Infinity: Battlescape (with seamless planetary transitions) FUNDED 300k+

JonnyƦedhed · November 14, 2015

Just another 32k to go on this kickstarter. If you've not backed it yet here is the link:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/309114309/infinity-battlescape

A couple of screen shots - Other planets viewed from the surface of a Mars-like planet. And a view from the space station.

JonnyƦedhed · November 14, 2015

An album of Content created from the lasts few live streams, community videos, and epic concept artwork.

Created by he game dev Hutchings (Developer/Artist)

http://imgur.com/gallery/hgrnJ/new

Miguel Batista · November 15, 2015

You are doing an amazing job promoting this game. Kudos.

Ps: I backed this game. Lets make it happen.

JonnyƦedhed · November 15, 2015

Gameplay scenario storyboard - Flavien Brebion

Hey everyone, Flavien here. We have entered our final week with 88% of our goal raised. Only $35K to go and we’ll have a successful campaign. But we can’t do this without your support, so keep up the great work, keep spreading the word and we’ll be there in no time !

Battlescape gameplay scenario storyboard

Jan and Dan have been working on a storyboard to depict scenarios that will let you imagine how a match would typically play. From scouting, gathering intelligence, making strategic decisions as a team, attacking or defending a battlescape in fighters, bombers or doing orbital bombardment with capital ships, it’s all in here:

... or follow this link.

And lastly....

Final streaming session - Sunday 15th Nov 3pm EST

Just a reminder that we will be hosting our final live-stream of the entire dev team ( and other people who have access ) playing the prototype ( and shooting at each other ! ) tomorrow at 3pm EST. If you want to see another of these hilarious moments like when Dan crashes into a cliff while asking everybody to follow him, head over here:

https://www.youtube.com/user/InfinitySupport/live

Another screen shot - 'The Sky at Night'.

Infinity: Battlescape - Pure Digital Art

Bobe · November 15, 2015

Stream starts in about 45 minutes: https://gaming.youtube.com/user/InfinitySupport/live

JonnyƦedhed · November 15, 2015

From I-Novae studios:

We've added some additional perks to our existing $100, $150, and $500 reward tiers. For starters the $100 tier now comes with an extra copy of the retail game. Many of you have indicated that it would be great if you had an opportunity to name something within the game and at the $150+ tier you will now be able to name an NPC ship. At the $500+ tier you will be able to name an installation such as a space station, mining facility, etc. In both cases these names will go into a pool and each match new NPC ships and installations will randomly select a name from their respective pool.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/309114309/infinity-battlescape/description

JonnyƦedhed · November 15, 2015

And a couple of screen shots and lastly some concept artwork from Andre (Orbital bombardment)

Concept artwork from Andre (Orbital bombardment) - You wouldn't want to be caught on the ground when this happens.

JonnyƦedhed · November 17, 2015

Just in....

Eric 'Wingman' Peterson (Descent Underground) -

"We just backed Battlescape Infinity -

Let's get them across that goal line"

and

"If you love ‪#‎IndieDev‬ ‪#‎SpaceGames‬, take a look INovaeStudios Infinity: Battlescape! Only 3 days left"

source - Twitter and source - Facebook

JonnyƦedhed · November 17, 2015

Narrated Gameplay Video Series, part 3 / 3 - by Flavien Brebion

The final part of the “gameplay prototype” video series is up, featuring a little visit to the Earth-type moon factory area
and a few more explanations about ship systems like power redirection or flight formations.

Sandbox mode, exploration and multiplayer:

Links to parts 1 [LINK] and 2 [LINK].

Thunderclap

Community member Ajay initiated a Thunderclap campaign to be launched a few days before the end of the Kickstarter campaign. He writes,

“The goal is to send out a single message via the Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr accounts of the supporters. If we have enough supporters (and some luck) we could become a trending topic, putting the spotlight on the I:B KS, which will hopefully result in more pledges! “

If you wish to support us on Thunderclap ( or learn how it works ), feel free to join the project page here.

rentaspoon · November 17, 2015

Hope this is successful, haven't got enough cash to pledge for it atm.

