The image above shows a Harvester. They are built and sent by a race called Locust. They harvest planetary resources like forest, gold and also cities. More on this next week.
No Upgrade Development
The new research system is much more focused on single tools and upgrades. Because of this it feels like doing the same thing twice over to still have to develop them. So we decided to have a try with a small change: The number of development licenses you receive during the missions will be reduced and you will only have to license buildings with them. If an upgrade of a licensed building is researched you can immediately use it.
In addition the development user interface received a little makeover:
Borders Reworked
Currently the borders are standing upright like laser walls. Because of this it’s sometimes hard to see them looking top-down. We reworked them and put them onto the planet. Now they are much easier to see and better looking:
This Alpha release is a compromise. We really wanted to publish the new mission on Magni and already postponed the release one week. But we still didn’t manage to finish it.
Nevertheless we felt that it’s time to release all the other stuff we have added – the new research system, the field navigation and a lot of small enhancements. We will publish the next release as soon as Magni is ready. This will be the case in two to three weeks.
Magni (without mission)
The mission is not finished yet, but the planet itself is. So we made it available through the competition and free play modes. You need to finish the Bora mission to unlock it, though.
Research
The new research system is grouped in 12 categories like infrastructure, agro technology and physics. Within these categories you can research 3-4 chunks that each cost a single fund. Some chunks only consist of researching a new tool (like mining) other chunks research technology that allow you to develop new upgrades for your buildings.
Important: Whenever you load an old savegame you will have to reselect the research. To make this a bit faster you can keep the mouse button pressed when clicking a chunk and release it on the okay button.
Field Navigation
The navigation mode now comes with a tool to highlight different field types. Enter the navigation mode by selecting the compass icon on the bottom center or by pressing the space key. On the left site you can now select the different categories you now from the sandbox build ring. Choose a ground type or building type to highlight the according fields on the planet. In addition the total number of fields will be displayed.
Mouse Cursor
Imagine Earth now uses a hardware cursor. This is a small enhancement, but it finally ends the feeling of the game being really slow at times.
That’s it. Have fun and let us know how you like the new research. And stay tuned for Alpha 16 at the end of this month.
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.
Is everybody ready for the next friday report?! This week we focused on the new research system.
The first version is shown in the picture above. The whole research is now grouped in currently 11 categories like extraction, city building and agriculture. Within these categories you can research between 2 and 4 chunks that each cost a single research fund. Some chunks only consist of researching a new tool (like mining) other chunks research a set of 2 or 3 upgrades.
We still have to put some work into this to make sure it works well with the existing missions and also with new content.
And next week we have to talk about theses guys who You will meet on the next campaign planet we are also currently working on…
The header image shows the new extended navigation mode. Currently it’s quite difficult to get an overview of available resource fields, gold depots and special buildings like temples or native tribes.
To use it you enter the navigation mode (by zooming out, pressing space or by clicking the compass icon). The new panel on the left allows the selection of a ground type, an environment object, a special building or any other building. The selected type will be highlighted on the planet with a light turquoise. You can also leave the navigation mode to have a closer look.
The feature described above is currently not available in the game and will be part of alpha 15 coming in early September.
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!
