The important information first: The two big things we are working on for Alpha 15 is a new version of the research system and a new planet.
This week was all about conferences. We have been attending Game Developers Conference Europe 2015 and Respawn. It was really great to get out and see how other people (indies and big companies) are creating their games and to learn from them.
Croteam (the makers of the “Talos Principle”) inspired us to build a scripted AI that plays through the campaign automatically and enables us to make sure all missions are still working whenever we make a change to the gameplay.
In addition we have started to experiment with an ingame mission editor that might enable you to become creative yourself. Would you like to create your own mission? Get in contact.
Finally, at Gamescom it was kind of unbelievable to see the big publishers showing their games on displays that are larger than our working room. We had a look at upcoming games and especially liked Unravel, Star Wars Battlefront and the Indie Arena Booth with games like Gangbeasts and Planetoid Pioneers.
Next year we will very likely show the finished version of Imagine Earth at the Indie Arena Booth, too.
Alpha 14 brings a load of small enhancements to the game: Tools like repair and remediation can now be mass-apply to your buildings, the quality of life feature has been extended, UI elements are now smaller, the competitor AI got stronger and new Steam achievements are available. Aside from this we are working on new planets that will be added as an extension of the campaign and come with the next release.
Tools
By clicking on an icon in the toolring and dragging it with the mouse or simply keeping the mouse button pressed you can switch to the tool-mode. In this mode you can easily click a bunch of buildings to apply the tool and don’t have to open the tool-ring again and again. The video explains everything in detail:
Watchtower Upgrades
The watchtower (and frontier buoy) now offer upgrades that automatically start the repairing or the remediation of surrounding buildings and fields. Together with the tool-mode described above this should reduce the click work a lot.
Population Growth
The quality of life is now shown as a smiley for each city whenever there is something to do for you. By hovering the city you can find out what is missing to make your people happy.
Mostly it’s missing resources or a nearby building that caused bad mood. A new aspect we added to this is a need for variety. For example a city district level 2 will need food of 2 different kinds, e.g. an industrial farm and a fishery.
The current variety of your production is displayed when you hover the resource production at the top of the screen. The pie in the production category indicates the current level of variety. Every resource type over 10% adds to this and gives you a production bonus of 2%.
Competitor AI
In competition mode (German: “Wettstreit”) the AI now has to develop new buildings and upgrades just like you. The computer will decide what to build based on available development funds, resource fields and existing buildings.
In addition the AI acts now a bit faster and in general makes better decisions. Or to make it short: It has become a real challenge to win against your competitors.
Achievements
We have started to add new Steam achievements. 14 are already implemented and more will follow with the next release. The achievements are now also displayed in the applications menu.
GUI Scaling
The user interface with it’s huge elements has been criticized quite often and has given Imagine Earth the feeling of a table or console game. We finally took the time to change this:
The gallery shows a comparison of the small, medium (default) and big user interface. You can configure the size in 5 steps in the options. Seeing it like that we can hardly belief that the UI elements used the have maximum size, occupying all of the screen 😉
Crowdfunding “Final Version”
One perk of our indiegogo crowdfunding offered the final version of Imagine Earth. We wont make Imagine Earth final until we feel that it really is, which is kind of bad for the people that supported us in the crowdfunding and now have to wait for the final version.
With this release we think that Imagine Earth has reached the state we once planned to be the final version. This is why we decided to send the Steam keys to all our supporters today. If you are one of them an email should have found it’s way into your mailbox some minutes ago. Grab your key and have fun. And again: thanks a lot for your support!
To make this clear: Imagine Earth will keep it’s early access alpha state which means we will continue to add new features and content over the course of the next months.
GDC Europe and Gamescom
Next week gamescom – the world’s largest gaming event – takes place in Cologne, Germany. We will attend the Game Developers Conference Europe that takes place beforehand. Let us know if you are there, too. We are available from Sunday evening until Thursday. Just write a mail to martin@imagineearth.info.
Your population’s quality of life is the factor that decides how fast it grows or shrinks. In addition the taxes payed by your people will be reduced if it’s bad and increased when it’s good.
The quality is influenced by nearby buildings and factors like environmental pollution, but first of all you have to make sure your people are provided with all needed resources. If your people are missing food they obviously wont be happy 😉
A new aspect we added to this is a need for variety. For example a city district level 2 will need food of 2 different kinds, e.g. an industrial farm and a fishery.
When you hover a district the message panel will explain what is missing. In the above example the quality of life is reduced because your people are not provided food of 3 different kinds.
The current variety of your production is displayed when you hover the resource production at the top of the screen. The pie in the production category indicates the current level of variety. Every resource type over 10% adds to this and gives you a production bonus of 2%.
Competitor AI
In competition mode the AI now receives development funds by growing it’s population (like you do). Based on this the AI now can develop now buildings and upgrades and takes these cost into account when it tries do decide what to build next.
