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: 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 Update: In-Game Chat

Here it is, the first proper feature update to Interplanetary! The main feature this time is something that's been requested a lot.

Update #1: In-Game Chat

As you may have guessed already, that feature is the much requested in-game chat. Now you can also bash your enemies verbally! Do try to behave, though.

An example of friendly, proper behavior.

Here's the full changelog for the update:

Interplanetary Version 0.1.3960

• In-game chat
• Indicators to show which players have ended their turns
• Building unlocks in Techtree now have simple descriptions
• Added a simple reminder when trying to end turn with no active research
• New player planet texture: Jungle
• Small changes to UI graphics
• Changed the version number scheme

Have fun cursing your opponents to oblivion (but seriously, avoid nasty words, there could be kids playing!) Also, don't forget to take part in our first "Whack-a-Dev" this Saturday. It'll be the true baptism by fire for the chat system!

Art of Interplanetary: Maps

The end result

Hello folks, Jukka here again. I'll share a bit of the process that goes into a creating planet texture for Interplanetary.

From chaos to order... Sort of

Usually, when I've made planet textures or painted planets, I've started with either using Photoshop's cloud filters and level adjustments or custom brushes to create the terrain shapes... And if you simply want to make a planet, this works fine, but for Interplanetary, going with just random shapes isn't that simple, since the texture is a factor in the game balance. For example, small continents will restrict player's choice on where he can build and also can make it harder for the other player to hit buildings, although a successful hit on densely built area would have the potential for greater damage.

The way we're trying to ensure that the maps wont be a totally unknown factor in the game balance is by using a specific ratio for land and ocean. So far we don't have much data from testing on the subject, so we simply decided to start out with 50/50 ratio and see how it works, but with this, the players would at least have the same potential area to build on.

White is land... Or was it the other way around...

Because the land-ocean ratio has be to taken into account, using random shapes to create the continents would become much more time consuming. So, we employed the use of this handy planet generator, which allows you to specify how much water you want. I care mostly about the division of the land masses, so I only pull out the black&white landmask from the generator, which I take to Photoshop for refining. 

The shapes produced by the generator are very ragged and "broken", so I shift parts of the continents and islands around and get rid of the excess of  small islands and lakes.

Touch of fictitious realism

Once I have landmasses ready, I block in some background information, like tectonic plates and ocean currents. I'm not an expert on geography so I just wing it. Even if it wouldn't be entirely accurate rendering it lends some logic into how the map turns out. And, of course, since we're not talking about Earth, there would be many, many things to take into consideration, if we wanted to get close to actual realism.

Lots of iron in the soil, or maybe it's dyed red from the blood of vanquished foes.

The next step is to throw in some colors and plan what kind of environment goes where. And from this point on, it's about painting in the terrain and details. For this I have some brushes I made from NASA's satellite photos, which I use to lay in texture. I go over each area several times with different brushes and slightly different colors to make the terrain look more detailed and natural. I also go in with a small basic brush to clean up and add precise detail to certain areas like mountains and river deltas.


If only planets were cubes

Due to the way the planet model is unwrapped, the poles need some more attention to minimize the amount of ugly distortion (there are a few methods for unwrapping a sphere to avoid the pole distortion, but I won't go into more details now as there'd probably be enough there for a whole new post and it is also still something I'm hoping to improve myself in). I use Photoshop's Polar coordinates -filter to wrap the texture into a circle so that I can see how the pole looks and then paint the details I want near the poles and use the Polar coordinates again (this time with the 'polar to rectangular' setting) to bring it back to rectangle shape.

Left: After using polar coordinates Right: How it looks in unity in my test scene.

That's it for now, but feel free to ask questions, and I'll answer the best I can, and see you again in the future.

Check out our IndieDB-page for more goodies!

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.

Blaablaablöpötiblöö.

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 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!

Being a tease(r)

Hello, Jukka here. This time I’ll explain a bit about process of creating a teaser and why we even wanted to have a teaser.

We are currently working our way towards alpha. With each step in development, we are also trying to reach more audience. As a young and still pretty much unknown dev team, we need to employ as many means as possible to make Interplanetary and ourselves known out there, unless we want to count everything on people finding us through Steam Greenlight. This is not that reliable strategy because of the sheer amount of other games that go there. Trailers are of course very, very widely used in games and movies, so a we knew we’d be making at least one at some point.

The  Nordic Games Conference was looming in the horizon when we decided on making a teaser, which we could show around. Though some of us aren’t exactly fans of teasers, since the information they give usually isn’t much and doesn't even necessarily include actual gameplay... But, as the name suggest, it’s supposed to tease the viewer to see if we manage to pique their interest or at least when they bump into it in the future, they’d recognize us or the game. Also it’s short, so it’s quite easy to show it around to people in person.

The Idea

So by the time we first wanted to have the teaser we had something of a playable prototype, but its purpose was to test some of the game mechanics and most of all, familiarize the crew with Unity. So it wasn't really something we wanted to feature on a video. Instead we decided to focus on artwork and try to tell something about the setting and the mood of the game.


Romeo & Juliet

So we sat down to think up ideas... And then pretty much jumped the first train which felt interesting: The prologue of Romeo & Juliet:

"Two planets, both alike in potency, In distant cosmos, where we lay our scene, From ancient greed break to a mutiny, Where great arms, shake the grounds apart."

So obviously, we made some modifications to it (here’s the original) and it was only the first few lines we wanted anyways. It kinda fitted and we hoped to get that “I see what you did there”-effect when someone would recognize the source material… We even got someone to record the lines in genuine British accent.

The pacing made it feel much longer than 30 seconds.

