Announcing Interplanetary Enhanced Edition Update! Have a Patch to Celebrate!

Kept you waiting, huh? Well, we’re finally back in action, and there’s a lot of catching up to do! With the help of Team17 and Advanced Interactive Gaming, we’ve had a chance to get back to Interplanetary and devise a cunning plan to finally add the fixes and features we’ve been promising...

Let’s not ignore the gas giant in the room any longer: we’re happy to announce the upcoming Interplanetary Enhanced Edition update! There’s also a small new patch out right now, just to thank you all for your patience.

Interplanetary Enhanced Edition

Interplanetary Enhanced Edition is a sizeable update with a load of improvements and various new features. At this point we are not entirely sure if the Enhanced Edition will be a normal update or appear in your library as a new product, but it will be free for everyone who has already purchased Interplanetary. The main goal of the update is to add the features we’ve been promising since forever, including Online AI Bots and Reconnect, as well as to make the game much more stable. As we explained in our previous posts, we had a lot of issues with the very architecture of the game’s code, making it near impossible to add these features and fix the lingering networking bugs. So, how are we managing to do all that with this update? By completely re-doing the whole game, of course!



For Enhanced Edition, we undertook a huge effort to actually rebuild Interplanetary from the ground up. It’s been surreal being able to have a second go at it, redoing the same game, but better. For you, it will be a hefty update, but for us, it’s actually a whole new game project. Development has been much faster this time around, but it’s definitely not a quick task by any means.

It will still be the same old Interplanetary in essence, but prettier and more user-friendly with new features, big and small. Here are some of the things we’ve been working on:

• Online AI Bots
  
• Reconnect
  
• Elliptic Orbits
  
• Quick Targeting Mode
  
• Tech Tree Graphical Overhaul
  
• New Intel Mechanics
  
• The Ability to Select Building Upgrades On the Build List
  
• New Buildings
  
• Rebalance
  
• Localizations
  
• Planetary System Navigation Enhancements
  
• Improved Visuals
  
• New and Redone Sound Effects
  
• Overall UI Polish
  
• Overall Re-Implementation of Systems, Eliminating Old Bugs
  
• And more...
  

We’ll probably give out a few more details on the features as the development continues.

Interplanetary Enhanced Edition will be out this summer!

Interplanetary Patch 1.1.6426



On to the patch! We thought that it would be nice to actually give you something concrete while kicking off the wait for the Enhanced Edition. Actions speak louder than words, after all. So, we decided to go our of our way to put out a little patch for the current version of Interplanetary. It’s mostly nice little extra features and balance adjustments. Without further ado, here’s the feature list for the pre-Enhanced patch, available right now:

• Navigation Enhancements
  
  
  
  • Added the ability to pan the camera by holding Middle Mouse Button
    
  
  
• New Planet and Visuals
  
  
  
  • New Player Planet: Breach
    
  • Enabled Starfield Background Randomization
    
  
  
• 2nd Stage Targeting Polish and Fixes
  
  
  
  • Defense ranges automatically visible when targeting inside their area-of-effect
    
  • Made planet-clicking easier on Missile targeting by increasing the click area and adding a highlight
    
  • Canceling 2nd Stage Targeting now takes you right back to Targeting View
    
  • Fixed a bug that caused the Intel View of the wrong player to be shown when canceling 2nd Stage Targeting
    
  
  
• Defense Polish and Fixes
  
  
  
  • Defense range visuals can be toggled on and off (B)
    
  • Fixed bugs that sometimes caused defenses to not activate when they should have
    
  
  
• Build Menu Polish and Fixes
  
  
  
  • Improved Build Menu highlights
    
  • Allowed tooltips on greyed out buttons
    
  
  
• Miscellaneous
  
  
  
  • End Turn button cosmetic adjustments
    
  • Removed analytics
    
  
  
• Balance Adjustments
  

For the full changelog, visit the Changelog-thread on our forums!

Special Thanks to Team17 and Advanced Interactive Gaming!

Whew, it’s been awhile since we’ve had anything concrete enough to make a news update on. While there’s been a lot of preparation and on/off-work on Interplanetary, we only had the chance to get the whole team back on-board early this year. We have both Team17 and Advanced Interactive Gaming to thank for this chance.

As some of you may have noticed, Interplanetary has been moved under Team17’s label a while ago already. We’ve partnered up with them to release Interplanetary Enhanced Edition and they’ve been helping us a lot already with publishing-related business. As the release gets closer, you might also see Team17’s Jonno roaming around our forums, giving us an experienced hand with community management. Be nice to him!

As sad as it is to admit, we can’t run our humble studio with passion alone. Luckily, we also made an indispensable ally of Advanced Interactive Gaming, who stepped in to help us fund the development of Interplanetary Enhanced Edition.

See, we told you we’d figure out a way to add all those features eventually :D

In Conclusion...

The last year was busy for our team, even though we didn’t get to do much for Interplanetary and almost all we did was internal. We went into details about the reasons for that in our last news post. We’ve mostly been occupied with a bunch of work-for-hire-projects, keeping our operations afloat. It’s been hectic, but we’ve learned a lot about different technologies and how to work better than ever as a team. We’ve even been helping our friends at Mushroom Party to release their arcade/action game Mushroom Crusher Extreme, giving us some experience as publishers, of sorts.



It’s been partly refreshing and partly maddening to start reworking Interplanetary from the scratch. We’re very happy we got the chance to do so, since people still seem interested in the game to this day and there definitely are some things we’ve wanted to fix for a long time.

tl;dr:

• Interplanetary Enhanced Edition update is free for all owners of Interplanetary and comes out this Summer
  
• A smaller patch for the current version is out now
  

And one more for the road: Interplanetary is now 66% off at the Team17 sale on Humble Store. Looks to us like a good bargain.

That’s about it! Do drop by our forums if you have any questions or would like to find people to play with. Even if we’ve been quiet on the news front, we’ve been and will continue to check the forums and answer questions whenever we’re able.

Blast you later!