Weekly Dev Update: 2017 June 2nd, 9th, 16th - Testing Releases and Poles!
As a team we've been super-focused on wrangling the Testing release out, iterating the Tutorial, Objectives, Progression and general balance, and attempting to prepare everything for a Live update. Building features is easy. Preparing features for release is extremely difficult. There are just so many little edges that need fixing. After Testing 163, Testing 164 and recently Testing 165 we're hopefully getting closer. Now is the time to offer feedback before things go into Live.
See everyone in game soon - we know you're all waiting for the update.
Code - June 2nd We have started working on the lance implementation again, exploring what works well at close range, given the latency of network games and the creature AI. The bombs continue to be polished.
The rich text support has been completed, adding support for icons and colour changes mid sentence. The GUI is working through the plinths and trading.
Character progression has added tracking of additional stats, such as worlds visited and machine use, for the differing skill trees.
We’ve worked on fixing some model normal mapping issues that showed triangular artefacts, especially on some of the new character customisation parts.
The world chunk data has been reduced ~25% so the servers and downloads are more efficient as well as caching more locally in the same space. We also added a server hook to allow resource rebalance to be more easily applied.
Code - June 9th We’re continuing to experiment with the lance and what works well with the creatures and latency. The challenge is finding a design and implementation that feels nimble and responsive whilst allowing the client and server to have up to 500ms of latency.
The GUI is working through the trading, locations and universe screens. We continue to work through the objective and fixing up the rules.
The closed portals are being made collidable, which should stop players getting stuck on the wrong side of portals built next to walls. We also fixed the holes in the world that could appear whilst mining through chunk borders.
We are working on the automated bots for load testing the servers. The goal is to increase the maximum number of users per server. As part of this we have also altered to the server to support different tick rates to see how this performs, both the load and the user experience. We also updated the server crash recovery logic to be more robust.
Code - June 16th We worked on the the latest testing update and addressing issues it showed up. Once the remaining key issues are resolved we are aiming on updating the live version in the near future.
We continue to iterate on the tutorial and objectives, fixing up the logic and flow.
The GUI update is working through the portal and universe screens.
We worked to make the creatures and combat more responsive on the client even with higher pings. The wildstock behaviour is being updated with the charge attack now much more responsive and client predicted.
We updated the servers crash handling to restart more robustly. For load testing the servers we are updating the bots testing, so we can simulate many users on a server. The server it now capable of running at different tick rates and will be tested to see what work well. We also optimised the most expensive server systems that the more developed worlds were showing up. More server performance ultimately means more concurrent players and more creatures spawned per active player.
Design - June 2nd Ollie and Luke were both away on holiday this week. Forcing Rob to be extra productive working on the GUI:
Fleshing out the Newsflash design.
Updated the Level Up with some VFX suggestions.
Updating the Objective announcements to make them more impactful and communicate a little more especially in the tutorial.
Updated New Region, New World, New Settlement newsflashes.
Updated the tutorial ‘hint’ area which shows which controls to use and how to interact.
Added in a new 30% indicator to the Stamina bar to show how much the player needs to refill to remove the fatigue status effect.
Re-thought how the tutorial presents the information so that instead of being lots of individual objectives they are larger objectives with multiple steps.
Made a start on the final design for the Chat component - still WIP.
Started updating the mega HUD design doc with all the new stuff I’ve been working on - still WIP.
Made a start on the final set of Skills icons - also still a WIP.
Design - June 9th Ollie has been busy with project management for most of the week and ensuring all members of the team are working towards the same goal. He’s mostly be prioritising tasks to ensure we get the Testing version into Live as soon as possible.
Luke has been focused on Objectives, Feats and Tips. For most of the week he’s continued to make changes and implement the new system based on feedback from the community and in-house. He also spent a bit of time looking at resource generation on home worlds in attempt to improve the amount of common resources that are spawned underground.
Rob has been working on how we present interactive and non-interactive buttons in the game, to be better highlight what you can and cannot interact with in the GUI. He also spent some time looking at the best way to show connection information to players in the game.
On top of that, he’s spent most of the week updating the HUD to include new health bars, reticles, objective information, new flashes and changes to the compass. There have also been a few additions to the amount of information shown about the Creature’s current state in the HUD.