NGC

So comes the deadline along with Nordic Games Conference and the teaser is finished. We had planned to have the teaser running at the Kavio Cluster’s booth we shared with our fellow dev teams, but in the end, we didn't have a big display or sound, so Niklas showed it around on a tablet. After he got back we had “post-mortem” about the event and the feedback we got and concluded the teaser didn’t really do what we wanted… Turned out nobody really made the connection to Shakespeare and so it just felt like a poetic narration and the whole shooting-at-planets-thing didn't quite fit, even in any particularly funny way.

Revision

So when the first version of the teaser didn't work, we sat down again to come up with a new plan. We wanted to use the existing material as much as we could and still we wanted to tell something about the setting, so we came up with the idea of following a railgun shot as it flies through space, towards its target.

Execution

My main tools for the job were Photoshop, Blender, After Effects and Premiere. After Effects I hadn't used before and there’s still much to Blender and 3D-modeling for me to learn. For both versions I made a storyboard of some kind. For the first version, I animated some sketches and transitions in Photoshop. Although it gave a good idea on how things would look in the final product, I should have used more time on the sketches themselves. I ended up using more time on animating their movement than on the actual images. So for the second version I stuck with more traditional storyboard and instead put more thought on what I needed from the material that I would need to create still.

Storyboard for the second version 

It is still very rough so if it’s not you who’s doing the editing/material I suggest you put a bit more effort into making it clearer for outside viewers.

Images

I’m not yet a very fast artist, so I often find having to remind myself not to get stuck in one image for too long. I've been also watching the videos from FZD-school channel on Youtube, and one point that Feng Zhu often makes in his videos, is to keep in mind what is the selling point - the most important part of the image - and make sure that that part is well defined and presented.  So, since I didn't have the time I needed to go through the images and make everything detailed, I tried focused my efforts on just certain parts. This also made sense because a single image wouldn't be shown so long that the viewer could explore every part of it.

All the images used in the teasers. Only half ended up in the final version.

While working on the second version Tarita, our artist, suggested we add a bit more life to the images by adding some animation in them. I hadn't planned for this to start with, so it meant a little extra work, but we figured it was worth it. I went through each image sliced them to layers, adding some extra where I needed. Most of the animations I did in Photoshop, except the final image with the city and explosion. It had so many bits and pieces that After Effects was easier to work with than Photoshop CS4's pretty clunky animation system.

Will it Blend?

3D is not exactly my main proficiency, but thankfully, planets are not the hardest thing ever to model, although, if anyone knows a good way of avoiding texture distortion at the poles of a sphere in Blender, I’m all ears! There isn't much I can say about making the 3D material, except that rendering the it as separate images, and using After Effects to turn them into actual video, was a life saver. It was mostly due to me forgetting to adjust some setting or noticing something in the middle of an animation that I didn't like, but having to render the whole animation again would cost me so much time since my work computer cannot handle Blender rendering and working in Photoshop at the same time.

An added bonus was that I could render just the planet on a transparent background and add the background in premiere and adjust it however I wanted.


Music

Although we can find a way to do pretty much anything we want on our own, sometimes it’s just better and faster to rely on other professionals. And concerning the music, we were fortunate to come across Vince Parrish, who agreed on making the music for the teaser and even the game itself.


And that's it, the story of creating a teaser. After we reach the alpha, we are also planning on finally getting some gameplay footage out there. So, look forward to it!

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!

Designing Tech & Research

When can I finally have a clone to call my own?

Hello, hello! I'm Sasu, a game designer on the most wonderful game, Interplanetary. Lately, I've been working on the technology tree and the progression of upgrades, which will be our subject this week.

One of the main themes of Interplanetary is the development of technology. Players start up with technologies that seem quite plausible to actually exist in a couple of years, but the further the game proceeds, the more incredible they become. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but we still try to make it feel at least somewhat believable. No huge science fiction star fleets, just humble interplanetary space guns. 

In Interplanetary, players gain science points that are used to research new technologies. The generated points are counted towards technological progress at the beginning of each turn. Each technology needs a certain amount of science points. When the goal is reached, the technology is usable and new development options are opened. 

Original diagram, do not steal.

Projects are construction or development operations that take place in cities and span over several turns. Researching technologies not only grants various bonuses, but also opens up the possibility to develop certain projects. For example, the technology of “Quantum Paired Sensors and Communications” allows the player to detect incoming projectiles earlier and to build facilities for “Communications Shielding” and “Faster-Than-Light Communications”. 

All the technologies and projects have certain pre-requisites. You need to research “Particle Physics” before being able to research “High Power Particle Beams”, which in turn allows you to develop “Orbital Laser Defense”-project. Sometimes, a project must be completed to unlock new technologies. No “Orbital Manufacturing” without the help of a “Space Elevator”. 

Research enough technologies and you just might reach something amazing. We might add some wildcard mechanics to the tech tree so some of the more incredible tech may be hidden and only discovered accidentally. That is, after all, how science tends to proceed. Eureka!

Alrighty, that's enough nuggets for now. I can almost promise you that the details will change in some ways, so no frowny faces if they do, okay?

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.

Interplanetary progress, starweek 38

Progress on Interplanetary has been a little slower than we hoped this week, mainly because part of out team wasted some days being ill. Shame on you!

However, we did get part of the core code structure done, and also made progress on the design front. We also had out graphic artist Jukka Kivijärvi working with us this week, so have some concept art. Full version available here: http://goo.gl/7r2pf

We are still working on Interplanetary and some other projects during this weekend, and next week we're hoping to really get going with Interplanetary programming.