Colorized Building Lights

The night lights of building now are colorized in each player’s color. Together with the border line every colony can now easily be associated with it’s owner. The cover picture shows an example of the result.

Smooth Shadows

The shadows really needed a filtering to become more smooth. Dealing with graphic stuff like this always takes a lot of time to make the result really nice. We hope you like it!

New Sandbox Feature

The sandbox editor  now comes with add and remove buttons for every ground, deco and building type. As shown in the screenshot below you can select the wanted ground type and use the plus button to assign it to another random field. This makes it very easy to distribute fossils, gold, forests and other stuff.

Bugfix Release Alpha 16.1

• Fixed a serious bug that lead to a game crash in the highscore list
• Fixed a bug that didn’t correctly initialize a missing steam client on startup
• Added achievements “Magni” and “Scientist”

With the release of Alpha 16 coming nearer we would like to give you a short info on what to expect from it content- and story-wise.

Magni

As you probably have already realized the new campaign planet will be called Magni. It will be added in between Rounos and Bora and continues the story after Lima and Twostone’s decision to form their own company. This is obviously a difficult task and to make some money you will start your next mission as a freelancer for the IEA (interstellar environment agency).

The Xrathul

The Xrathul are a locust like race that use ships called Harvester to harvest resource from planets. They slowly float from field to field grabbing and destroying what they find on their way. A part of your mission on Magni will be to protect yourself and others from them.

More on this next week with the release of Alpha 16. Releasing it only 3 weeks after Alpha 15 brings us back to the schedule of releasing new content at the beginning of each month 🙂

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:

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.