We're living exciting and busy times. As some of you may remember, we've been throwing around "The Early 2015" as the release date of Interplanetary for a long time. If our watch is correct, it IS the early 2015 already! We are now scrambling to finally get Interplanetary to version 1.0 and out of Early Access! A huge amount of progress has been made since the last public version and we're hoping to get this thing released soon. We'll announce an actual release date a bit further on, but when we say "soon", we mean in about a month or so! Scary. The reason why we haven't released a lot of patches and updates recently, is that we've been working hard on adding all the final features and fixing them in place. This means we've had to spread the game open in such a way that packing it back up into nice updates would've slowed down the development too much. We've now managed to implement pretty much all the main features that were a part of the initial plan. Being in Early Access, however, slightly expanded the scope of the game according to player feedback.
Some of the features available at release:

• Ranked Matches and Online Matchmaking
• Custom Game Setup
• Saved Games
• City Projects
• AI Difficulty Levels 
• Damage Area Visualizations
• New Event Log
• New Tech Tree
• New Upgrades
• New Intel Mechanics
• New City Growth/Science Mechanics
• Achievements 
• Improved UI and Graphical Touches

And then some! This is just a little sneak peek of the upcoming features and we'll be revealing a more detail list later. We've added a lot, but unfortunately, a few of the features we've explicitly promised to include, will have to wait until after the release of Interplanetary 1.0. Promised features that will be added post launch:

• Grey Goo, the third superweapon. Includes some pretty unusual mechanics.
• The return of LAN Game. We had to disable LAN matches during the network overhaul. There are simply more vital features to add before launch, but we haven't forgotten about this one.
• Online AI Bots. Needed to be pushed back so we could finish other features.

Uncontrollable problems, such as some particularly terrible in-office flu seasons, have sometimes slowed us down dramatically, but the good news is, we will not abandon the game once it's released. We want to keep patching it and updating in the features that just couldn't make it to the initial release. Now, this is another good opportunity to sincerely thank all of you who have been with us during our stay on Early Access! All the game testing, suggestions and bug reports from the players have definitely improved this game and we would have never been able to develop it to this point without your support. It's not too late to send us some more feedback, though, even if we are going to leave Early Access! We will have a good opportunity to add more things to the post-release updates. Anyway, this is where we are, at the moment. We'll be making a proper release date and feature announcement sometime closer to the date. Look forward to it!

[ 2015-04-02 16:49:02 CET ] [ Original post ]