In the first half of June 2022 we participated in the Green Gam Jam organized by the UN initiative Playing 4 the Planet. Together with 42 partly big international game studios we tried to do our bit for reforestation and sustaining the world’s forests and raise players awareness for this issue. This is about all we achieved even though we did end up with slightly different solutions for the activation than originally planned.

Our first participation in this game jam among big studios was very exciting and accordingly let us come up with a very ambitious plan. One of four items we had in our activation plan was releasing a new free spin-off version of Imagine Earth on Steam. Unfortunately, the release of a whole new product on Steam turned out to be not so quickly feasible in terms of scheduling and might not even have been most effective activation strategy.

I still like the idea but as a 2 man studio have to concentrate first on finishing DLC and Playstation version. So we decided to alter the free version we already had on Steam – The demo of Imagine Earth which also offers a fully playable planet and since the Green Game Jam has an end screen where you can now choose to buy the soundtrack or the green planet bundle to plant trees with the proceeds. These donation options are now in the game to stay.

Activation Campaign Achievements

• We integrated a new Steam achievement – Players who plant twenty forests on one planet in the game from now on plant one tree in the real world.
• We organized a custom Steam Sale Event during the campaign time to raise awareness for game and demo with a discount and offered to plant ten trees for every copy sold.
• You can buy the official soundtrack and all proceeds will also donated to Eden Reforestation.
• On top of this we parallel participated in the Ocean Day Steam Sale in June 5-8 and donated another 10% of net income to Whales and Dolphins Conservation.

All this enabled us to plant 14,920 trees between 6/3-17 with our partner Eden Reforestation Project. A result that wasn’t possible without your help. As we started to sell the soundtrack for charity shortly after the release in May last year we could already plant a total of 48,940 trees. We’re actually really proud.

Dear planet managers, we really struggled a bit to be able to offer you this hyper-speed optimization of the global management system! The interface is the most annoying part of the game production. Let’s hope that the latest interface optimizations will leave nothing to be desired!

Control optimization

Fast and universal switching between temples, workshops, cities, factions and merchants is finally possible and revolutionizes the navigation in our game.

You can now trade and do diplomacy with all sorts of partners through the interface without having to jump to you with the camera. This way, you are not always pulled out of the local action on the planet because of crafting or item acquisition, and you always keep track of what’s going on.

Takeover through stock trading

A separate stock panel right at the frasction panel, where you can see all the information about a company’s cities and directly buy shares and take over cities. A big button that flashes visibly and visualizes the takeover process.

We built a large popup that solemnly announces that you have successfully taken over a city. And also indicates if you have captured equipment in the process, which means you have taken certain items from the enemy.

We also restructured the stock trading panel so that the player always automatically starts at himself and can more quickly throw some shares on the market to get new capital.

Setup optimizations

The difficulty button has been redesigned to look the same in the setup for new rounds of competitive and endless play as the other options or tabs in the setup menu. The start button has been enlarged.

Also, you can now turn off Gaia Forces and Asteroids in the game for a more realistic gameplay experience that is mainly about global warming and environmental issues rather than futuristic sci-fi elements.

Fossil buildings

Fossil power plants can now drill and exploit deposits in adjacent fields. This keeps them productive longer and means they need to be moved less often.

In exchange, fossil production buildings have again received a malus. It no longer looks in the game as if there would be no problem at all if a certain resource is not available.

This is especially important in the context of the core message of the game. Fossil buildings that just keep on working, that too is unrealistic.

The new taskbar

The taskbar has been made narrower. Options like Research and Technology, which are already positioned in the top left of the interface, are no longer duplicated there.

Gamepad layout

We didn’t spare ourselves and once again tweaked the configuration of the controls. There is a new control pad ring menu with which you can control many things in the game even faster than with a mouse.

In all ring menus, the D-pad or directional pad can now be used to navigate particularly quickly and directly, select a build option or item.

Jumping to an event or an alarm. Has not worked for a while. Is now, however, on the left stick.

Supply capsules

Had literally disappeared from the game. On medium setting, such a vehicle now lands again every 5-10 minutes.