But as a kid I grew up on space sims so loving the revivals

JonnyƦedhed · November 17, 2015

I would of liked to of seen higher goals reached as well by now. 600k would of been good. But we do still have the post KS funding which will continue via the website for the next year and half at least while development is under way. Hopefully some extra funding goals can be reached when the public see some of the progress over the next year or so. The pledge rate at the moment seems to be rising at a steady rate today. And I do hope the 300k goal and a bit extra is reached by campaign end. Also its been good seeing Wingman and the descent underground team showing their support.

The matches have a good chance of lasting many hours, if not days in some cases where enough players are present. Players will be able to dip in and out of a long match as they like, or stay for longer sessions. Do some exploring and sight seeing as they travel from planet to planet and rings etc to join the action.

Dog fighting over and through the valleys and canyons of rocky moons and planets, or follow from high altitude the rim of an ancient crater to just explore. Fly over the great plains and tundra's of green algae planets, or along lava filled valleys of volcanic moons. Defend or take outposts for mining resources. Fight for your chosen faction as you enter or exit the atmosphere of planets. And descend into the deep cloud layers of gas giants to reach floating factories, where your ship will need to withstand the pressure and atmospheric storms. There will be plenty to see and do, without leaving your ship.

image by Lomsor

JonnyƦedhed · November 17, 2015

A new video from 'Planet Explorer' (TARS). Prototype game play battles set against majestic space and planetary scenery.

All in-engine (I-Novae: Engine) prototype.

The I-Novae: Engine - Pure Digital Art

JonnyƦedhed · November 17, 2015

Kate Russell - (BBC presenter and Elite Dangerous Novel author -and tech journalist)

"Late to the party... sorry 'bout that @BadNewsBaron sent me your way and it looks epic..
looking forward to raising a toast to the KS when it busts the 300k :)"

"Even without the home run boost it's looking pretty for this gorgeous space sim :)"

source - Kickstarter comments here and here.

Miguel Batista · November 18, 2015

It is going to get funded I congess I was affraid for a second. My hope is that we get to see a semi permanent world...

Edit: in the future. Have they mentioned anything about ground troops? Cause that orbital bombardment looks nice!

Really, if this could turn out to be a modern bms... Well, come January I will play with it

JonnyƦedhed · November 18, 2015

FUNDED! 300K plus more coming in the hours left.

Now, with another two years of heads down development and extra game fund raising via the website, the game will become so much more than the bare bones prototype we see today.

And to cap things off, one of my favourite screen shots...again.

JonnyƦedhed · November 18, 2015

If there's anyone still on the fence about whether to pledge or not. Just $20 gets you the finished game.

JonnyƦedhed · November 19, 2015

Questions & Answers - by Flavien & Keith

Re-posting Kickstarter update No.#15 - source

Hey everyone, this is Flavien. Today’s update is probably going to be the last update of our Kickstarter campaign so we’ll focus on some community questions & answers as well as future plans.

Infinity Battlescape Community Q&A video

Here’s also a bunch of other questions that we frequently saw:

Q. Will I be able to pledge on Paypal, or increase my pledge after the Kickstarter ?

A. Yes, we’ll keep accepting new donations / pledges on our website a few days after the KS campaign has ended. You can also increase your pledge if you want, however we will not have a backer portal to manage all your pledges and rewards until a later stage, so if you donated $50 on KS and donate another $35 on our website later, you will have to wait until we have the backer management system implemented to claim your $85 reward tier. This backer portal should be available within a few months.

Additional funding will be used towards increased development quality and unlocking the next stretch goals.

Q. The modding goal is at $800K, which is quite far away. Does that mean there will be no modding if you don’t reach it ?

A. The $800K modding goal is for “full” modding, completely changing the gameplay or even making new types of games and total reconversions ( like adding walking on planets/stations ). Even if we don’t reach this goal, there is still going to be partial mod support in the game. Players will be able to customize their own dedicated servers, add or modify ships, weapons, planets / solar system setup, sounds and special effects.. this includes the look but also all the gameplay / balance / physics parameters. The gameplay however will pretty much be set in stone until we get more funding.