Creature Glyph HUD
Radial Update
Design - June 16th This week was mainly focussed around getting the stuff we have been putting into the testing branch ready for release to live. There are a lot of big changes in testing, so it’s been a lot of work to massage that into a releasable form, but we’re getting there.
Luke was continuing to polish the tutorial and the initial Objectives which aim to guide new players into the game. He’s also continued to work on Feats and Tips, which are further areas of progression which both teach new players the game, and give you interesting goals to achieve in the game.
Rob has been preparing all the icons for the different skills so that the skill trees look good, and are easy to read. He’s also updated the warp and portal screen designs to include your beacons and a reverse portal direction button.
Ollie has been doing project management, as well as helping to manage the release. In between he’s been tweaking and balancing for the release including damage and speed values for tools and weapons.
Art - June 2nd The art team have been busy working on:
Decorative prop concepts
Supporting the lance prototype
Modelling bomb assets, character body models and faces
Art - June 9th This week the art team has been in mid-development of the character customisation feature which we shared in a past update. We’ll share more on this in the near future.
We’ve been developing the decorative poles system as well as exploring other decorative prop ideas. Here are the the latest concepts from Amanda.
Exploration on the horizontal bars to attach to the vertical pole designs in wood, stone, metal and gem themes.
Also dabbling with 'corner' pieces, which we imagine could create a fancy attachment design with the pole and bars. They derived from earlier explorations of 'brackets' or 'braces' that could be used to prop next to walls to break up the voxels and generally add more shape to structures.
The hanging/end pieces are a continuation of a system we are exploring where things could be hung on the poles (lanterns, buckets, butchered spitters etc) and also placed on top of it.
Other art time has been spent on pre production of the new bigger and better sanctum.
Art - June 16th
The art team have been busy fixing bugs and general tidying to support the testing update. Jess and Amanda have continued prototyping the character customisation feature with technical help from Luca.
Mentioned before we’re building a library of natural props. Jess has completed this chunky cactus for arid areas:
Amanda has also continued with decorative poles concepts. When all complete and modelled we think these will work nicely providing the player with a further level of customisation in addition to block building and sculpting. Below are iterations from the earlier images shared:
Let us know what you think.
Weekly Dev Update: 2017 May 26th - Character Customisation and more!
We're still busy preparing the next update to Testing. The aim is to make the next Testing update suitable for migration to Live for everyone to play. We really appreciate all the players reporting issues from the Testing releases. It really is super valuable.
The following are the main changes coming in the next Testing update:
Multithreaded chunk meshing.
Earn XP for standard in game actions: mining, building, chiseling, etc.
Objectives iterated based on player feedback.
Updated Furnace, Plinth and Trading GUIs.
Support for variable-sized backpacks.
Campfire and Beacon control meshes added and showing fuelled status of the beacon.
Creature projectiles now fully predicted resulting in smoother and intuitive combat.
Player projectile damage now predicted.
Stamina rebalanced to operate more like food.
Code We’ve been working on the projectiles system, adding support for shotgun-style ammo and better prediction of projectiles for creatures. The aim is to allow each Slingbow to have a different firing function: rapid fire, sniper, shotgun. There has been further work on polishing up the bomb and its fuze as well as the status effects it delivers.
As part of Progression the inventory now supports variable sizes, getting larger as you level up.
We've update the GUI text rendering to support inlining coloured icons in the flow of text. This will be used to rendering controlling information during the tutorial, and also allow us to inline glyphs and other icons. The GUI reskinning has updated the furnace, plinth and trading.
We are continuing to work through the objective and adding any missing supporting logic.
We’ve added logic that will speed up meshing if you have already downloaded the data into your cache when revisiting an area. This should help portals open much faster. Further meshing logic has moved to a thread that should speed up remeshing when the world changes (building/mining) if it's already meshing elsewhere as well as the lower level of detail meshes.
Design Ollie has continued working on Bombs and Status effects this week. He also did some balancing for the core attributes and made Warp Crystals (formerly known as Warp Shards) easier to craft. This should help players who are struggling to get off their home worlds. There was some more project management tasks to do this week but luckily not as much as the previous weeks.
Luke is still working on the new objectives system. This week he’s mostly been generating a list of objectives to work as passive tasks for players to complete. This week he’s had support from Andy to introduce new elements and objectives to the tutorial. In addition to the objective system, he spent some time working on the roadrunner to make it more alert to nearby players and looked into balancing the Stamina drain when using items and jumping.