Navigation

We cleaned up the navigation so that too many enemy cities are no longer displayed around the globe at once.

Optimizations

• In the field ring, the updates of houses, are now displayed on the right and thus it is no longer too long on the left, so that information sometimes hangs pointlessly out of the screen.
• The buttons for diplomacy no longer show all the time, all the details that play a role there. This makes the user interface much narrower.
• Auto-harvesting now also works for temple ruins from which artifacts are harvested.
• When a building ring has a panel open on the left, the building info is displayed on the right.
• In the colony rating screen you can now select the different factions.
• Citys Panel – Merchants, Workshops and Temples now only displayed at cities when hovering.

Bugs

• We have 5 bugs that have been sent to us via Discord.
• Factions often built too many towers next to each other and also liked to place City Centers in clusters or in a pile.
• The controls in the build menu were a bit disjointed.
• The build menu can now stay open with the gamepad, so you can always see your list of strategic items.
• In the Weekly Challenge, the gamepad cursor disappeared until you pressed something.
• “Show Influences” in the Technology panel was not selectable with gamepad.

Greetings, world builders! Recently I had a particularly nice task on the table, but it also made me a little nervous. To finally give you a complete vision of what we want to accomplish next in the evolution of Imagine Earth. You can see the product here, a visually appealing roadmap to the Open Space DLC, which we will finalize by the middle of this year. Many of the game elements, scripts and objects are already created, we often just have to carefully put all the pieces together.

The picture above shows the approximate set of features that the following updates and DLC will contain. We will go into more detail when the time comes.

Here’s what’s happening right now. We are very euphoric about how much better navigating the planet and building your global colonies will work with this fine tuning.

Here I have summarized what we have achieved since the release last year. This graphical reappraisal of the events somehow did me good.

All the achievements we made last year before the big final release would not have been possible without the funding we received at that time and your years of support in Early Access. However, we also learned a lot and were not able to realize some things, which will now be rounded out with the DLC, just as we always wanted to complete the game.

Look forward to when I finish the project story soon. In this entertaining style, it will offer incredible insights into the past and how this project started 14 years ago as a concept of some students.

Thank you for your interest, please share your ideas and thoughts. What have you always wished for Imagine Earth? Best regards, Jens & Martin

Greetings, dear world-builders!

While we are already working on the next big thing for Imagine Earth we have worked on a lot of usability, balancing and performance improvements and decided that this is worth being released in a dedicated update.

Deferred Rendering & Motion Blur

Switching to Deferred Rendering has made our Imagine Earth 10% faster right off the bat while at the same time allowing us to show more individual light sources on the planet.

Motion Blur makes the planet’s rotation look smoother, especially when running a system with fewer frames.

Items & Crafting

We have built a new crafting panel, that automatically buys the needed resources as soon as not all components to create items are available.
While working on this we have also balanced which resources are needed for crafting and reduced what is needed for most of the items.
Honey Pots, which can be used to attract Xrathul, have been optimized in their operation, especially in the probability with which they lead to Xrathul spaceships arriving on your planet.

Planet Generator Balancing

To get better and play worthy planets we had to diligently tweak the generator. In making adjustments, we tried to achieve as even a distribution of field types and rare resources as possible, while also providing local hotspots that make good starting places for your colony. Also we increased the number of mountains and rocks on the planets and placed more Gaian ruins so that there are more artifacts in the game. Under these circumstances it also made sense to regenerate the Weekly Challenge planets. They are still based on the same planet, but the distribution of resources is a bit different now.

Bugs & Fixes

• Dropped Dynamic Resolution
• Removed graphics setting for anti aliasing, because only marginal differences can be seen here based on the rendering techniques of the Unity engine we are using
• Fixed configuration display of polar ice
• Fixed blurred intro
• Workshop Planets File System Windows 7 bug
• Fixed the description of the frontier station
• Navigation: Show only one city of each other faction
• World congress is no longer happening during game over
• When productivity is low because of plague, show the corresponding plague icon

We hope you started the new year safe and sound and are fit for the challenges it brings, because it will definitely not be boring. The Corona virus keeps the world in suspense and mankind has its trouble to organize itself sensibly against it. After that, the even more colossal challenge of climate change is just waiting to be targeted again. But also in the virtual world, in Imagine Earth, new challenges await you in the new year.

