There are new things in the Worlds of “Imagine Earth Ltd.” We talked about these Rocks in last week’s update. They are nasty blockades and mining them will take time and money but your growing civilisation needs room and rocks might even reveal interesting groundtypes after beeing removed.

Gold deposits

are the counterpart to these disturbing rocks. You see them on the left of the screenshot above. Mining those will grant you a big income. It will also take time, but this extra income will be particulary helpful in the phase of starting a new civilisation, which often isn’t too cost effective in that state!

Temples, graves, pyramides

From now on you will find some rare and old constructions on every globe which could be summarized as world cultural heritage. Temples, graves and so on will have a very positive and widespread influence on the mood of your citizens and their life quality while they provide cutural tradition and identity to your people.

But you might be tempted to plunder these historical facilities for cheap instant credit at the latest when your planet falls into crisis…

Good news everyone! A new world is born. It’s a small world of only 180 fields but it is coated in beautiful deciduous trees and topped with interesting formations of rock.
Proud like parents we present the latest starchild but we still haven’t named it yet, we thought about asking you for a smart name. Something short… like Joma or so …and two abstract syllables would really be enough… please drop your idea on our facebook site.

This one got nessecary because we finally realised that the stuff in the current tutorial world is enough for two. It’s even smaller than Tuto and the boss will not ask you for more than 700.000 population just to train the basics of city tuning and supplies. So people can go into the first tough job with more ideas how to start a civilisation successfully. In the storyline this one will be the application test before you get the job and get into Joe’s department.

Rocks will play an important part in the game mechanics. They block fields and mining them will take a long time. You will have the expensive option to blast them away at any time.

But there will also be some cliffs filled with precious metals and mining those will make rich enough to start new inventions or at least pay some bills.
As they are also overgrown by forests the do a bit of emission and pollution compensation.

Working on this planet we decided to give up the city building limitations. Districts can now be built everywhere buts it’s still vital to upgrade the citycenters the old way of course.

Please check out the old demo on steam or stay tuned for the new one in a few weeks. In that case you might want to sign up for email release notification on the right?

Today we wanna talk about life quality. Those who played the old demo version on steam already know that smilies over the citiy districts show the mood of your people. Back then, this life quality which is divided into 7 major states was responsible for the growth of population and depended on the availability of resources. Today as tax money is collected automatically we decided to add more relations to that.

Still every mood better then neutral makes the population grow. But additionally the circle around the smiley is closing faster as life quality improves and bonusbags of coins will popup over the district in addition to the normal income!

There are three basic criterias:

• Food is vital for your people to survive.
• If you have sufficient energy, life quality will be neutral.
• If you also have sufficient goods, life quality will become positive.

Additionally your people’s mood will be pushed up by wonderful things like Forests, Organic Farms and also by nearby Park Districts and Shopping Centers.

It is lowered by the specific influences of polluting powerplants and industries in the neighbourhood and is reduced by one level in case of critical ground pollution of the city field. It is also reduced if the citypart is devasted what means a critical state of structural integrity or health if you like to say so.

According to our latest poll at the facebook page most people will be playing Imagine Earth with mouse and keyboard even though we have implemented an interesting solution for the xbox360-gamepad. But so we also developed a set of hotkeys, that will boost planetbuilding!

The universal ringkeys will enable you to access any tool or construct with the combination of not more than 1 or 2 keys. Press W and then E and you have immediately placed a citydistrict. If you are hovering a field with a building then the keys direct to the tools in there Q or A start upgrades while for example will start a repair D.

Here you can see the Infopanel from the lower left part of the screen and how it shows the individual values of some energy power stations in the game. At the very top it shows the  produced resources in blue. The second value is the costs which fall due every week.

The Infopanel makes these values easily comparable when you are opening the buildring we introduced in Devblog #4. There you can see a constructs total production and consumption before placing it.

When hovering the planet this panel is trimed to the production value until you click at a certain construct to learn more about its internals. Now you will have relative values often influenced by other buildings and the the field qualities of the land you’re about to place it on or near by.

Air und Ground Pollution

At the bottom you will always have ground pollution and at last air pollution which stands for the emission of greenhouse gases and leads to global warming. Soil pollution is located on every field and therefor also shown on the top of the infopanel close to the field triangle.