In addition the AI will act a bit faster so it becomes harder to win against them.
All these changes and more will be added to the game with Alpha 14 that will very likely be released next Friday (31st).
Jens designed a whole new set of icons that better fit the general style of the game. They are a bit less colorful and come with cleaner symbols as the following picture shows.
Tool-Mode with Colorizing
By clicking on an icon in the toolring and dragging it with the mouse or simply keeping the mouse button pressed you can switch to the tool-mode. In this mode you can easily click a bunch of buildings to apply the tool and don’t have to open the tool-ring again and again.
In addition the planet fields withing your radius or colorized based on the tool.
When you enter the upgrade- and level-modes the colors show which buildings are ready to be upgraded. In the example (picture above) all buildings that are ready for an efficiency upgrade are displayed light blue. The buildings that already have the upgrade are drawn with a grayish blue. Notice the upgrade-icon that is attached to the cursor – it symbolizes that you are in tool-mode.
In the repair-mode (left) every building that is damaged is colorized from yellow (medium damage) to red (high damage).
In the cleaning-mode (right) the planet fields are colorized accordingly helping you to see which fields are polluted.
Finally the harvesting-mode displays which forest have a lot of wood (green) and which ones are nearly cut down (red) and should better be not harvested until they have regrown.
Currently we are working on adding more achievements to the game and we are creating a concept to make the growing of your cities and population a bit more complex and interesting.
New Planets
The campaign with it’s 5 planets offers something between 5 and 10 hours of gameplay. We don’t plan to extend the campaign itself, but we will add a new galaxy next to it. This galaxy will come with several new planets to be conquered that will be added over the course of the rest of this year. The first new planet will also come with a mixed vegetation instead of having only one type of forest for each planet.
Research We are currently not 100% satisfied with the research system and are going to reiterate on it’s gameplay design. This might include adding some small new gameplay elements that can be researched.
Competitor AI
The AI currently don’t have to unlock buildings and don’t make use of upgrades at all. We want to change this to make the AI stronger and more “realistic”.
Steam Cloud & Achievements We plan to add some additional Steam Achievements like “Build a City Center Level 4” or “Populate a planet with 10 million people”.
In addition we want to make use of the steam cloud to allow you to synchronize your game profiles and savegames between different machines.
That’s it – and as always this is only our guess at this point of time. If there is a feature you would like to see in the game let us know!
This month’s alpha release comes with a lot of useful changes to the user interface. It’s now a lot easies to understand what influences the resource production on a local and on a global level and to identify the biggest emission sources. In addition we added a new competition mode that introduces victory points to the gameplay.
Competition Mode
In the competition mode your goal is no longer to be the first to reach a defined population. Instead you have to earn victory points. As the following screenshot shows there are different ways to receive these points.
This allows you to use different strategies to win the game. You can try to maximize your population or you can try to maximize your money and buy points from the merchant. For the future we plan to add additional ways to earn points.
Reworked Menu
All game modes (Campaign, Free Play and Competition) are now available from the main menu. To load or continue a game you have to choose the game mode first – this especially helps to keep the load menu clear.
Emission Statistics
By clicking the global emissions display on the top right you get some details on the emission sources. Currently this is hard to understand and even a bit buggy. So Jens did a redesign of it that makes it a lot simpler and easier to understand. Have a look at the screenshot below.
On the first level it displays the current compensation of global emissions and the emissions caused by every player. You can drill down each of them to find out what type of building causes the most emissions. In the example my coal power plants cause 120 of 398 emissions which is more than a quarter.
Resource Statistics
Finally we had to rebuild the complete resource statistics, because they just didn’t work (and feel) right. There was simply too much numbers that made it almost impossible to understand what goes on. For example the following screenshot shows the food statistics – how much food is produced by your buildings and how much is consumed.
Production Details
The different things that influence the production amount of a building are now presented more clearly. The base production including upgrades is displayed blue. Bonus production (by ground types and influencing neighbor buildings) is displayed green and a decrease, for example by pollution, is displayed red.
That’s pretty much it. Packed with some bugfixes to the Bora mission all changes are now available through the early access version.
The graphics on Steam were a bit outdated and still had the old logo. So it was time to recreate them from scratch and now they look much more appealing (left: old; right: new):
Clouds
Next, Jens realized that the clouds on our planets are very important for the overall look of the game. So we did a rework. The result is shown in the post’s header and looks quite beautiful.
Resource Statistics
Finally we had to rebuild the complete resource statistics, because they just didn’t work (and feel) right. There was simply too much numbers that made it almost impossible to understand what goes on. The new statistics are much clearer (at least we think so).
The image on the left shows the new statistics for the production of food compared to the old version on the right. The first three entries are the producing buildings. The fourth entry is the sum of consumed food. You can hover this entry to find out how much every city building type is consuming:
In addition you can hover any of the producing building types (here: industrial farm) to get some details on the base production and the influence of field types, neighboring buildings and pollution on the amount of produced food.
