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!
 

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!

Inside Interplanetary: The Remains of the Year

Ho ho ho! The jolliest holiday greetings from Team Jolly Roger! Hope you've been well, our dear Interplanetarists, and everyone else interested in our misadventures in game development!

It's been a while since we've been actively putting out status updates, blog posts and such. But now, right before we set out for a quick Christmas holiday, would be the perfect time to quickly go through what's going on over here and write about our general thoughts on the passing year.

Interplanetary Musings and Thoughts for the Future

And so it began.

May 12th 2015, we released our first big PC game, Interplanetary, on Steam after a year of open development on Early Access. It was a roller-coaster of fun and horror, as these things tend to be! In the end, everything went much better than expected, a lot of which is thanks to the enthusiastic and warm reception of the game. You guys are the best!

That said, not all the features we planned made it to Interplanetary. As most developers nowadays, we didn't simply throw the game out there and were done with it, but had great plans of supporting Interplanetary by fixing things, adding things, balancing things... Maybe even a bit too great, it turned out.

Some bumps on road to release caused a lot of trouble with our subsequent support of the game. Shortly, we discovered some difficult online networking problems affecting some of the players around the launch time. You can read more about it in our July status update. We had to push back the bigger, funner features on the list and concentrate fully on critical fixes. We even put on hold some of our regular events, such as Whack-a-Dev's, until it was certain that no player would lose progress over a networking hitch. But, as it turned out, fixing the networking problem would require diving deep into the roots of the game, re-writing the code extensively; and the schedule was tight.

With all the patches and trouble, we blew through the time we wished to spend on more interesting things. Eventually, most of the team needed to move on to different work-for-hire-projects, thus, having to leave Interplanetary support to the background, which was quite disappointing for all of us.

Now, although we're heavily occupied by other work and can't give you any sort of sensible timeline yet, we are looking forward to continuing to support Interplanetary once we are able. We do eavesdrop on the community all the time and are very grateful to the players, who are still sending us excellent feedback!

tl;dr
Things didn't always go as planned and we ran out of time. Now we're really busy with other work. We want to update Interplanetary, but don't know when it's possible. Hopefully soon!


Of course, it wasn't all pain and disappointment. After all, Interplanetary was our first significant project and, as tough as it was at times, it let us learn a great deal of things. Not to mention the confidence we found in the friendly reactions from the critics (even got to appear in printed press!) and eager participation of the community - great morale booster!

Interplanetary in print. Next to Farming Simulator 15, no less!

Speaking of morale boosters, even though enthusiastic players are the best prize any game developer could ever ask for, getting an actual award also feels pretty great. And that's how it felt to win Nordic Game Indie Sensation Award last May in Malmö, Sweden! Unexpected and absolutely overwhelming, such recognition from peers, only days after the release gave us the strength to go on and the public attention to get Interplanetary noticed by new audiences.

The conference was fun and we got a hefty souvenir to take home, too.

Aside from the Nordic Game Conference, we got to tour inside Finland and all across Europe, showing off Interplanetary and meeting some of you guys! Among the events we got to attend in 2015 are:  Paris Game Connection, Slush in Helsinki and Unite Europe in Amsterdam. Pretty out there, huh?

 To round up:

Patches released: 6
Events attended: 11
Coffee packs consumed: Countless.


Yeah, quite a busy year! It's been mostly behind the scenes, out of the public eye, working on secret projects and such. Makes for a kind of a boring retrospective when we can't talk much about the things we're been working on, but we hope we've been nicely transparent and answered some questions.

Thank You For Your Patience!

And now it's time for us to take a little Christmas break. We'll be back in business early next year. Enjoy your respective holidays, everyone! Take it easy, play lots of games and we'll see you again soon!

May the Blast be with you!

Inside Interplanetary: Behind the Sound

My name’s Jack Powell and I am the sound designer for Interplanetary. My role was to create all the sound effects that you hear in-game. In this brief write up I will be dissecting a few sound effects from the game, specifically the main menu ambience and the building sounds for the nuclear plant and water mine. So grab your scalpel and let’s begin.

Main Menu Ambience

The main menu ambient loop sits discreetly in the background and lets the theme music take the forefront.

The loop has 2 layers. The first layer is a processed version of a recording NASA's Voyager made of interstellar plasma sounds! Science! (NASA has made a bunch of fascinating copyright free audio recordings available on their Soundcloud for people to listen and download, I highly recommend you check them out.)

I pitched the sound down and set up a prefade send to a dark chamber reverb to add depth. It felt a bit static so to add some dynamics I automated the reverb send level so it builds and fades away in places.

The second layer is a low rumble sound I made for the planets, which is a recording of my old bathroom extractor fan pitched down and filtered.

Nuclear Plant

When you place a building it should sound gratifying and have characteristics similar to the building type. For the nuclear power build sound I used layers of sounds associated with energy and concrete/brick construction.

It is made up of 4 layers. A recording I made of a refrigerator humming, the startup sound of a hard drive and some wood and brick impacts.

I processed the sounds using pitch shifting, reverbs, EQ and some light compression. The brick and wood impacts were pitched down to add more punch and represent the initial construction of the building. The fridge hum and HDD startup sounds quickly fade in after as if the power plant is powering up and becoming operational.

