Category Archives: Blog

Alpha 9 – Sandbox Editor

Alpha 9 is out now! Another important step taken 🙂 Here is what it adds to the early access version of Imagine Earth:

Sandbox Galaxy

As introduced in the last Friday Report, you are now able to generate as many planets as you like to and save them to the Sandbox Galaxy. You can use each of them for the Free Play and Time Trial mode (described below).

Editor

Since generating planets clearly isn’t enough we added the editor. The editor works for all of your sandbox planets. You can start it in the planet menu – the same place you would start a Free Play. Within the editor you can terraform (Keyboard M and N), define the type of every field and place and remove every building you like. Finally save the result and go back to the Sandbox Galaxy to play your planet. Watch the video to see everything in detail.

Time Trial mode

After raising the limit with new Landing Permissions and Research Tokens for up to 20 million people on each planet, we decided to include a first draft of the Time Trial mode.

This mode is made up of up to 5 race goals like “500,000 people until week 500”. If you reach one goal the race for the next starts. If you fail one goal, you loose. The time you have for each goal depends on the amount of population needed and the difficulty you choose.

The Time Trial mode is clearly not perfect yet. We look forward to hear your feedback.

Trade with Natives

2015-03-05_NativesTrade

The natives on Rounos will now sell their precious and tasty food to you. Make sure to negotiate first, because otherwise they wont trade with you. The food price depends on their mood and the maximum amount on the number of forests surrounding them.

Natives added to a sandbox map will also trade with you.

Details

Two details among other things we changed:

  • Your operation systems setting for left handed mouse control is detected and used. Did you know that there are 10-15 % of left handeds folks amoung us?! 😉
  • Your population now grows based on the space available. This means you will have to deal with the problem of supplying enough resources. The population growth is based on the level of difficulty so you can still keep it easy if you want.

What didn’t make it?

  1. Mission Bora, because we put our focus on the Sandbox Galaxy and Editor for this release.
  2. The Warehouse, because we are still not sure whether it should be able to store all three resources or just one of them at a time.

What is planned guessed for Alpha 10?

  • The final mission on Bora!
  • Volcanoes
  • Steam Workshops for sharing Sandbox planets
  • Steam Achievements and Trading Cards
  • A new game mode with AI opponents

Early Access Contest – 3 Steam keys to be won

Win a Steam key for a friend by populating Joma Free Play with the most people. One important condition: You have to maintain a positive climate balance. Upload your Steam Screenshots to our community board on steam. The winners are announced in next weeks Friday Report #3 in the blog section!

Blog, Updates

Friday Report #2

We plan to update the early access version with Alpha 9 next Friday. The glorious final campaign mission and the AI we are working on will not be part of this release. But there will be a lot of other new features that will be fun and worth a try. So let’s keep this short and go with some more screenshots.

What did we do the last 7 days?

The AI now considers the influences that buildings have on each other. This way they make much betters choices on what building to take and where to place it.

We completed the basic trading system. You can read more about it in last weeks post and see a screenshot of it in the header.

Destroyed City Centers can now always be rebuilt. This is because we realized that it really s*cks to rebuild your whole city in a new location when your City Center has been destroyed by a twister or something else (and you didn’t unlock the rebuild tool from the research).

2015-02-26_RebuildCityCenter

Sandbox Galaxy

This one is my weeks favorite! You can create a new planet and it is saved to the sandbox galaxy so you can (re)play it anytime. This is the foundation to integrate Steam Workshops for planet sharing into the game (YEAH!).

2015-02-26_SandboxGalaxy

The free game mode now will give you coins and new city centers until you reach 20 mio people.

Currently the population stops to grow when you are out of resources. Thanks to the feedback of one dear follower (thanks Bora!) we realized that it’s much more interesting to let the population grow based on the space available. This means you will have to deal with the problem of supplying enough resources. The population growth is based on the level of difficulty so you can still keep it easy if you want.

The Warehouse is a new building type that will have some deeper influence on the gameplay. You can use it to store overproduced resources. If your population grows too fast or some buildings are destroyed the resources from your warehouse are used to meet the demands of your people. The screenshot shows a small bar over the goods balance representing the total amount of stored goods. In the top left you can see the absolute amount for the focused warehouse.

