Genre: Real Time Strategy (RTS), Strategy, Tactical, Indie
Infested Planet
Infested Planet Update 7 is Out
A new mission is out for Infested Planet in the second September update.
New Mission - Anabasis
After the dramatic events of Memento Mori, you get to see both the Sarge and the Doctor on the battlefield in this mission.
Both of them have teams present on the map, doing their own thing. It's up to you to make sure that the aliens don't eat the characters.
This mission has been possibly the hardest to script so far, with a lot of custom code to get the AI teams to behave. Try it out and let me know what you think.
Other Changes
New Icon for "Reinforcements" tech
A bunch of work on another mission that wasn't finished enough to put in the patch
Infested Planet Update 6 Is Out
The first patch of September is here, bringing a new mission with it.
New Mission - Memento Mori
I'm very pleased with the newest addition to the campaign - the "Memento Mori" mission. How long can you hold out against the alien advance? Play this mission and find out.
A lot of players have asked for a survival-style mission. This mission adds something close to it, in scripted form. The experience from making and balancing it will help me to create a random survival mode, if I ever get to it.
A big thing has been finding a balance between the aliens steamrolling the player, and the marines getting a chance to counterattack. I'm pretty happy with the way it works in the new mission - dead hives drop BP crates!
Other Changes
I took a week to spend with people I love, so a lot of time was spent on looking adorable and silly. Still, I managed to squeeze some small, extra fixes into this patch.
"Foundations" mission will ask you to recycle marines now. People were getting stuck on that, since the script didn't know about the new marine spawning
Radial bars now fade to show gradations of progress and HP
Infested Planet Update 5
The latest update to Infested Planet is out and here are the new features in it:
New Mission - The Return
The campaign has been extended with a new mission - "The Return" - where you face off against an old enemy. You have some help from your army buddies, but you'll have to rescue them first.
This mission steps up the difficulty a bit, by introducing the Guardian mutations to the scripted campaign. You're going to have to figure out how to deal with them.
Fortunately, there's a new technology to help you out.
New Technology - Heli-Drops
In the last update the "Reinforcements" tech was made obsolete by the ability to spawn as many marines as you like. In this update, Reinforcements has been completely reworked.
When you build the tech station, helicopters will ferry your respawning marines to the front lines. Instead of having to walk from your territory, they'll be dropped right into battle. This can be incredibly useful if your team is being killed quickly and needs fast reinforcements. You can keep up the pressure on the guardian hives and stop them from regenerating.
The price for this useful tech is 5 BP and an ammo cost every time a helicoper drops off marines. This means that you can't fight a rolling battle forever - eventually you'll run out of resources.
Infested Planet Update 4
It's time for yet another Infested Planet update! This one has a lot of gameplay changes. The biggest one is that you can now increase your team size as much as you want by spending BP. The BP cost increases each time, but you can get pretty large teams by the end of the game.
Another big change is that failing campaign missions now gives you partial cash reward. This way you get something if you almost beat a mission, but fail at the last moment. Hopefully this bonus cash allows people to upgrade their team and try again after being licked.
Custom maps include a new raid mode - this is just like the one in the campaign, but you can tweak it yourself now. Oh, and I added a presets page for selecting existing difficulty levels for custom levels. That way you're not always starting with Abyss as a base. For those of you who like to turn up all the dials to 11, the maximum BP cap is now 999.
I've also spent some time rebalancing a couple of mutations. After thinking about it, I didn't like how brutes shut down all bullet weapons. They didn't just make bullets less effective - reflection meant that you had to switch to flamethrowers ASAP. After the change brutes still fill the same role, but they won't cause all bullet classes to kill themselves. Because of the brute change, I also changed the way Calcification works - it creates giant trails of barriers now. Finally, there's a new mutation - Reflection - that makes barriers reflect bullets. It's only on at Abyss mode, if you like that sort of difficulty.
Finally, guardians have been hit by the nerf stick a little bit. They now get hit harder by scouts (whom they can't see any more) and siege cannons. Grenades are more effective towards them as well. This should give you more options in dealing with them.
MAJOR
Added campaign payment dialog and failed mission payments
Added unlimited marine spawning and UI for it
Added raid mode to custom maps
Added presets to custom game mode
Increased maximum build points to 999
Added a new hive tower layout, radially clumped instead of mixed
Made engineering reduce damage by 4x to buildings (and increase shield projector duration by 2)
Made guardians less likely to flee with more regeneration trips
Removed guardian scout-detecting ability
Made guardians more vulnerable to sap damage
Made guardians more vulnerable to blast damage
Changed Calcification mutation to spawn barriers along swarm paths
Added Reflection mutation that makes barriers reflect bullets
Changed brutes to spawn barriers on death instead of bullet reflect
MINOR
Tweaked respawning to prefer proximity to main team
Made double-click attack move an option
Fixed crash with custom mode if there are initial mutations with an empty queue
Removed Wild Mutation
Fixed crash with Abyss raid missions
Fixed typo for Crow's Neck mission
Fixed skirmish and custom mode UI reaction to video mode switches
Fixed text entry on non QWERTY keyboards
Fixed bug with Burrowing Hive in Raid missions
Fixed music switching in custom mode menu
Made GL 2.1 an optional requirement
Fixed email address validation
TECHNICAL
Disabled window icon, since it stopped working with SDL2
Fixed inplace button response to mouse in/out events when disabled
Deleted SDLMain.m - not needed in SDL2
Did some research into multiplayer prospects (it's still hard)
Added ability to specify mutation pre-requisites
Fixed lua CallFunction issue
Added ability to drop shadow on text
Added shadow to some UI text
Added CSV exporter to metrics
Changed event sort order for sharing server report
Reduced the number of indexes for event table
Added remote_api access point to sharing server (for bulk loader)
Switched to SDL2 for OSX
OSX compile fixes
Infested Planet Update 3
Major
Patch 0.72 is here and it has a few things that the community has been requesting. The biggie this time is the new Custom Skirmish mode. This is a new mode in the Skirmish screen that allows you to tweak everything about the map generation. Want a giant map with 3 hives? A tiny map with 30 hives and unlimited resources? You can do all that yourself.
