Hi there, what a pleasure for Serious Brothers to be at the Reversed Festival for Games in Museumsquartier MQ Vienna! Nice to meet so many interesting people and there latest creations and also some professionals from the industry.
MarZ Rising – Am dollsten gefiel mir Style und Atmosphäre bei diesem Tactical Tower Defense Game auf dem Mars. Vermutlich wäre es mir allerdings zu schwer.
Minty Pic – Eine ebenso witzige wie chaotischer App, die zwei gemeinsam vor der Kamera getroffene Propanden knippst und ihnen skurrile Sprechblasen unterschiebt. Free!
Der Preis für das beste Konzept wurde an Goliath VR. verliehen. Ein mit Kinect verfolgter Spieler miemt einen Giganten, auf dem ein zweiter Spieler Jump&Run mäßig von Plattform zu Plattform läuft.
Das Beste Spiel des Festivals beruht auf Erfahrungen von Abdullah Karam, der aufgrund des Bürgerkriegs Hama in Syrien verlassen musste. Path Out – Gratulation an Georg Hobmeier und Co. von Causa Creations.
I mochte besonders die Idee von “Somewhere” einem Textadventure, welches dir das Gefühl gibt einen Messenger zu bedienen und einer realen Person zu texten und zu helfen, die sich manchmal auch nur alle paar Tage meldet und der du dann mit Recherchen auf Maps und anderen Websiten helfen musst.
The Lion’s Song – Ein wunderbares Retro-Point&Click-Adventure im Jugendstil-Wien in 8 Farben und 4 Episoden der österreichischen Entwicklern Mi’pu’mi Games gibt es auf der
We wrapped up the most important changes of release 33 and 34 in a devlog clip on Youtube again.
TL;DR
Electronic Employee is now called Assimilator and comes with a floating drone
Laser und Pulse Cannon can now both be used against asteroids, Xrathul harvesters and Assimilator drones
Ideon Bomb and Explosive Device can be used in new ways – even against the Assimilator
Blow up mountains to get more rare resources
New campaign bonus mission on ice planet Iqunox
Wake up sleeping volcanoes with ideon bombs
Added second main objective to Tuto mission
Electronics Factory
Assimilator Drone
This first point is partly a spoiler. So jump right over it, if you haven’t played the Bora mission yet.
As you know the Bora mission introduces a threat that is kind of an end boss for the campaign. This “Assimilator” (previously “Electronic Employee”) spreads its cables from field to field to reach your City Center in order to assimilate it.
The assimilator now comes with a floating drone monstrosity that increases it’s territory field by field. You can use frontier towers with laser or pulse cannons to defend against it.
Be careful though – the assimilator drone will fight back with a small laser cannon and thus might destroy your defense. And your cannons will only allow you to stop the assimilator from expanding. Meanwhile costing money and your precious attention.
There are several ways to get rid of it. Use asteroid strikes or volcano eruptions. Or expand your territory and apply explosive devices or an ideon bomb.
Laser and Pulse Cannon
The laser and pulse cannon now attack all enemies and dangers that approach you. We have change the values for fire and reload duration and damage and defined how each cannon interacts with the different targets.
E.g. the laser will do triple damage to asteroids and thus destroy it with one shot – just because it is optimized for this purpose.
Towers no longer take fire when being damaged and health is over 25%. You can repair them and they go on shooting.
Ideon Bomb and Explosive Device
We have put some work into improving our blasting items. Both are now dropped by one of the drones starting from the City Center.
The Explosive Device allows the immediate blasting of mountains, rocks, buildings and ruins in your area and on all fields directly adjacent to it – the later one is especially helpful to defend yourself against Assimilator.
The Ideon Bomb has multiple times the effect of an explosive device on an area of four fields. It also disintegrates big mountains and wakes up sleeping volcanoes.
Blasting single field and big mountains will leave the fields with rocks that may contain the rare resources gold and titanium.
Ice Planet Iqunox & Sleeping Volcanoes
We have added the third bonus mission to our campaign.
Since the outbreak of the pan-galactic plaque in this sector of the Udoxia Galaxy the demand for an antidote has skyrocketed.
On planet Iqunox which was known only for its cold and miserable living conditions, giant coral deposits have been discovered.
You will be one of three contractors who are send to extract the coral antidote for the U.S.U.
