Hey guys! Me and Martin just got on Indie DataBase indiedb.com with our enthusiasticly endless indie production “Imagine Earth” and to celebrate this we are releasing the latest 2 minute game trailer on this platform first. Please enjoy watching and tell us what you think about it…  We are also preparing a demo version that will definitely come with the new year. That time we also want to start a crowdfunding campaign on indiegogo.com to raise money for the last period of development which we consider to take nine month. Our Plan is to release Early Alpha and Episodic updates of every finished planet directly after the funding… consider more infos and material appearing on this site in the following days or check by the official project website www.ImagineEarth.info Thanks for your interest! The time of planetary colonization has come. Claim your territory on various planets with huge cities. Expand into space faster than any other corporation.

Good news everyone!

We invented Shopping Malls that will bring a lot of excellent stuff to raise the mood in all City Districts nearby. An alternative way of raising the life quality in growing cities and to secure the delivery of goods to your people. A simple truth about comsumerism it makes your people happy!

Here an early scribble of those shopping malls and other Districts that will enhance the citycomplexity

Thanks for the interest and have a nice week!Jooki & Martin

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?

A short update concerning the future road map of Imagine Earth.
After a long time of development we decided to start a crowdfuning. This has two reasons:

1. We need some money to pay for the establishment of a small business partnership, sounds and especially localization.
2. It’s time to go out in the public and tell the people about Imagine Earth on a great scale!

Right now we are planning all details and need a lot of contacts to spread the word about the Crowdfunding.

Do you know someone who would like to mention the crowdfunding for Imagine Earth in a blog, newsletter, …? Please tell us here, on facebook or write an email to martin(at)imagineeearth.info.

You can also leave your email on the right to get notified once the crowdfunding starts. We will post more details soon.

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.

Important note: Gamepad support is disabled in the current early access version of Imagine Earth. We are focusing on the gameplay for now and will come back to the gamepad implementation later.

Love to sit on your coach playing games on your TV?
Just like Steam’s Big Picture mode, Imagine Earth will support your XBox 360 Gamepad as input controller. Simply connect you PC or laptop with your TV. The game will automatically switch between mouse and gamepad – whatever you use to make inputs.

Please let us know if you like this feature or prefer to play the oldschool way – sitting at your desk with mouse and keyboard.

Tip 1: If your TV cuts of some parts of the picture you can adjust the size of the GUI via the options menu.

Tip 2: With the MotioninJoy driver you can also use several other gamepads.

In Imagine Earth there are 8 types of ground that can give your buildings a much higher productivity (or in some cases a much lower). This short overview will help you to decide how to place your buildings.

Soil
is the default ground type for your land buildings.

Fossils deposit
will increase the productivity of power plants that rely on energy sources. Coal and gas power plants are a good example.

Fertile
ground makes the crop yield of your farms much larger.

Desert
on the contrary, isn’t a good place for a farm. Nevertheless, a solar park will have it’s highest energy output when built into a desert.

Coast
fields are know to by windy spots and will increase the production of wind farm.

Ocean
fields will allow you to place some different kinds of buildings.

Oil fields
are the right place to build an oil rig.

fishing grounds
will let your fishery produce a lot of food.

Mountain Fields
They remain inaccessable the whole time.

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.