BitPlanets changelog

20191202

• Better background graphics (generated and change over time)

• Added new game mode: domination

• Added new planet type: unit converter (a)
• Added capital planet when you start a new game (b)
• Added new planet type: black hole (c)

• Added new transportation mode: worm hole

• Also I'm proud we reached the home page of http://iogames.space/, one of the most popular io games website.

• New items in toolbox
• Ability to increase ship streams
• Ads!

• Navigation bar improved
• Scoreboard improved (has a bar chart to show the player that is dominating)

• Redesigned ship streams

• Redesigned planet unit bar

• Added more documentation: tutorial, planets and transportation
• Rebalanced upgrades and other game variables
• Improved performance on desktop and mobile

20190917

• Long distance ships: now you can send ships at 5 times your range at a price
• Redesigned layout to fit better on mobile
• Disabled background effects on lower end devices to prevent lag
• Fixed pointer broken when you resize the window

20190916

• Improved performance
• Booster to instantly create units
• Improved on boarding live tutorial
• Progress bar for incoming resources and building units cycles
• Animation when units are added to the planet
• Added bot to help in the chat when you ask questions
• Improved design on upgrades panel
• Redesigned the navigation bar
• Added planet ownership with colours above the scoreboard
• Implemented XP, but are not used yet in the game

20190208

New ship design.

I'm planning to add a skins for the ships so you can change them during the game. We will have around 10 of them by the end of the month.

They don't look that nice yet, but a design is working on them so hopefully we will have some nice shinny ships!

New info box panel

Added a info box panel on the top left side with important information such as: match timer, resources per minute and number of streams. If you are not playing it will have a message explaining that you are a spectator.

Scoreboard and chat redesign

Minor redesign of the chat and the scoreboard to be more readable when the player color is too dark.

Improved server stability

This was a big one, took me a few days. Thanks to all the new players the servers started to crash because of the overload. That's a nice problem to have. Initially I had to hack it together in a few hours, but then a proper solution took a few solid days.

Each room is basically a new server and when it the server starts will ask one of the servers to get the next task required. In this case a task is to create a new room so players can play. In this way, every time I start a new server it will automatically appear as an available room to play. For now we only have 2 servers, but I'm planning to add a few more, probably add 2 more by the end of the month.

Support on Patreon with some cash!

As you might know, the game has no ads and makes no revenue, but servers are burning some cash for now. I'm adding Patreon to see if I can raise at least some money for the existing and new servers.

Other minor changes

• Disabled planet creation when you are not playing: this was an issue that Son of Atom mentioned and has been fixed. You were able to create a new planet next to somebody, spawn, upgrade and kill all his planets or damage a lot.
• Ship streams are limited to 60 for performance reasons, later you might upgrade and increase this limit.
• Started work on adding more ship skins. Soon you will be able to change ship skins.
• Upgrades now show as "x per minute" instead of "x per cycle", which was confusing.
• Background is now black.
• Fixed room selection that was loading for long time.
• Friendly names for loading screen.
• Show loading while is loading correctly, there was a minor issue.
• Added patreon for support.

20190116

• Added 2 more rooms. Now we have 4 rooms each with a different number of minutes per match. 13, 21, 45 and 55 minutes.
• Added a video tutorial on game start, see video below.
• Join on our whatsapp link, join here to schedule matches and other BitPlanets discussion.
• Name already prefilled when you start a game.
• Removed that you can't spawn near other planets rule. So now you can spawn near other planets.
• Added email popup so you can add your email. I know is not the best but I need to build an email list.

20190114

• Units per cycle and range upgrades are more expensive and are less powerful
• Users can't spawn on a planet that has an enemy planet in range
• Reduced the resource planets in the middle, there is just one big planet now
• Resource planets are all the same size
• Full screen on first click
• Automatic graphics settings, it will auto adjust the settings based on your frames per second

20181215

• How to play links to home page instructions on bitplanets.com
• Added full screen button