Interplanetary Arrives to Steam Early Access This Friday!

Surprise! It's finally time to move to the next level: the Steam Early Access version of Interplanetary will be released April 18th, which is this Friday!

We decided that going Early Access was a natural continuation of Interplanetary's journey, as we've already had close collaboration with its players during development. By continuing on to Steam, we'll be able to reach a much wider audience than ever before, which helps the development a huge amount.

Like usual, buying the Early Access version at a reduced price will also give you all the future updates until the game is finished and you'll be able to better influence the direction of the game through your feedback.

New Features

For the Early Access release, we've prepared an exciting new feature: Superweapons. These are unlockable through the Tech Tree and will wreak serious havoc with your enemy's planet.

This planet's going to have a bad time.

Currently, we've implemented two superweapons:

• Asteroid Diversion
• Diverts a group of asteroids towards the enemy planet, causing massive damage. Works similarly to the railgun, except that the starting point is the asteroid field at the edge of the planetary system and you'll be shooting a cluster of space boulders instead of one small shot.
• Solar Laser
• An accurate and powerful weapon, the Solar Laser is fired from it's own orbit close to the sun. Unlike with normal lasers, it can shoot to any direction, unless there are other celestial objects blocking its line of sight.

These weapons are pretty devastating, so make sure you get them before your opponent does!

In addition to superweapons, we've been doing a lot of smaller updates all across the board. Some of the major ones include the ability to have hotseat matches with up to 4 players and many graphical and UI-fixes. There are also plenty of balance adjustments, so make sure to weigh in with your opinions.

Time to get hyped!

Hop onto www.interplanetarygame.com and join our mailing list for timely updates.

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