2015-02-26_Warehouse

Crash the server: Ok, this one was really stupid. I (Martin) decided to have a short try updating some libraries on our server and ended up crashing the whole thing at 2am. Not the best way to finish your day I can tell you. Luckily it’s working again thanks to the backup made by our hosting. Thanks a lot for this feature.

What’s planned for next week?

Main focus is still on the Bora mission and maybe we will add the volcanoes that didn’t make it last week. But since the next Alpha version is due Friday 6th of March, we will focus on things that can be used within the release. For instance the natives on Rounos will start to trade their special food with you and we hope to add a first version of the sandbox editor so you can terraform your generated planets.

Anything else?

Nope. We have to get back to work now. There are things to be done. You know.

Blog, Weekly Reports

Friday Report #1

We learned that some of you would like to follow our work in more detail. This post is a first try to give you some insight into our weekly development.

What did we do the last 7 days?

Jens created the concept and design for a planetary trade system that looks pretty promising so far.

Next thing he did was a first draft for some new characters (see post title): The space merchant will come around when you have some valuable gems and products to offer to trade them for research tokens and more… The Electronic Employer is the ultimate planet exhauster. Major Eko is good for sub-quests regarding environmental issues. The Illuminati are the natives of Bora. Living in their pyramids they got a very strange technology to turn the planets forces against you if you turn out not being a friendly visitor.

Additionally to these new characters he made a design concept video for how the communication with these guys might look much more sci-fi style in the future. It’s on our new youtube channel and you really should set the quality to high.

Martin has been working on an artificial intelligence for computer players that will be used in the Bora mission. Right now it simply starts to grow it’s population by building districts. Resource buildings are built whenever required. Some parts are still missing though. The AI still has to learn that building a lot of fisheries next to each other doesn’t make sense. In addition it only grows it’s city to level 2 for now.

Next he started to implement the trading system that we have been discussing lately. It will allow you to buy resources from natives and to trade with friendly AI players.

2015-02-20_Trading

In between I added the new characters and temple buildings for the Illuminati to the game.

The last thing (some minutes ago) was implementing the Warehouse that stores overproduced goods so they can be used for bad times (see the bar over the goods balance at the top center of the screenshot).

What comes next week?

Our main focus will be adding all gameplay elements necessary for the Bora mission. There might be some volcanos, additional AI routines and other stuff like that. If there is some free time available we will create a galaxy screen for your sandbox planets. This screen will allow you to “discover” new planets which means that you will be able to keep the generated planets and collect them on a screen similar to the one from the campaign. One day (or hopefully already in some weeks) we will also add the ability to terraform those planets and to add and remove all available buildings so you can create interesting scenarios like demolished cities.

Anything else?

The AI we are building for the computer players on Bora is only a first step. We want to make this available for the free play, too. But obviously it will take some more time to make sure the computer becomes a good player and opponent.

We hope this was somehow enlightening for you. If so please leave a short “great” in the comments.

 

Blog, Weekly Reports

Alpha 8.1 – Test-Mode

We just released a small update to early access alpha 8 on Steam.

It adds a “test-mode” button to the campaign screen. The test-mode allows you to play all available planets and missions without unlocking them. This also includes all constructs in the free play modus.

Additional changes:

  • Jens created a new galaxy for the campaign screen.
  • Improved the way underwater and coast textures are drawn near the poles so they don’t look stretched anymore.
  • Ruins of Cite Centers can now be destructed.
  • City parts that don’t grow because of mission resources or bad mood will show a small warning icon.
  • Changed the naming of our version so it’s easier to use. Instead of 0.8.1.1302 it’s now “Alpha 8.1 build 1302”.

Jens & Martin

Blog, Updates

Alpha 8 – Generate Your Own Planet

The January update of our early access version is live now (yes, it’s already February … ).

While the Bora mission is still being developed this update comes with one big new feature: Procedural planets. Meaning you can now generate your own planet with different themes, sizes, landmass, field resources, rocks and forests. The big dice button will generate some random values for the lazy ones among you.

In addition Buoy Stations and Watchtowers can now be built on fields adjacent to your build radius. This makes it easier to reach a specific region on the planet without using a City Center.