Rob’s focus this week has been on updating the economy screens in the game. He’s been looking at ways to improve the overall presentation and user experience for Request Baskets (formerly known as Buying Plinths), Trading and Shop Stands (formerly known as Selling Plinths). The names are still a work in progress, so let us know if you have any other ideas.
Setting up a Request Basket:
Another user selling items to the Request Basket:
New look trading interface:
Art The art team have been mostly focusing on character customisation this week. Here’s a sneak peak of the character customisation module in action.
You’ll be able to choose from a library of faces and head pieces, character scale, body types, body colour, eye texture and colour. Plus body tattoos - each with three levels of elaboration on the body, three areas to customise colours and a transparency slider to reduce the intensity if so desired. Check out some examples below.
We’ve also been supporting development on bombs, prefabs and the new sanctum. More on these soon!
Weekly Dev Update: 2017 May 19th - Elemental Icons, Tattoos and more!
We're gradually getting closer to a version of Testing that is good enough to migrate Live. I think we'll need 1 more Testing release before it should be ready. In parallel we have plenty of other features and assets in the pipeline which will also be rolled into the next Live release.
We've also been working again to try and reduce any latency issues. The next release of Testing will include some engine changes that improve the performance of the world meshing by making more stages of the pipeline run in parallel, and dramatically (fingers crossed) reduce the number requests to the server for worlds you've already visited. This should help make portals spring into life much faster. Boundless will now take more advantage of PCs with multiple cores. We'll make sure that there are sufficient options so that if you're capturing or streaming Boundless, or talking live with friends, that the game doesn't take all available resources.
We've also been reworking all the client + server combat code to enable much more prediction on the client. This should mean that the combat you see in the client matches what the server is doing. It makes combat much smoother and feel great. I think you'll notice a big change once this is released.
Lots of design work has been happening to tie together all the elemental weapons, tools, buffs, bombs, and creatures in game. The recent HUD updates attempt to communicate this in a clear way.
Code Testing was updated with version Testing 163. All the details are in the release announcement.
The Status Effects are being worked through, adding dynamic modifiers to creatures and characters, for example the Slow buff now slows down the target and its animations. Bombs continue adding the throwing animation and it now has a fuze time so you can time your throw. The bombs now bounce off creatures.
The threading of the meshing is now integrated in for the next update and should roughly double the speed, making placing blocks more responsive as well as the world appear more rapidly, if it is downloading the data quickly enough.
We‘ve be adding the meshes for campfire and beacon controls that signify the state of the beacon’s fuel.
The GUI work is focusing on the Furnace and Storage. The Objective also continue to be polished up.
There was further work on the PlayStation 4 version to address some issues around multiple portals and excessive ram use.
Design Apart from implementing the new objective system, Luke has been balancing different areas of the game for most of this week. He started the week off with the threat generating system and how it affects nearby creatures, particularly how they react to players with higher threat values. He also spent some time on improving how much Iron and Copper is spawned on spawn worlds, in response to player feedback. To finish off the week, he has been balancing the micro-experience rewards for performing certain actions in the game.
Ollie has been working with Andy and Fooks this week to bring the bombs and status effects system to life. He’s been trying to come up with fun and rewarding uses for these new features which will hopefully be coming to the game very soon. A nice break from the project management stuff he was doing last week, but alas he still had some to do this time as well.
Rob’s week has been spent on status effects as well. He’s been working on new concepts for a whole set of icons to show skills, status effects and different colour combinations to better represent on the HUD what is happening in the game.
Status effect elemental table:
Player related icons:
World related icons:
He also put together some new screens that are shown when you log out, when you are defeated and when you return to the sanctum. Some of these can already be seen in the Testing version on Steam.
Art The art team have been supporting the Testing release, prototyping bombs, developing character customisation and more prefabs.
Amanda has been exploring different visual styles for how player tattoos should be designed. We did a first test exploring hard graphic shapes and gradients with a flaming tattoo decals theme. During character customisation you will be able to select a tattoo design and control the 3 different design colours.
Jess has finished the buying basket model. Now in game. Let us know what you think! The idea was to clearly differentiate between selling and buying.
We’re adding the last few prefabs to our first Earth-like library:
Adding more richness when exploring caves.
Cave ceiling crystals:
Underground remnant:
Underground themed remnant:
Standing stones:
Ancient glacier portal remnant:
Overgrown portal remnant:
Dry desert oasis:
They'll be another weekly dev update soon.