21.Mai 2014 – Das Braunschweiger Startup Serious Brothers hat soeben seine Kolonie-Simulation “Imagine Earth – Planetary Colonization” im Early Acces bei Steam veröffentlicht. Darin spielt man das Schicksal eigens entwickelter Zivilisationen im Zeitraffer bis zum Ende des Klimawandels durch. Das neue Release enthält einen weiteren Planeten und sowie ein neues Forschungssystem.

Imagine Earth ist eine futuristische Aufbau-Simulation. Dem Spieler fällt der Job des Koloniemanagers zu, in welchem er unberührte Planeten erforschen und bevölkern muss. Es gilt große Städte zu errichten und deren Versorgung mit Kraftwerken, Farmen und Fabriken sicher zustellen. Die eigentliche Herausforderung ist es, den Zustand des besiedelten Planeten dabei nicht aus den Augen zu verlieren. Schnell hat man die Resourcen ausgeschöpft und die Wälder verschmutzt und die Polkappen abgeschmolzen. Am Ende kann nur die Erforschung erneuerbarer Energiequellen und die Entwicklung nachhaltiger Produktionslinien den Klimakollaps der neuen Heimatwelten verhindern…

In der offiziellen Demo lassen sich die zwei Planeten spielen www.imagineearth.info/demo

“Mit seinen Entscheidungen wird sich der Spieler mit hoher Wahrscheinlichkeit an einen Punkt bringen, an dem es seine Strategie komplett überdenken muss !” said Jens Isensee.

“Beim Aufbau die Balance zu finden zwischen Wachstum und Nachhaltigkeit ist in diesem Spiel der Schlüssel zum Erfolg,” meint Martin Wahnschaffe, “so wie es die letzte Herausförderung jeder Zivilisation ist.”

Der Klimawandel ist womöglich die unterschätzteste Bedrohung der Computerspielgeschichte. Imagine Earth transportiert diese ernste Problematik in ein packendes und motivierendes Spielsystem. Es entsteht in gewisser Weise ein experimenteller Weltsimulator, der dem Spieler alle Freiheiten lässt, seine eigene Entwicklungs- und Rettungsstrategie zu entwickeln.

Serious Brothers GbR
Ist ein unabhängiges entwickelndes Duo, dass sich zur Realisierung dieses Projekts zusammen getan hat. Alles hat als enthusiastisches Studentenprojekt begonnen, bis zu Beginn dieses Jahres ein Startup gegründet würde. Das mittlerweile auch schon zwei Preise gewonnen hat und sich erfolgreich um nordmedia Förderung beworben um das Spiel bis zum Ende des Jahres fertig zu stellen.

Pressekontakt:

Name:       Jens Isensee
Mobile:    +49 176 44421882
Email:       jens[ at ]imagineearth.info
Presskit: http://imagineearth.info/presskit

As you can see you will simply have a ring around the field where you clicked to build something and it will show the available building choices. Everything in place!

And yes, we had to redesign the icons of the resources. Because a knuckle of pork can’t seriously be representing food in general, not in a serious game ;D! So we took this abstract version of a vegetable as the major icon for greenhouses, farms, cattle breeding, fishing or fountains. The diamond as the icon of goods was as well misunderstood as luxury goods while it ment commodity and consumer goods of the every day life. At last we decided to put them into these red delivery boxes where anything like that can be packed in.

To expose the function of at least some of the buildings in that ring: These facilities will fit into the building-logic of your cities. the financial district will of course squeeze more money out of surrounding parts and the campus district will advance them while shopping malls and park districts will simply raise the life quality in residential districts.

An early scribble for the next build ring with the first comming up of icons representing the buildings.
Please give us feedback in the comments section below or at our facebook site.

A little update from the development, (expect these to come more regularly from now on). We reworked the water shader and now you can see crystal clear turquoise wobbling ocean water and you will have many ways of polluting it with oil slicks, chemicals, pesticides and even nuclear radiation because your dilapidated industrial buildings can now have accidents you will have to cleanup!..

This could be one the sustainable energy plants in our game. Seems to me more interesting than Wavecraft at the moment ;D ! Call it “fuel without fossils”: Jonathan Trent is working on a plan to grow new biofuel by farming micro-algae in floating offshore pods that eat wastewater from cities. Hear his team’s bold vision for Project OMEGA (Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae) and how it might power the future.

Not only does Jonathan Trent grow algae for biofuel, he wants to do so by cleansing wastewater and trapping carbon dioxide in the process. And it’s all solar-powered. TED