The next update at the end of this month will hopefully bring you the final campaign mission on Bora. In addition we are experimenting with AI and it’s quite likely that there will be a game mode with computer enemies and allies.

Jens & Martin

Blog, Updates

Development Menu and Production Bonus

It’s only two weeks after our last update, but we added some new features to Imagine Earth and decided to release them before Christmas.

So here is what’s new:

  1. Statistic on the air pollution of all your buildings
  2. Enhanced visualization of building influences. Outgoing influences are displayed, too now (e.g. the influence of a Forestry on a Factory). Furthermore we decided to leave decimal values away to make the information more clear.
  3. Sound volume: You can now control the volume of music and sounds in the game.
  4. Production bonus: In real life a diversified resource production is more stable than relying on a single resource (like mono-culture). To take this into account you receive a resource bonus when at least two building types each produce 10% or more of a resource.
  5. Development menu: This has already been mentioned and now made it’s way into the game. You can use it to develop new buildings and upgrades. It makes it more easy to compare the different building types and understand the relationships between them. In addition it is still possible to develop buildings and upgrades in the build and tool ring.

The video gives a short introduction on the development menu,  production bonus and the influences some buildings have on each other:

The next update is planned for end of January.

Your thoughts and feedback are welcome!

20/12/14: The demo has now also been updated,

Blog, Updates

Terraforming Preview and Rounos Reworked

We are currently developing new features for our editor that maybe will find their way into gameplay in some form as well… At least its a huge step towards the possibility of a universe with procedural generated planets and a new game mode called Conquest in addition to the available campaign. The video footage shows what I personally call the “godmode”: The ingame planet editor is taking shape… A big wow from the design department, with that thing running I could create 2-3 planets a day ;D.

Steam Update: Rounos Reworked

In addition we have just published a new early access version on Steam. It brings a completely reworked Rounos mission. The old script had too much stuff happening in parallel. We changed this and it’s much more straightforward now. Special events and side-quests are better communicated and highlighted on the planet and in the mission briefing. A side effect is that old Rounos savegames wont work anymore. Sorry for that, but there were too fundamental changes to the mission.

Your thoughts and feedback are welcome!

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Development Menu and 20% Steam Sale

As the headline suggests 20 % off right now on Steam until December 2nd!

One thing we are currently working on is the development panel. Unlocking constructs and upgrades should have a determined user interface to give you a good overview of all your options. In the development panel you can see all available constructs and their upgrades. You can hover them to see details in the Info-panel (bottom-left) and click to get a description.

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Steam Online Scores Integrated

Hey, we have just integrated Steam Leaderboards into the Imagine Earth score system. After an update on Steam you can see your score for every planet and compare to …

  • steam friends
  • people in your country
  • people around the globe.

Please note that you will have to finish a mission again to upload the score to Steam.

Tip: If you are using multiple Imagine Earth profiles (e.g. sharing the game with a friend or relative) the best score will count. So you can have kind of a local competition between profiles and only the best will put his or her score to the global leaderboards.

In addition to the leaderboards we also made the Joma mission a bit easier and added new graphics for every planet.

Your thoughts and feedback about the new leaderboards are welcome!

Blog, Updates

New Terrain Texturing and Trade System

We revolutionized the way our planets are getting textured and came to a quite simple solution based on the height of the terrain. This enables 5 times more details while saving a huge amount of texture space. It works for all existing planets  and will make it much easier to produce more of them – even procedural planets in an expanding universe seem to be possible now…

Diversifying Resource Production

In the real world it’s a good decision to diversify the production of a resource. For example it’s helpful to use different ways of energy production, because the whole system becomes more stable.

We will add this aspect to the game. The more different producers you have for a specific resource the more you will increase the mix-factor. This will give you a general bonus (e.g. 10% more energy for 4 producers)

factor

it might look much like this and the feature will pave the way for another new gameplay element:

Trade System Coming!

In the last mission of the single player campaign we plan to introduce a trading system. You will be able to trade different resource types like energy from oil, solar energy or wooden goods with other colonies (and maybe also with natives). This way you can raise the mix-factor of your resource production even though you might only be growing mono cultures. This will unleash a great potential for free and strategic development of your colonies.

As always we encourage you to share your thoughts about the games’ state so far and what you would love it to become… Continue reading →

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