Weekly Dev Update: 2017 May 12th - Threat, Bombs and more!
We have our heads down working on iterating the Testing features and preparing them to release to Live. The Objective system is probably changing the most base on feedback from players. We're also working on the world loading pipeline: streaming, caching and meshing to make the game and portals spring into life faster.
Code A new Threat mechanic has being added to the game. The creatures now display a threatened animation when players get too close for comfort and depending on the damage users have done to other creatures.
The Bombs system is implemented to a first pass, bouncing around with a ribbon trail and hooked into a new throwing animation. A first pass version of Status Effect hooks has been added to help visualise when a character is buffed or debuffed / penalised.
The reskinning of the GUI continues with the character sheet now showing the attributes and skill trees displaying more information on each item.
The character customisation added three colour tattoo decal support and general polish. The backend support for multiple characters per user is progressing.
The campfire and beacon meshes are being integrated into the game and will show when the fuel is running low.
Further work on using additional threads for meshing has yielded good results; it's looking like it will yield a least a twofold increase in performance.
Ollie has been continuing to set up and add to the new project management software. The peak of excitement being moving all the bug reports from GitHub to JIRA. It doesn’t get much better than that! He’s also been helping Marc with the profile screen and Fooksy with the bombs.
Rob has been working on the icons in the game, which takes a long time for something so small! He’s also been looking into how the HUD scales with different settings, and settling on good defaults for both PC and PS4.
Additionally, he’s been updating the character profile screen, as well as doing another pass on the beacon screen.
Art This week the art team were a bit light with illness but development continued apace. Amanda has continued with pole concepts. We’re continuing character customisation development adding eye shapes, iterating face designs and body decals.
Jess completed the new buying plinth asset. Now redesigned as a basket to put requested items into. We think this will be a lot clearer.
We’re approaching the home stretch on building our library of earth-inspired prefabs. We can’t wait to start populating the final version of the biomes with these.
Arid cacti.
Giant sunflowers.
Giant redwood trees.
Twisted trees.
Gerry has completed a set of creature threat animations. These telegraph to the player creature threat intent.
Weekly Dev Update: 2017 May 5th - Objectives, Reticles, and Prefabs!
This week we've been reviewing all the feedback and ideas from the recent Testing releases. This has mainly focused around the Objective system and exploring alterations that gives players freedom to explore their own path - which has always been the ambition.
The high level aim of the Objectives are to:
Tutorial Objectives: Gradually introduce players to all the features of the game. This will start as some basic Tutorial style objectives at the beginning, but continue up to more complex introductions such as building a Portal. To experienced players this may seem like a bore, but we get lots of comments from players not knowing how to proceed in the game. And not everyone is keen to ask for help on the forums or Discord. The aim is to allow players to play Boundless without resorting to a Wiki.
So now you know how to play the game, what should you do next?
Rewards for your own direction: If you want to go off explore, mine, gather, fight, build, craft, build a city, develop your character, then there needs to be a reward mechanism.
Rewards for given direction: If you want a mission or an objective beyond #1 then there should also be a reward mechanism. The aim is to make these longer form much more like quests.
I think we have some solid ideas and will make sure they're shared for community feedback.
From a release perspective we're working to migrate the Testing version across to Live, but this will not happen until we're happy that the Objectives are exactly how we want them. So it's likely to be a few more weeks.
Code We started the first pass implementing the throwable Bombs. These are thrown grenade-like objects that bounce around and have a timed fuse. When crafted they will support a wide range of effects beside explosions, including buffs like healing and penalties like slowing targets.
Further work continues on the Tutorial and Objectives. The GUI skinning continues with the character screens, beacon and settlement screens getting a visual update.
A first pass of the Character Customisation is now complete and is sufficient for us to test the character assets in the game engine. We have some more iteration planned before this feature is merged into the Testing or Live releases. We added some new prop blocks with six variants of plants, rocks and fungus.
We have started work to allow more threads to be used when meshing the world. This should mean that loading (assume you're not bound by networking) and world alterations should appear much quicker. Ultimately this will make the game feel more responsive and make better use of the available hardware. We worked on further optimisation of loading and memory for PlayStation 4.
Design This week Luke was poring over the feedback on the objectives system and tutorial from the community, and together with feedback from our own internal play sessions he’s come up with a plan for the next iteration. He’s also been preparing some posts for social media, so watch out for those.