Compete now in Weekly Challenges, Quarterly Seasons and Annual Rankings. Effective immediately, we have unlocked the official 2022 league. In addition, we would like to celebrate the official top 10 annual winners of the 2021 league. We sincerely congratulate all the participants for enrolling in the Imagine Earth’s internal leaderboards forever.

The Greatest Terraformers of 2021

1st place – Franci0 – 1,457,784
2nd place – KiBou – 1,400,492
3rd place – Wingyl – 1,393,397
4th place – craig.akitt – 933,881
5th place – Critical Floof – 913,485
6th place – Artiss – 863,621
7th place – Roderick – 663,128
8th place – RainbowDesign – 532,542
9th place – missladykayura – 473,274
10th place – martin – 457,000

So in 2022, you’ll be competing with other planet managers not only for overall victory in weekly high scores, but also for the lead in quarterly seasons and the overall year-round victory. By the way, we’ll be playing the weekly missions ourselves for testing purposes, so you’ll have the pleasure of competing against the developers themselves, look for Martin and Jooki in the highscore. If that’s not a special challenge.

Rating optimization
We have also adjusted the rating of the game rounds. It remains exciting, you still can’t save and load, but you don’t have to reach the first place in the competition anymore and the achieved colony rating will be entered into the highscore, so it’s worth the work in any case. Of course you can repeat the challenge the whole week to optimize your score by ceiling, have fun!

Colony rating

We have given the calculation of the value of your global space colony a new balancing. If you sell all your shares, you will no longer end up with a high score of zero, the impact has been reduced to 50%. The quality of life in your colony plays a bigger role, its impact has been increased from 12.5 to 20%.

Asteroids, moons and lens flare

Graphically, Imagine Earth has also stepped up its game again in this release. There are a lot of visual effects to admire. Moons and meteors orbit your worlds and cast gigantic shadows, in broad daylight they darken the landscape.
When you zoom in very close to the planet, the perspective rotates so you’re not always looking at the action from above. Also, the atmosphere on the horizon becomes dense and blurry.

Graphic options

You can now set exactly a target frame rate to better define how much gameplay will hit you on the graphics card.

Automated mining processes

The harvesting drones of the warehouses now start mining valuable resources fully automatically. You now have to disable this instead of activating it individually as before. Simply convenient, we think. This way the warehouses fill up by themselves with valuable resources, which are urgently needed for the production of important equipment.

Landing zone locked

In the future, you won’t be able to accidentally park your landing capsule right next to another civilization, creating a non-competitive launch position for both parties.

Fishing grounds and oil wells
So far, procedurally generated planets, have almost no fishing grounds and oil wells. Sea grass has a higher positive impact on fishing and it has also become more productive in principle. Thus, in the future, the sea will be of higher strategic importance as a place of expansion and a source of food.

UI and control improvements

• Fields where the temperatures are just too hot to grow food well are no longer shown as particularly fertile.
• The display of your cities, top right, is no longer packed with loud icons for bad moods. That was just confusing.
• Tooltips and info in the sales and manufacturing panel no longer overlay the menus, but are displayed outside.
• We reduced the planetary view in menus and overview also reduced the superfluously large distance to which the planet is zoomed out.
• When opening panels like the one for planetary overview or research, the planet in the background is no longer zoomed out.
• Font size on various buttons in the game optimized.
• Tower is upgraded again when you level it up.
• Nitro pumpkin seeds are now also offered by the trader.

Bugfixes

• Game pauses in menus decently again – For example, you could just wait in the win dialog until you lost again.
• Intro skipping can be defined in the config file again.
• UI-Flickr glitch in hyperspace between galaxies is fixed.
• The nice melting of the snow when you turn on the thermo-generator is back.
• In the Biron faction, some of the dialogs in the voice output are no longer mixed up. It makes more sense to talk to them now ;D

Thanks for reading all this and staying excited about the developments of Imagine Earth! Jens & Martin