And all mixed together

Water Mine

As with the power plant, and a lot of the other building sounds, I used elements that would fit the building type. So, no surprises I used the sound of water, a heavy river flowing to be precise. I also added in a snippet of a construction site ambience where a worker is hammering. The final layer is a sound I made using Sonic Charge’s Synplant. I don’t remember how I got the end result but it sounds similar to a big turbine pulsating or spinning. Well in my head it does.

For these sounds I only used high pass filters on the construction and water sounds and boosted the mids of the synthetic layer.

I synced up the pulses with the hammer hits which gave it a mechanical feel, as if a big turbine was being powered.

That wraps it up. Thanks for reading and I hope that you found this interesting. If you have any questions shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to answer them.

 jack@audiojacked.co.uk / http://audiojacked.co.uk/ 

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!

Interplanetary Released!

This is it! Interplanetary has spread its wings and left the cozy Early Access nest!

It's been quite a journey. Back in 2013, when we first started active development, we were still working from school, with no idea what would be in store for us. Our first alpha testing campaign, with a homemade key code system, was really the first thing that started drawing large scale attention to the game. This is where the ride started to get wild: the founding of our own company TJR Games, our Steam Greenlight adventure, Early Access release, development, development, development!

That's what two years of hard work and coffee abuse can do.

Now, we can finally say that Interplanetary has reached the point we determined to be "1.0", in the early days of development. It's actually more, since the ideas have expanded and our stay in Early Access gave us the chance to develop the game more towards the direction the players wanted.

Like we said before, we will keep supporting the game with patches and updates, as needed. There are even a couple of bigger features that we promised at various times, but which couldn't make it to the launch. Features, such as online save games, online AI bots, ranked matches, LAN game and the third superweapon, will be added in a later update.

Thank you for playing! We hope you will enjoy the 1.0 version of Interplanetary and do keep sending that feedback. Just because it's finished doesn't mean we're going to leave it!

Get the darn thing here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/278910/

Interplanetary 1.0 Coming to Steam on May 12! Also a Trailer!

It's finally happening! After a year of hard work with Interplanetary on Early Access, we're getting ready to release the 1.0 on May 12th, 2015! Celebration!

Ah, those were the days.

Major Added Features

• Online Matchmaking
• A quick way of starting online matches with a push of a button
• Match Customization Options
• A nice amount of options to change up the rules of the game. These include the ability to choose the amount of Cities, change the size of the planets, modify the strength of gravity, disable certain weapons or gameplay elements and more.
  
• City Projects
• A new gameplay mechanic that allows players to assign Projects for cities. The projects generally have a set duration and give resource bonuses and other perks. The amount of population in each city determines the amount of projects the player is able to initiate.
  
• AI Difficulty Levels
• Four difficulty levels for the AI, including a stupid, impossible cheating AI for ultimate challenge
• Saved Games
• Matches might drag on a bit, so this should come in handy!
• Damage Area Visualizations
•  Hit area markers that show the exact area of damage dealt by the projectiles. They lend themselves to some interesting, advanced strategies.
• New Event Log
• A clearer, much less spammy event log. Also quite a bit prettier.
• New Tech Tree
• A lot of new techs have been added to house all the Building Upgrades and City Projects. Also a nice graphical update that helps visualizing the branches, paths and unlocks.
• New Building
• The Offshore Mine, an advanced resource building, buildable only on water
• New Upgrades
• A bunch of new upgrades, most of them having pros and cons to add some interesting choices and strategy paths.
• New Intel Mechanics
• Intel View UI completely redone. Players will be able to see the exact amount of Intel needed to see more of the enemy planets and also spy on their resource amounts.
• New City Growth/Science Mechanics
• The players will be able to boost their Cities' Population growth by using Projects or attaching Power Connectors to them. The amount of Population is also tied to the amount of Science generation, so the more citizens you have, the faster you will gain new Techs.
• Achievements
• 26 achievements for players to unlock. Won't be easy!
• Improved UI and Graphics 
• Lots of smaller changes

A complete visual and aural damage dealing experience.

Naturally, we have a lot of fixes and other improvements in store as well, but these are the most visible features for most players.

After the game is finally released to the world, we won't just abandon it! No, we're going to watch over it and keep up the support! There are still a couple of relatively big features, such as ranked matches, online bots and online saving, that we have wanted to add, but didn't have a chance to do that before release. It's not really too late to give us some feedback either, just like you've been doing so far.

Speaking of feedback, as we're getting closer to the end of our Early Access adventure, all of us would like to once more thank all the players and testers who have been involved with the project! Whether you came aboard last month or you've been following us since pre-Early Access public testing, you've all been a massive help, in one way or another. Giving excellent feedback, building the community or just silently supporting the development of Interplanetary are all things that we are genuinely grateful for. We hope you will enjoy the end product, and even if you don't, send some more feedback our way!

One more thing. Starting from May 12th, Interplanetary will cost $14.99/€14.99. Don't panic! There is still one more week to get the game for yourself and friends for $9.99/€9.99, before it leaves Early Access.

Thank you!
~Team Jolly Roger