By clicking the global emissions display on the top right you get some details on the emission sources. Currently this is hard to understand and even a bit buggy. So Jens did a redesign of it that makes it a lot simpler and easier to understand. Have a look at the screenshot above.
On the first level it displays the current compensation of global emissions and the emissions caused by every player. You can drill down each of them to find out what type of building causes the most emissions. In the example my coal power plants cause 120 of 398 emissions which is more than a quarter.
Production Details
This one is still work in progress. We realized that it’s sometimes hard to understand why a building produces a certain amount of resources. The screenshot shows details on the production of a industrial farm:
24 food is it’s base production
4 additional food are produced by an upgrade
6 food are added because the farm is built on farmland
3 food are added by a nearby cattle breading. This influence is limited to a maximum of 4
11 food are lost because the field is highly polluted
Aside from this we received some bug reports by the community and did a Steam update with the fixed version.
… just has started and Imagine Earth is available for 10% off. Together with the price change from $25 to $20 this is now the cheapest price Imagine Earth ever had.
What is planned for Alpha 13?
Competition mode
We discussed a lot about this and will now add a victory point system to the competition mode. This means you will need a certain amount of victory points to win the competition. You receive these points by reaching population goals and by being better than you competitors in things like life quality, emissions, etc. If you have a lot of money you can even buy victory points from the merchant. Altogether this will give you a number of different ways to win against the competitors. We are really looking forward to play this!
Advanced custom game menu
The first draft of the custom game menu that was added in alpha 12 will partly be reworked and advanced to make the selection of a planet and game mode more clear and easy.
Research We are currently not 100% satisfied with the research system and are going to reiterate on it’s gameplay design. This might include adding some small new gameplay elements that can be researched.
Resources To add some more diversity to the resources we plan to store each resource of a category (e.g. energy) individually (e.g. wind energy, coal energy). You can buy and sell packages of these resources and the price will vary based on the demand. The people in district levels 2 and 3 will require different resources of a category to be happy. In addition the storage will be moved from the goods to the people section in the build ring to clarify it does not produce goods.
Autosave
It probably happened to you, too: You just built up a beautiful colony and two wrong decisions later you have to restart, because you forgot to save the game when everything was still perfect. To help you with this we will auto-save the game. This will be the cause in crucial moments during the campaign and after you receive new city districts and research.
As always this is only our guess at this point of time. The competition mode will clearly be the outstanding new feature of alpha 13, because we want to add some more long term playability to Imagine Earth.
Besides creating a new trailer and logo, we focused our efforts on reworking Joma and Lorian and adding some small enhancements to the other missions. It was exciting to see just how much has changed since we first built them!
In addition we have changed the main menu to make sure it is as easy as possible to start a custom game with the game mode you want and a generated, campaign or sandbox planet.
Warning: The following will contain spoilers!
Joma: Temples and Terraforming
After introducing the Illuminati temples on Bora it was obvious that the temples you find on Joma should become some power, too. We took the “fertilize” power from the Illuminati temple as the it’s first power and added terraforming as it’s second power. This all is wrapped into the mission and some small side quests.
The image shows the temple on Joma (left). It has the power to terraform a free ocean field (middle) so it becomes usable land (right). Since the temple has to keep the global balance there will always be a side effect: Creating farmland will degenerate some field on the planet to a desert. Terraforming ocean to land will somewhere change a field from land to ocean.
Lorian: Merchant and Laser
First, we did some general enhancements like reducing the mission goal from 4 million to 3 million people, fixing quests that didn’t work correct and things like that.
Second, we now introduce the merchant and the warehouse on Lorian. It’s a perfect fit and allows you to generate some money by selling overproduced goods to the merchant. In exchange he will sell research licenses that will be usable during all missions of the campaign (see Friday Report 12 for more information).
Third, we integrated the laser defense into the mission and removed the scripted nuclear catastrophe. Instead you now have the chance to really defend against the meteorites and we used this element to add a nice final to the mission.
Bora
On Bora we did some fine-tuning. Especially with the Electronic Employee, who had several unwanted vulnerabilities and wrong behaviors. Additionally, Bora now comes with a beautiful visualization of the planetary shield.
Custom Game
The main menu now has a new option called “custom game”. Starting a custom game is an easy and fast way to play Imagine Earth. It comes with a predefined setting and let’s you configure the following options:
Choose planet
Random generated planet: You can configure basic params like planet size, theme and forests.
Campaign planets: You can use all unlocked planets from the campaign.
Sandbox planets: Use the planet you have built in the sandbox editor (can be reached from the main menu).
Choose game mode
Competition: Reach the expansion goal before your competitors.
Continuous: Enjoy to colonize the planet without any goal. Additional colonists are optional.
Time Trial: Hurry to reach the expansion goals in time.