Sleeping volcanoes are spread all over the planet. You can use Ideon bombs to wake them up and increase the temperate on surrounding fields a few degrees – enough to get rid of the snow and grow food more effectively.
The Iqunox mission also adds the “Emission balance” as a new victory point type: It starts tracking from 20:00 onward. The leader needs to surpass others by at least 40.
Rare Resource Goal on Tuto
Planetary colonization is foremost about making a backup of humanity and populating new worlds. But there is another important goal: Exploiting resources!
To reflect this point we have added a second main objective to the first mission on planet Tuto. It introduces all the recently added gameplay mechanisms for rare resource harvesting, item crafting and blasting mountains.
Electronics Factory
The Electronics Factory replaces the existing Mall. It produces complex electronics and needs trained staff. For that reason it is more efficient next to city parts and research districts. It features “Chemical Filters” and “Entertainment Devices” as upgrades.
The Factory has been renamed to Machine Factory to make it easier distinguishable.
Other
Fixed a hovering problem of the bookmark panel
Storage upgrades for warehouse have been removed from the research system
Removed asteroid explosion graphic bugs on start of freeplay and competition matches
Show asteroids in bookmark panel (top right of the screen)
Dear Space Colonists, the Serious Brothers proudly present alpha release 33. It involves crafting and hacking and we where also present at two conferences during this update cycle – in case you are wondering what took us a bit longer this time. As usual we’d love to hear how all the new features work out for you. Please leave us your comments and ideas.
TL;DR
Crafting Items in the Workshop
Nitro Pumpkins
Midras Resources & Resource Storage
Texture Size Doubled
Breaking Waves at the Sea Shore
Independent Frontier Towers
New Item: Hacking Kit
Share System & City Takeover Improvements
AI Territory Logic
Temperatures and Global Warming
Quo Vadis Conference and Amaze Festival
9 More Things
Crafting Items in the Workshop
One of the main new features that come with this release. In the workshop you get a list of special items that you can craft yourself instead of buying them. They are listed with up to 3 resources that you need for the generation of a certain item and it also shows if these are available or not. This will enhance the trading system as well because you can buy most needed resources from other factions. In the future it might become necessary to buy new construction plans or recipes from your trading partners. But for now we have a basic set of strategic things that we will try to balance out.
Nitro Pumpkins
This plant is a new rare resource used to craft the fertilizer and explosive device items, because it enriches nitrogen and salts. It can be found in mires and cold but fertile biomes – and was also added to the campaign planets.
Midras Resources & Resource Storage
The Midras are selling more rare resources as they are now needed for many crafting issues. For crafting it was also necessary that goods, energy and food that you particularly chose to lay in and reserve space will no longer be consumed by your personnel in times of shortage. That change was made as well because you couldn’t sell stored things when they are always eaten up by hungry colonists.
Texture Size Doubled
We have lately fixed a long time overseen graphics problem concerning texture mipmapping. The whole planet with all the stuff on it should have much higher resolution by now!
Breaking Waves at the Sea Shore
Beautiful waves and a soft and organic water line on the beaches improve the look and feel off our oceans now.
Independent Frontier Towers
Towers do no longer need a field connection to the city center, the land claimed by your towers and therefor the towers them-self remain yours even when your city center is lost.
New item: The Hacking Kit
Buy this item from the tech trader to hack and take over an adjoining tower of another faction. They can defend themselves by use of such a Hacking Kit as well. so it makes sense to keep one in your inventory just for security reasons. The AI will also make use of this, once they feel like this is a good decision.
Share System & City Takeover Improvements
From now on you can always repurchase your shares for twice the price if somebody else owns them. The shares will be taken from the company owning the most of your shares.
You do no longer have to obtain over 50% off an opponents shares to take over a city that is smaller than 50%. The take over fee has been reduced to 8.000 space coins.
AI Territory Logic
Our AI companies can now use the land claim feature to obtain fields adjoining their build radius. They will eventually use the hacking tool to take over your towers – take care!
Temperatures and Global Warming
There is a new variable range of global planetary temperature that can be defined when creating a new planet for competition mode or free play. The global temperature is raising up to 10 degree until the final climate collapse happens.
This is also important for the health of local flora. Some sorts of trees and plants will not stand a chance in snowland anymore but they will regrow leaves as soon as the temperature raises to positive numbers again. Water temperature is limited down to minus 2 degree Celsius.
You will be able to experience this phenomena particularly well on the new ice planet we are currently working on.