Ollie has spent much of the time setting up a new project management system (exciting!). He’s also been prioritising the tasks in our backlog to work out what we should do next.
Rob has been exploring how best to communicate player status in the HUD.
The design captures:
The most basic reticle.
Reticle holding equipment in both your right and left hands.
Equipment cool down in the right hand.
Powering up or charging in the left hand.
Exposure to a toxic atmosphere.
Oxygen depletion whilst underwater.
Direction of damage indicator.
All items together. (If your reticle ever looks like this - RUN!!)
Below is the current visual target for the complete HUD with all elements activated. (Before anyone complains that it looks too busy - this is with all the elements activated, it will not normally look like this!) Let us know what you think, because now is the time to get feedback and make some changes.
Art The art team has been busy working across a wide range of areas.
1st person tools/weapons: Gerry has nearly completed the final pass on the 1st person tools and weapons animations. As mentioned previously these animation positions are designed to work with a less distorted FOV in 1st person. See Gerry’s WIP. Notice how accurate the model proportions are compared to what we’re used to in Live.
Kit of Poles - Amanda is having fun concepting the poles feature. She’s close to concluding our planned design on these. See her second WIP post here. The poles will be a framework for building lots of different structures: street lights, flag poles, wells, cooking spits, building supports, and poles.
We’re in production on the character heads. He’s a sneak peek of the ZBrush Orc-inspired head with annotated feedback from Amanda. It takes a lot of work to get the models to match the original concepts.
Character Customisation - Jess has been supporting Luca who’s created a placeholder character customisation screen, featuring selectable faces, heads, bodies, colours.
Natural props - Production on natural prop meshes continues apace. Blocktypes have now been added for the full planned set of natural props. In rocky areas if you want to find mushroom-type resources, you'll find it growing on these rocks.
Here’s our progress of the set all here using the same tint as a plant model.
Sanctum - We’ve started pre-production on the new Sanctum. It’s too early to share any details but we’re very excited creating the first environment the player sees when entering the Boundless universe. More of this to come.
World Builder Prefabs - We’re augmenting our set of natural prefabs with some interesting little shrines. Some of these have been updated since last week.
World Builder prefabs are always welcomed especially if you have a crazy or fun idea of something we can hide in the worlds for players to discover!
Weekly Dev Update: 2017 April 28th - Character Customisation and Beacon Controls!
This week, we have been predominantly fixing bugs, making tweaks and extending existing features for the update this week. Details of the update can be found here. The first person animations missed the cut off for this release. They should be included in the next update.
Over the next coming weeks, we will continue tweaking objectives and making sure that attributes are acceptably balanced (proper 1st pass). This includes properly updating the skill tree GUI. We're still in the process of converting the GUI to the 1.0 design and features.
The Lance has been delayed whilst we've been working on the client prediction of more combat actions, this helps make the game feel more responsive. We have an asset for the Beacon Control and Campfire ready to deploy.
We've also been working on the Character Customisation pipeline so that we can test the different assets we've been creating. Hopefully this'll be released soon we a subset of the assets for you to play around with and make your character feel unique.
Code The foundations of the Character Customisation are being laid, building the mesh from a selection of body parts (face, head horns or crest, eyes and body shape), colouration and decals.
The slingbow is now predictive so the lag between firing and hitting is now predicted client side making it feel more responsive. The knock back has been reworked to also allow predictive feedback.
Stamina system has been implemented, so it is now drained by various actions like running and jumping. Jumping has been reworked to fit with the character progression. Further work continues on the tutorial and objectives. The skill tree, portals and warps have been reskinned.
We’ve added some first pass effects for item rank (when leveled up at the forge), and character status effects, e.g. when poisoned. Further sound effects have been added including the start of custom creature tier effects, making killing the lower level wild stock even more of a guilt trip.
We’ve improved boot up times, especially on PlayStation 4. Some long standing physics bugs have been fixed, mainly around the more complex shaped objects. (So no more walking along walls next to stairs - magic over.)
Art This week the art team have been busy on decorative props, 1st person tools animations, hunter animations, prefabs and the beacon control.
Amanda has been iterating on the decorative pole concepts. She will share her progress next week.
As mentioned in previous posts we are building a library of prefabs for the worlds. This will make the worlds more interesting to explore. Here’s some latest work in progress pics of altars and shrines:
If you're feeling creative please submit some of your own designs to include in the world generator.