The other big (but invisible) thing is that the game now keeps track of how long it takes you to finish each level. I'm hoping that I can use this info to build some community features in future updates. For example, I can make a system that detectes people's favourite random maps. This will also allow me to see which levels and mutations are too hard - I can get data when people fail a level.
What about privacy? I think that the system works fairly reasonably. The game does send data online, but it's only "Level Started" and "Level Ended" messages. No personal data is ever sent - everything is anonymous.
Custom game mode - Tweak everything (in Skirmish menu)
Added foundation for possible future online map sharing
Resolution changes are now instant
Minor
Added update timer and notification signup
Made announcements speed up if there are a lot of them
Increased marine radius
Made mines vulnerable to SAP damage, but also resistant
Added mouse-wheel scrolling to options and campaign
Added mouse grabbing option
Fixed out-of-bounds bug in pathing, if the path is trivial
Overhauled campaign research descriptions
Fixed centering bug with research widget
Technical
Added update timer and notification signup
Switched to SDL2
Updated entity arranger to filter infested structure placement more flexibly
Added fatal error message boxes
Added more error messages on init failure
Added init checks for OpenGL version 3.0
Reworked mutation system to randomize on level start, to tie mutations to level seed
Added ability to load debug constants
Added player UUIDs
Added Metrics
Changed double-tap group focus to use global timer, not world timer
Added guard code to Hive Spawner Effect (to prevent spawns outside of the map)
Infested Planet Quickfix
I just released a patch to fix some issues up left from Tuesday's big patch. There were crashing problems with the new pathfinding code and this update should solve them.
Infested Planet Update 2 is Out!
Welcome to the first Infested Planet content patch. I've got a a few big additions to the game for you as well as a ton of smaller fixes and tweaks.
The two big things for this patch are the new missions. There's one more mission in the campaign - a convoy escort job. I've also added a new random game mode type. It's timed and you have to race against the clock to kill as much stuff as possible. The more you kill, the more bonus cash you get. The trick is that when you kill hives, they're replaced with bunkers. If you let them be destroyed, you lose cash. So choose - do you want to push farther into the aliens and risk your money going down the drain?
Another biggish thing that has changed is the pathfinding code. The old one had a bunch of problems, so I replaced it. The catch is that it's not entirely finished yet - there will probably be new bugs, so report strange pathfinding when you see it.
Major
Finished first pass on "Preparations" mission (NEW CAMPAIGN MISSION)
Added new random game mode: Raids
Replaced pathfinding code (expect some new bugs); this will allow large entities to move around the game map, if I ever make them
Minor
Double-tapping group # centers view on the group
Added failsafes in video mode initialization; fall back on windowed mode if can't init
Centered game window in desktop
Prevented damage to boss hive before the script expects it
Fixed snipers doing damage to shielded entities
Tweaked description for sniper
Fixed path colour for chained marine orders
Fixed graphical glithch (that looks like picture-in-picture)
Hopefully fixed a common crash dealing with entity handles
Hopefully fixed issues with old Catalyst drivers
Tweaked hive's IMMUNE message again (to only appear when laser has no effect)
Changed "Command Cancelled" to be a white message
Added info message for group binding
Tweaked human path termination (when colliding with objects) to only work for buildings
Fixed toggle button border eating clicks
Technical
Replaced polygon boolean ops code
Updated debug missions to new map init format
Added prop building blueprint graphic
Tweaked guardian tower replacement so it works even when towers don't respawn
Changed all random levels to LUA
Refactored VectorMap out of GameWorld header
Added private impl to CGameWorld
Added more safety buffer for path short-circuiting for humans
Added Framebuffer object for future use
Switched pathfinding to delunay-triangulation based paths
Reworked all drawArray calls into shader draw calls
Added RC file for windows version info
Update 1 is Out
The first update for Infested Planet is out.
This is a quick patch made to fix some of the problems that people were reporting.
Turned off map compression - should fix corrupt map drawing
Fix for text not being drawn on old Catalyst drivers
Changed sound to address Creative sound card crashes
Various other small fixes
Welcome to the Forums
I'll be your friendly neighbourhood game developer for this flight. Please keep your tables in their upright position and be sure to blast any alien scum on sight.
Since this is a BETA, I'll be hanging around these forums to talk to you about the game. So, don't be shy and let me know what you think about the game.
