Category Archives: Blog

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!

Blog, Updates

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.

Blog

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 →

Blog

New Demo and Steam Version Released

We have released a new demo that comes with many of the new features we have added to the early access version recently. The most important update is that Tuto has been completely reworked and now comes with more buildings, new goals and a much better story presentation. In addition we have unlocked the Free Play mode on Tuto so demo testers can play without time and growth limitations. The Demo is available for download on this website and on Steam. just like the Early Access Version.

Planet Rounos

Read all about the latest Mission on Rounos, the Natives, Alien Investors, Hostile Colonies, Ideon Crystals, Riots, Wild Fires and the 8 new Constructs the Planet has to offer here…

Production Chain

productionChain

Influences between constructs aren’t new in Imagine Earth but the tactical importance is raised with the latest update. Buildings are forming production chains which are increasing the value of strategic placement. Here you see a forestry delivering to a factory that is filling the warehouse that itself does supply the mall … just as an example.

Blog, Updates

New Constructs, Models and Resource Statistics

Imagine Earth received a new interface look, resource statistics along with the new buildings and more. Welcome to our latest Imagine Earth update on Steam. Here are the details of everything it will bring to you.

  1. Difficulty levels easy, normal and hard. They adjust the consumption of your cities and the pollution of all buildings. This will make a huge difference in terms of how easy it is to populate you planets with huge colonies.2014-10-31_DifficultyEasy
  2. The new interface look is much cleaner and comes with some new icons and an improved Info panel in the bottom left.
  3. New character art!
  4. New resource statistics can be opened by clicking into the resource panel at the top.2014-10-31ResourceStats
  5. Cattle breeding and Biomass power plant are two new buildings. In addition Jens added new 3D Models for all buildings in the demo version  the others will follow of course!..
  6. Tuto got completely reworked and will now start with more buildings and real choices. In addition we slightly adjusted the goals and story in Joma. This means that savegames of both missions wont work anymore and will be hidden and you can replay both missions to get the stars for the new goals.
  7. The campaign screen now displays all unlocked planets within a galaxy and visualizes their different magnitude.
    2014-10-31_Campaign
  8. Planet rotation is now locked so north stay always on top. A small change that makes a huge difference – it’s now a lot easier to keep the orientation on your planet!
  9. Using the build menu now immediately places the building. You can still choose a different placement field by keeping the button pressed.
  10. Balancing & Bugs – as always.

Continue reading →

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New Interface Design and Character Styles

We are sticking to our plan and will release the next version on Friday, 31st of October – exactly one month after our last release.

And this is what we are working on:

  1. Basic resource statistics
  2. Complete GUI restyling
  3. New campaign screen
  4. New graphics for a lot of our buildings
  5. New buildings:
    • Cattle breeding
    • Biomass power plant

2014-10-23_NewGui2

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