Weekly Dev Update: 2017 April 21st - Centraforge, Poles and Faces!
This week we've mainly been reviewing and fixing all the issues raised with Testing 161. We'll likely iterate another Testing update before we consider releasing these changes to Live on Steam.
We have also spent a chunk of our time playing the game from the Tutorial to identify areas to make improvements on. Hence, this week has been about fixing bugs and working on the plan to make improvements. We have also been working on some new features too. We are hoping to update the testing release of Boundless again next week with the following:
Various bug fixes
High priority changes to the Testing release identified internally by the team and externally by the community.
Update 1st person animations.
Updated Machine recipe & queue GUI.
Updated Skill Tree GUI.
More functioning attributes (skill unlock).
Fixes to the broken Objectives.
Updated creature assets for the Cuttletrunk, Hopper and Spitter so that they're more visible in darker places.
Code There has been further work on the revamped tutorial including re-adding the Elder character. For Objectives and Progression we’ve added more movement tracking Statributes. As part of progression we’ve also been experimenting with jump logic upgrades.
The GUI reskinning is working through the Machine, Beacons and Progression interfaces.
We've added support for attaching VFXs to the different character joints for glowing status effects experiments and additional fade out logic. A few bugs have been tackled including the bright fog in lower caves.
For the PlayStation 4 we’ve been fixing up some Trophy code and further work on the memory manager. Lots of smaller changes have been worked through including reworking some of the fundamental data types to help productivity.
Design Monday morning this week started with a full team playthrough to look at all the changes that have gone in, but specifically the tutorial and initial objectives. It was a very useful exercise, and threw up a lots of feedback from everyone.
Ollie went through all the playthrough feedback, sorted it and categorised it. We then worked to come up with some changes and polish tasks for the next iteration. He also worked with Rob on the Forge, and has started writing up what will hopefully be a comprehensive first-pass design for the system.
As well as taking part in the playthrough, and working out the next steps for the tutorial and objectives,Luke has been fixing bugs and working with Luca on updates to the character jumping to incorporate variable jump heights (based on skills) and the double jump. Towards the end of the week he started implementing the changes to the tutorial and objectives.
We shared some data about the latest resource changes to help players understand the current online Live worlds.
Rob, who obviously was also involved in the playthrough, was working with Simon on the updated warp UI, and with Marc on the updated skill tree UI. The rest of the time has been working with Ollie to wrangle with the complexity of the Forge and come up with an engaging, but understandable feature that will keep the keener crafters amongst you interested. The Forge is the machine that enhances your gear with special features, making them unique and special.
Here is a work-in-progress capture of the forge, tentatively named the “Centraforge”:
Art Progress has continued with the new system of majority of the 1st person tool animations which will share the same default positioning, core animations and perspective for consistency. Some of the new features Gerry and Dave have been looking at this week include splitting the swing animations of the tools (hammer, chisel etc) into a hit or miss action depending on if contact has been made with the block mined. We plan on matching the animations with the trigger cues for SFX and VFX which will provide a much more responsive 1st person experience.
Big progress with the face and head customisation options for the new character models has also been made in the art department. Here’s some of the work Jess has shared with the team this week. During character creation you will be able to select a face and head piece combination.
Finally here’s the latest glimpse of the ‘Pole System’ that Minyi has been busy visualising through her concept work. In particular she has been looking at connecting different widths with the hope that you will be able to walk through some and not through others.
She has also been exploring the visual value of the core materials so that wood does not become devalued in terms of decorational aesthetics. It therefore wouldn’t be necessary to link a wooden build to the lowest tier of prestige.
Weekly Dev Update: 2017 April 14th - Testing 161 and Creatures!
Last week, we were busy testing and fixing bugs for a big testing release of Boundless. It contained so many different changes that we decided to update the Steam Beta “Testing” release of Boundless. Detail on this release can be found here.
In the following days and weeks, with the feedback from the community, we plan to continue working on the update to:
Tweak the new features - specifically the objective system.
Tweak the gameplay balance - specifically player progression and the skill tree.
Fix bugs.
Add more reskinned GUI
All machines
Portals and warps
Skill tree
Beacon, Location Worlds, etc.
The Lance is still in development but has been paused whilst preparing the Testing 161.
