So that's the very basics, we may write in more detail about these mechanics later. Lets us know what you would like to read and we will do our best to deliver!

Designing the Laser installation WMD

Giant Death Laser (work title) preying upon the enemy planet.

Hello to you, dear readers! I’m Jukka, one of the two artists working on Interplanetary. I will be responsible, for the most parts, for creating concept art and illustrations for the game.

In this post I’ll be talking a little about visual design, this time focusing on the "Laser installation" concept.

Our goal in Interplanetary is to make the technologies seem as realistic or feasible as possible without letting the gameplay suffer, so a big part in creating concepts for them is the hunt for applicable technologies that already exist or have been theorized. Luckily our team lead & designer Niklas is something of a "tech nut" so usually he already has some ideas to what might work.

The first step in starting designing the Laser installation, was to type "world's most powerful laser" in Google and hit the search. Quite fast I ran into the National Ignition Facility in US where they conduct research on nuclear fusion with lasers. They use 192 individual lasers all targeted to a small fuel pellet in order to reach the temperatures they aim for. 

So I thought that instead of using a single laser to create a powerful enough beam, it would be more feasible and interesting to have multiple lasers and have some kind of lenses to converge the beams into one. My thinking was, that a tower-like structure could be useful, so that the lasers could be arranged along its length along with the lenses so that theoretically the lenses wouldn't need to bend the beams too much. From that I made the quick sketches below, and later the one on the top.

Earlier GDL concepts. The idea of how they might work has remained pretty much the same.

Another thing to consider was the immense amount of energy needed to fire the lasers. While having it's very own nuclear power plant could be fun, I found out about SMES (superconducting magnetic energy storage), which besides sounding very sciency just might be a feasible way of storing the amounts of energy required... I'm still pondering what I'd do with the design to make it bit more interesting without making it look too unrealistic.

That's it for me this time, but I just might be back writing more of these posts in the future, and once the final concept is done for the Laser installation we'll no doubt be posting it to our Facebook concepts album.

- Jukka

Inside Interplanetary: Resources

A concept sketch picturing a mining operation.

We thought it would be interesting for many of our followers to learn a bit more about Interplanetary's inner workings, so here's the first of a series of posts that should shed some light on the content and mechanics of the game. Please do keep in mind that some of these are more than likely to change during the development. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, you don't need to be logged in to do so anymore!

Resources are key elements in many strategy games, and that's also the case with Interplanetary. There are three main resources in the game, each one pretty different from the others. Here's a more detailed breakdown:

Power
The basic function of Power is to determine how many actions player can commit in a single turn.  Available Power is calculated in the beginning of each turn by adding up the output of all active power plants the player has built. Small amount of Power is also generated by cities. Nearly all major actions, such as firing a weapon or building a building, consume some Power. There are also buildings that use a small amount of Power each turn. Any extra Power the player might have at the end of the turn doesn't carry over to the next one.

A strategic decision player has to make concerning Power might be, for an example, whether he or she wants to go all out at the enemy by firing as many shots as possible, or leave some energy in reserve for defensive actions when the enemy projectiles come flying towards the home planet at the end of the turn.

Material
All non-renewable resources on home planet are represented by a single indicator, Material. There is large, but limited, amount of raw material available on the player's home planet when the game starts. Mines need to be built in order to extract the raw material and make it usable. Unlike with Power, unused Material will carry over when a turn ends. After the home planet is eventually depleted, the only way to get more Material is by launching a successful colonization project, which will still provide only a relatively small amount of Material each turn.

Large amounts of Material are generally consumed when the player builds something. Some other actions use smaller amounts of Material. For an example, a nuclear power plant turns a small amount of Material into a relatively large amount of Power each turn, and shooting a railgun requires much smaller amount of Material than building one.

Just like Power, limited material forces the player to make strategic decisions: It's possible to build a powerful, yet primitive, attack force early in the game by aggressive mining and building early power plants in a large scale, all in order to eliminate the enemy as soon as possible through superior firepower. Another viable strategy would be to develop the planet gradually and wait for more efficient late game buildings, gaining access to advanced weapons with some material left still.

One of the Power/Material bar UI designs from a year back.

Population
Population is a bit of a sneak peek here. It's tied to many other mechanics that will be presented (and hopefully discussed!) later, but let's lay out the very basics:

Population is the number of people living inside the cities of the home planet. Most of the population is concentrated in megacities, that work much the same way as cities in Sid Meier's Civilization series of games. The biggest difference is that other buildings are built outside the cities, not in them. City's population (along with some modifiers that will be presented later) will determine it's productivity and scientific output.

Population of cities is restricted by a global population cap, which is essentially the amount of people the home planet can sustain with current level of technology. As the game progresses, the player is able to research technologies that raise the global population cap and allow the cities to grow larger, allowing the player to more with the city.