Modding atmospheric parameters, curtesy of TARS (Planet Explorer on youtube)

Q. I am not much of a combat guy, is it possible to play as an explorer ? Is there a sandbox mode ? Can I play offline ?

A. Absolutely. While Battlescape is focused on combat and large-scale battles, you can choose to play a supporting role on your team as there will be a need for explorers and scouts to determine locations and weaknesses in the enemy infrastructure. If you simply prefer to explore the solar system at your own pace without the threat of being attacked, there will be an offline “sandbox” mode where you will be able to test ships, experiment weapons and train, or simply fly over the majestic landscapes of all the various environments and hazards the game will provide. There will also be some sandbox elements and easter eggs ( hunting for other backer’s statues, anyone ? ). Below you can find an example of modding that could be added to the game to improve the sandbox elements: a canyon-racing mode.

Modding in Battescape: canyon racing example

Q. Now that the Kickstarter has been funded, what is the next step ?

A. In the upcoming 1-2 months, not much will change and developers will continue working part time. It will take a few weeks for Kickstarter to validate the campaign, collect and transfer the funds. There will also be a leave notice of a few months ( at least in EU ) for developers leaving their full-time jobs. I am expecting that we will ramp up the team to full production mode starting in January.

Our first step then will be to review our workflow, tools and prepare deployment of the game prototype to our Stellar supporters. There’s still a fair amount of work to do for that, like network improvements, adding an automatic patching system ( nobody wants to download and reinstall the game manually for every minor patch ), a bugs / statistics report system and many gameplay and visual tweaks.

Procedural asteroids

Some early work in progress screen shot of a new, procedurally generated giant asteroid.

In the past days I have been working on massive, procedural asteroids. In the following example you can see a 500-Km wide asteroid, which you could almost consider a mini planet ( it’s at the limit of where a celestial body starts to become spherical ), in the gameplay prototype. Keep in mind this is a heavy work in progress. It has some pretty sharp lighting and shadows due to the high contrasts in space ( there’s no atmosphere to dim the lighting ), but if you compare it with real asteroid photos, you’ll see it looks pretty realistic thanks to our physical-based lighting and high dynamic range systems. Still, there are many improvements that we’d like to do in the future, like for example procedural texturing which is not yet at the level we aim to achieve.

Infinity : Battlescape - 500km wide procedural asteroid WIP

And again, I would like to personally thank everybody that contributed to our Kickstarter campaign.

-Flavien Brebion

Re-posting Kickstarter update No.#15 - source

I-Novae Engine - Pure Digital Art

JonnyƦedhed · November 20, 2015

A few more screen shots in the KS closing hours.

JonnyƦedhed · November 20, 2015

With another two years heads down development this game will be very polished. Seeing how far the devs can push envelope forward procedural generation over the next couple of years.

Here's a final few screen shots for Infinity: Battlescape.

Miguel Batista · November 20, 2015

What I find impressive iz that this engine sample already looks so good. And if we get full moding support, someone could probably create a better version of spore on it (yes, I am still buthurt about Spore).

JonnyƦedhed · November 21, 2015

I-Novae studios are now preparing there website to start taking further funding pledges. Inc Paypal I believe. After a little rest and re-organisation, its heads down development for the next two years or so.

JonnyƦedhed · February 20, 2016

There have been a couple of new kickstarter updates which have some good progress news. A summary is below:

Posted by I-Novae Studios

Now that full production is underway we want to start writing weekly summaries of the work we're doing. These summaries will be pulled from two micro-blogging topics on our forums which will contain small updates made throughout the week.

There is one topic for engineering (https://forums.inovaestudios.com/t/quick-progress-reports-engineering) which is updated most days. A good technical progress thread.

And one topic for art (https://forums.inovaestudios.com/t/frequently-infrequent-art-updates).

On the engineering side of things we were primarily focused on finishing up all of the account management and authentication needed for players who have pledged the appropriate tier to be able to play the game. This effort is nearly complete and we will soon get back to finishing up installation and deployment. You may have noticed over the last few days that the forums have been going up and down a bit. This was due to an odd issue with Discourse that seems to only affect a small number of websites. We found a workaround for the problem and since its implementation the forums have been running smoothly.