Quo Vadis Conference and Amaze Festival
Serious Brothers where present at the international Games Week Berlin and showing Imagine Earth on several Events. Indie Game Expos at Quo vadis and Making Games Festival on Mo – We and at the A Maze Festival on Friday.
9 More Things
Fix: fish, fertile and desert on generated planets
Highlighted field colors show the best and worst placement choices directly when you are setting up a new building!
Italian language goes official
Rewritten game info in steam store and website
Better handling for long names in the info panel
Fixed problem with the emission goal on Rounos
New icon for iron deposits
Position fix for infrastructure buildings in dev panel
Switched mouse buttons fix for left-hander
The competition panel shows the winner more clearly
Dear Space Colonists, the Serious Brothers will be present at the Games Week Berlin and showing ImagineEarth on serveral Events. Indie Game Expos at Quo vadis and Making Games Festival on Mo – We and at the A Maze Festival on Friday. See you in Berlin next week! Also the German Computer Games Award will be presented in Berlin at a festive gala event this week. Imagine Earth was nominated for Best Game Design 2 years ago. With prize money totaling 550,000 euros, it is the most important sponsorship prize for the German games industry.
As a small feature addon we have lately fixed a long time overseen graphics problem concerning texture mipmapping. The whole planet with all the stuff on it should have higher resolution by now!
A talk by Liz George and Peter Buschkamp at the Chaos Communication Congress 2017 that we liked a lot, because it treated some more tangible possibilities of planetary colonization.
Good news for those who where questioning the retro 90s look of Imagine Earth. Yes, not all buildings are state of the art and some will get a makeup upgrade already with the next release in a few days. Finally the cities look like futuristic stuff you would definitely build while you are colonizing space.
We should also see some redesigned farms and get the space port running where you can build rockets and fill them with the resources you produced to sell them on the intergalatic markets…
Welcome to the latest friday report! We’re back from taking a summer break and working hard on the research system revolution. Due to holidays the whole thing is delaying a bit more but we got lots of exciting news on latest units and constructs. I almost don’t know where to start… but remember all these are ideas in development that will most likely change and we’re desperately looking for more feedback on them.
New Trade Dynamics
So far your overproduced resources go straight into the trash as long as you haven’t developed the warehouse already. A still very limited possibility to store resources for hard times. One that we definitely want to expand.
Space Ports
In the future we want to advance the whole trade system to enable you selling the different sorts of resources each at their individually varying price level to other colonies but futher more into space with your own space ships. When we do that you will be able to use your city center ships to deliver a package of certain goods package into space But that will keep it occupied for a very long time. To improve your sales oportunities you can build the space port. At an extra cost you can construct one way rockets to stuff in the resource packages that are to be sold and to send them off to the intergalactic markets.
This way of trading makes you independent from other business partners but the rocket construction lower the profit rate.
The Harvesters
These creatures have developed a completely different life style than other known lifeforms of this galaxy. They hover into the lower orbit of a planet with their giant ships and extract all resources from on or under the ground with advanced tractor beam technology. The appearance of harvesters is a devasteting event for a living environment and a thread for its inhabitants. As long as you have no advanced defence technology you can only try to buy your colony out of their interest by delivering the desired resources yourself. Infact when a harvester is slowly turning towards your colony and approaches your cities for a good loot you can motivate them to change course if you sell them your resources at zero cost. But that will only make someone elses problem for a while…
Stone Quarry
There’s another new unit that was long overdue. The stone quarry produces build material from rocks. Yes they are finally no longer useless. After all that time these rocks turn from being an annoying disruption into an actual resource. Reaping by tool will no longer only cost your money and time it’s an early and limited way to gather a sort of goods. Of course the quarry will mine rocks slower and constantly. produce more building material at lower costs. you can increase its effectivity by placing it next to stone deposits.
New research options
Additionally when you advance your societies transportation abilities in the research field mobility you can also relocate stones from one place to another to save the build material for later but set free the building land they block or just take them to a quarry elsewhere. You will also be able to research blasts which way you can get rid of rocks and gold deposits the fastest way but that involves heavy losses.
Hurray! Imagine Earth was awarded with the “Goldener Spatz Award 2015” as “Best Indiegame”. Look at this picture of me holding the price. Actually it was a very nice trip to Erfurt even though the trophy turned out to be made of glass not gold. Main thing is the kids like our game!