Thank you for being interested, more to follow!

It's alive!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

256 was not enough!

Hello again after two weeks! TJR HQ has moved to new business premises and we hope we can resume active blog keeping.

Headlines of the week: For the first time we failed a Windows Phone Marketplace certification process. Twice, to be exact, but for very different reasons.

Spiritual, our most graphics heavy game so far, hit the recently lowered ceiling for memory usage on WP7. (90 MB for the new WP Tango devices, note to developers.) This is actually very welcome wake-up call for us: While 256 MB of RAM is not much for a modern smartphone, it should be more than enough for a game like this. Back to optimizing, and let's do that from the beginning with the next project.

Then there is Ouroboring Life, which apparently is our first R-rated title. In case you are unfamiliar with the project, it is a simple rhythm based life simulator where your goal is to achieve perfect life after a few generations of fortune building. The game was made for this year's Global Game Jam. You can get better idea of what it's all about by watching the trailer.

During the game you come across life events, two of which are pretty hardcore: "Just enjoyed your first XXX!" and "Got an STD..." While we understand the cultural differences, it was still a bit of a surprise for the game not to pass the filter in some areas. We decided we're against the idea of changing the content, so we simply removed a few regions from the list.

Ouroboring Life is available for PC here and for Windows Phone here (both free!), in case you want to check out all the hardcore action yourself. :P

Status report, stat!

Since we don't have anything too specific to report this week, we thought we might as well shed some light on several projects we are working on and their statuses, so here goes:

Break MORE Aliens! is nearly finished and will go through some testing and analyzing by Kajak students in a few days.We're pretty exited to hear their thoughts on it!

Spiritual is not under active development, but we have plans for the additional content, which will most likely be published during summer.

Interplanetary is going through a slower phase in development at the moment. This is because we prefer it to have our full attention once we can get cracking again.

Dr. Globdor is coming along nicely. We mentioned last week the possibility of a PC release, and that's actually become our main focus. We will not release a finished game right away, but instead give players the essentials and a chance to give us input on which features they'd like to see in the finished game. Because we're indie developers and not a major publisher, this is actually a valid strategy and not an excuse to cut development time. ;)

Besides those we are of course working on subcontracting projects all the time. And finally, here's a little sneak peek to a whole new game project we will be working on this summer:

Dr. Globdor on rampage!

We were going to write about something else for a change this week, but Dr. Globdor has us completely ensnared! A new major feature we have been working on this week is level editor, which seems to be something that should help the game stand out on WP7. If all goes well, users will be able to share the levels they have made, too! We are also considering the possibility of publishing the game for PC, which would make it our first official PC release by the way.

In other news, the major update on Break MORE Aliens! is coming along nicely, and we are actully plotting on having some Kajak students test the game for us this week. ;)

The early version of Break MORE Aliens! was already published for a Nokia game competition (3rd place!) earlier and has thus gone through the crucial peak of release downloads. We are thinking about covering some of those losses by making a new, simple game with similar theme and a direct link to Break MORE Aliens!, once the major update is released. We will cover both in more depth later, stay tuned!

Dr. Globdor

Last week I promised there would be more on Dr. Globdor, our crazy little project made for teaching Windows Phone development at Kouvola.

At this point the project is pretty much finished if we look at the original specs; we added a simple particle engine and a couple more enemies and such even after Kouvola, and will upload them for our students to see shortly.

However, as it so often goes with these projects, we have some ambitions to develop the game further and make it an actual release. Working with Globdor is very enjoyable. Much like with Break the Aliens! and Break MORE Aliens!, we are aiming to make an enjoyable game with retro feel, but top it off with some modern elements like pretty pretty particles. We have also been planning the possibility to release the game on some other platforms besides WP7, and adding cool features like, say, a level editor?

And that's not all, at this point it's fairly safe to say that you can expect a 4-6 part tutorial on how the original, Kouvola version of game was made.  Plus the source code, spritesheets, music and all that jazz. We will strongly encourage anyone who's interested in game development to make their own game with the help of those, it's a ton of fun, and even more so if you can build a little team to work on it! :D

And by the way, happy Easter to everyone celebratign it, and equally as good weekend to the others! See you next week, TJR out.

Charging capacitor banks… Adjusting the rails…

Interplanetary was on a bit of a slow lane for a moment as half of our team was ill, but we're getting back on schedule again! Let's celebrate with some concept art of an Orbital Laser Defense module. (Art by Jukka Kivijärvi)

Most of the engine's core structures are done and pretty much all the major modules have been attached, so we are getting closer to releasing the alpha version.

Unlike we planned at first, Interplanetary aplha will most likely have graphical UI for moving between game states instead of just in-game console interface, so non game developers can play too. :p