Yesterday we updated our production web infrastructure in preparation for importing all of our Kickstarter and IndieGoGo backer information. We haven't imported the data yet because we're currently having an issue with the IndieGoGo API that prevents us from being able to figure out when we have a new pledge. Naturally we want someone who pledges our game to be able to begin playing it as soon as possible and we're currently working with their developer support staff to get it all sorted out. Once backer information is imported the most immediate change will be that those of you who have pledged Developer Access or higher will be able to access our private development board on the forums. The rest of you who pledged Asteroid Supporter or higher will receive placeholder badges on the forums. These placeholder badges will be pretty unsexy at first but we'll replace them with an appropriate level of awesome as soon as we can.

On the art side all of the assets that were made for our Kickstarter and the prototype are going to be replaced. This was the intent from the moment we began work on the Kickstarter campaign as we knew that once we had more resources available and were able to learn from past mistakes we would be able to produce much higher quality work for the final game. Recent advances in hardware have also allowed us to update our polycount budget which enables us to dramatically increase the amount of detail in our ships.

To that end Jan and everybody's favourite space beard - Hutchings - are working hard to get the Starfold bomber updated and integrated into the game. The bomber was featured in rough form as an enemy ship in our Kickstarter campaign video. They're producing a new cockpit for it, updating the geometry, and re-texturing the entire ship. Initially all of these new/updated assets will be in placeholder form so don’t expect shipping quality from integration day 1. We’ll be iterating on our art assets throughout development. Kristian is hard at work modernizing the texture packs for all of our planets and asteroids. The asteroids in-particular were rather hastily integrated into the prototype so we'll be adding a lot more depth and variety to them over time.

Concept art for prototyping ship ideas

As we mentioned last week our #1 priority continues to be getting the prototype into the hands of our Developer Access backers as soon as possible. Game development is always full of unexpected bumps in the road however we're pushing through, making great progress on all fronts, and we look forward to getting into the game with all of you soon!

------

Weekly Update #2 (Feb 15th 2016)

Posted by I-Novae Studios

Our focus remains on releasing our prototype to Developer Access backers as soon as possible. Over the last week we've wrapped up most of the remaining issues with account management and authorization. A basic server browser has been implemented though at release we're most likely only going to have a single server available which will be located on the east coast of the U.S. There's still a fair amount of work left to be done on installation/deployment/patching and worst case if we can't get it solid enough by the end of the month we're probably just going to make the game available via a zip file and release manual patches until the deployment code is ready. That being said you will still require a valid I-Novae account with a Developer Access+ pledge to login and play the game.

Work-in-progress SFC Bomber

On the art side Dan and Jan continue to work on getting the WIP SFC bomber integrated into the prototype. Even in its current early form we think it's coming together quite nicely. Kristian is nearly done with a new set of upgraded planetary textures and has also been working on concept art for a new asteroid mining facility. The general idea is that it's a large 10km+ asteroid that has had its center hollowed out as the miners slowly move toward the perimeter. We'll post the concept art as soon as it's ready. As we mentioned during our last update please visit our forums at https://forums.inovaestudios.com if you're interested in micro-updates throughout the week.

Work-in-progress SFC Bomber primary thrusters

The I-Novae Engine - Pure Digital Art

Pledge now via the website (indiegogo)

JonnyƦedhed · February 29, 2016

The Development tier prototype access has been released today to those that pledged at that level so they can test it out. Also Developer Access forums for backers of the same tier are up and running.

Some 4K extreme screen shots from the latest dev tier prototype just released today.

Shared by - Caesar - on the I-Novae forums (link)

And some 1080p screen shots from the latest dev tier prototype just released Sunday.

Shared by - Zen - on the I-Novae forums (link)

JonnyƦedhed · February 29, 2016

Some more dev access tier prototype screenshots @1080p. If you're a Developer Access+ backer you now have access to the Infinity: Battlescape prototype.

The Infinity: Battlescape prototype has been released!

Shared by - Janusz - on the I-Novae forums (link)