Project Planet - Earth vs Humanity News

Welcome back for another Dev Blog, and an exciting one at that!

Project Planet finally has a planned release date, and you won’t have to wait long!

We’re officially announcing that Project Planet will release on Monday the 25th of September!

It’s been a long three years of hard work, but seeing the community play and enjoy our game over these past few months has been an amazing experience and has given us more energy than ever to make this final push! We cannot wait to welcome even more players to Project Planet when we finally release the full version.

Over the next month and a half, we will work together with a wide range of streamers to give players a sneak peek of the new disasters. First we will share the Locust Plague and Hurricane disasters, which have already been played by a handful of streamers. Later we will add the Asteroid Impact. Keep an eye out for these streams on our Discord (or follow our Twitch channel), or join our weekly community streams each Friday @8PM CEST for exclusive access!

The game will launch with a total of three disasters (Virus, Locust Plague & Hurricane) with the Asteroid Impact being added in the first update. After that we will add two more disasters, with the Solar Flare and Volcanic Eruption through later updates.




We also have some exciting news about Dreamhack’s Indie Showcase, as Project Planet has been selected for this year’s Summer edition! The festival will start in exactly one week, Friday the 18th of August and run until the 27th. During this week and a half, we will organize multiple streams on our Steam page, so don’t miss out!


Finally, we have been having so much fun with all the Project Planet memes during our weekly community streams, that we decided to hold a contest. Each week for the next 8 weeks we will select the best meme submitted during the community stream. Creators of the memes will be featured in the game’s credits and receive a special Discord Memelord role.

At the end of the contest, we will select the three best memes from the eight winners. Final winners will be able to choose between a full key to the game or being featured in the game’s News Items.

The first week’s winner was:



Submitted by Raiking, who has now proudly earned himself the "Memelord!" role on Discord!

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That’s it for today. Keep an eye out for the many streams and see you during our weekly community stream and at Dreamhack’s Summer Indie Showcase!

In the meanwhile you can join our Discord community to stay up to date on everything that happens, find others to play with, or if you want to get in touch or ask us questions!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2224610/Project_Planet__Earth_vs_Humanity/

We just released update 0.11.1, a minor patch improving the Crisis, fixing some issues and preparing the game for a closed Beta of the full release.

Full changelog:

Changes:

• Made multiple tweaks to the Crisis: Earth can now only choose from 0, -1, -2, -4 and -6 Force, effect when Crisis is not prevented was increased by -2 Population (Population is now reduced by amount of Force spent plus two), and crisis UI has been improved on mobile for both Earth and Humanity players
  
• Reduced length of certain texts that appeared in the News Banner at the bottom of the screen.
  
• Added new Game Over screen banners for “Humanity won” and “Earth won”.
  
• Removed player reconnect sounds during the game and the tutorial.
  
• Players now maintain their spot in the lobby even when disconnected, unless the player presses "Leave".
  

Bug fixes:

• Fixed an issue where players would not see their question until they refreshed their browser. Note that this may still occur, but should happen a lot less frequently.
  
• Fixed an issue where the game would get stuck when Earth would trigger a Crisis after their final question of a Stage was queued.
  

We just released update 0.10.1, addressing a large list of issues and points of feedback from Steam Next Fest and our Discord community!

This update fixes the issue where abilities wouldn't always work when used, increases turn timers of the AI to make it easier to follow what's going on, and fixes an issue where the game wouldn't always end when the population hit 0, among many other things.

For a full list, check the change log below:

Changes:

• Increased AI decision timers by 3s and another 0.5s for each additional AI in the game (after one). This should make it easier to follow what’s going on for new players, especially when playing singleplayer.
  
• Decreased impact of Population effects by ~5%.
  
• When players bid the same amount in a Crisis where Humanity spent enough resources, the ability will now go to the player with the most Power instead of the player who was fastest to answer.
  
• Reduced Force cost of cheapest Trigger Incidents (-2 Ecosystems/Pollution) for Planet Earth from 2 to 1.
  
• Adjusted certain Trigger Incident values that made these options too unappealing.
  
• Reduced the impact of Earth’s "Heart Failure" option in Virus Stage 4 from -6 to -4 Population, to reduce the extreme Population decline at the end of the stage.
  
• Earth decisions that cost 0 Force will now also show the Force cost behind the titles.
  
• Added disaster-specific background images to the web environment.
  

Bug fixes:

• Fixed an issue where abilities would not always activate when used on the same target more than once.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Population would count down to 0 and then suddenly jump back to a previous value, not ending the game.
  
• Fixed an issue where the game would not end if the Population hit 0 during the Stage Results Screen.
  
• Fixed an issue where Notifications and the Live Feed would not show up in future games when players returned to lobby at a specific time.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused texture settings to always be set to Low by default.
  
• Fixed an issue where the wrong tag would be displayed on certain abilities.
  
• Fixed an issue where Population decline from Ecosystems & Pollution was swapped in the score screen.
  
• Fixed an issue where two options in the Industry abilities would have the swapped score effects.
  
• Fixed an issue where players that were disconnected when the Crisis started could not spend any points.
  
• Fixed an issue where the icon representing score being spent on the Crisis was blue (points gained) instead of red (points lost).
  
• Fixed a visual issue with the Research Completed banner on mobile.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Industry would not always get a question in Virus stage 1.
  
• Fixed an issue where the wrong news item would show in Virus stage 2.
  
• Fixed an incorrect Live Feed message in Virus stage 3.
  

Welcome back for another Dev Blog!

Today we have some good news about the next demo update, information on our weekly community streams and a Flemish gaming podcast that featured Project Planet and our dev Rik.


Over the last month we’ve been working very hard processing the feedback we received from you during Steam Next Fest and on our Discord channel. We’re happy to announce that the next update will be released tomorrow, and will include a long list of bug fixes and improvements.

Among the most notable changes are:

• An increase to AI decision timers to make it easier to follow what’s happening, particularly when playing against many AIs.
  
• A fix for the issue where players selected an ability but nothing happened, despite using the ability.
  
• A fix for the issue where the game wouldn’t end when the population hit 0.
  
• And loads of balance changes.
  

More on this tomorrow!


If you’d like to play the game with other people, but you’re having trouble getting a group of friends together to play with, our new community streams might be something for you! Every Friday evening at 8 PM CEST (11 AM PST) we are hosting a community night on Twitch. Everyone is allowed to join the game and chat with us on Discord, and you may even get a sneak peek of new updates!



And if you’re not able to join the stream on Fridays, you can find lots of other streams from content creators on our public Discord. For example, BlondeLikeMonroe is streaming tomorrow Saturday the 14th of July at 8 PM CEST (11 AM PST) and DKittyCone will be playing Monday the 17th of July at 10 AM CEST (1 AM PST). Come join the fun!


Last Thursday our producer and game designer Rik was a guest on the Bitkroeg podcast. Unfortunately for the non-Dutch speaking players the podcast is fully in Dutch, but it covered many interesting topics on the game development process and state of the games industry. They also played a game of Project Planet to introduce the gameplay to the audience.

Thanks a lot to Robby Bisschop and Rutger Cnudde for having us! You can find the podcast through the links below:

Bitkroeg website Spotify Twitch (uncut with video)


That’s it for today! Be sure to check back soon for the demo update. We also expect to announce our full release date within the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned!

In the meanwhile you can join our Discord community to discuss the game, find others to play with, or if you want to get in touch or ask us questions!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2224610/Project_Planet__Earth_vs_Humanity/

Join us here: https://www.twitch.tv/projectplanettv