----------
Code There has been lots of preparation and bug fixing for the Testing release this week. And if you try that version you’ll see the new “Universe” screen (press ‘u’), Character and Progression screen (press ‘k’) and Objectives screen (on ‘j’). Also available is the new Campfire as a stepping stone to full Beacon usage.
There have been lots of additions to Achievements and the Tutorial - making good use of the Progression system.
Crafting Machine and Skills GUI improvements continue to be made, with the systems developed there allowing us to more quickly update the many other screens that need improving: Furnace, Storage, Warps and Portals, Setting, Account and Character creation.
Also one of our key programmers made a slight change of working location - from Guildford to Tokyo!
Design Luke has been refining the design for chat in the game, working out how you can speak to specific people, and how it will work when there are guilds. That also includes muting and filtering player chat. He’s also been continuing the ongoing work on getting the objectives integrated, tested and tweaked. At the end of the week he’s started looking at how reviving characters might work.
Rob has worked up how status effects will be represented, including stacking and the “level” of the effect. He’s also been producing assets for the skill tree implementation for Marc, as well as working out how unlearning will work from a UI and UX point of view. In addition he’s done some tweaks to the crafting screens, looked at the UI for muting in chat, and started on the Forge UI.
Ollie has working on boring, but important work around categorising all the items in the game for the Objectives and Skill systems. He’s also done lots of support work for Marc and Andy on progression and Objectives.
Art This week has all been about props and creature integration.
Minyi has been busy working on concepts for non elemental tool VFX.
Jess has been busy tinting all creature tiers whilst also looking at making the creatures visible in caves. We’re very happy with the results.
A cornucopia of Spitters:
We now have ethereal Cuttletrunk tentacles and other emissive goodies. The aim is to make sure that the aggressive creatures can be seen in darkness, either underground or during the night. Here’s a sneak peek:
Gerry is continuing with a polish pass on the 1st person tools and items.
We’ve also continued production on our library of earth inspired prefabs. More to be revealed soon.
Weekly Dev Update: 2017 April 14th - Testing 161 and Creatures!
Last week, we were busy testing and fixing bugs for a big testing release of Boundless. It contained so many different changes that we decided to update the Steam Beta “Testing” release of Boundless. Detail on this release can be found here.
In the following days and weeks, with the feedback from the community, we plan to continue working on the update to:
Tweak the new features - specifically the objective system.
Tweak the gameplay balance - specifically player progression and the skill tree.
Fix bugs.
Add more reskinned GUI
All machines
Portals and warps
Skill tree
Beacon, Location Worlds, etc.
The Lance is still in development but has been paused whilst preparing the Testing 161.
----------
Code There has been lots of preparation and bug fixing for the Testing release this week. And if you try that version you’ll see the new “Universe” screen (press ‘u’), Character and Progression screen (press ‘k’) and Objectives screen (on ‘j’). Also available is the new Campfire as a stepping stone to full Beacon usage.
There have been lots of additions to Achievements and the Tutorial - making good use of the Progression system.
Crafting Machine and Skills GUI improvements continue to be made, with the systems developed there allowing us to more quickly update the many other screens that need improving: Furnace, Storage, Warps and Portals, Setting, Account and Character creation.
Also one of our key programmers made a slight change of working location - from Guildford to Tokyo!
Design Luke has been refining the design for chat in the game, working out how you can speak to specific people, and how it will work when there are guilds. That also includes muting and filtering player chat. He’s also been continuing the ongoing work on getting the objectives integrated, tested and tweaked. At the end of the week he’s started looking at how reviving characters might work.
Rob has worked up how status effects will be represented, including stacking and the “level” of the effect. He’s also been producing assets for the skill tree implementation for Marc, as well as working out how unlearning will work from a UI and UX point of view. In addition he’s done some tweaks to the crafting screens, looked at the UI for muting in chat, and started on the Forge UI.
Ollie has working on boring, but important work around categorising all the items in the game for the Objectives and Skill systems. He’s also done lots of support work for Marc and Andy on progression and Objectives.
Art This week has all been about props and creature integration.
Minyi has been busy working on concepts for non elemental tool VFX.
Jess has been busy tinting all creature tiers whilst also looking at making the creatures visible in caves. We’re very happy with the results.
A cornucopia of Spitters:
We now have ethereal Cuttletrunk tentacles and other emissive goodies. The aim is to make sure that the aggressive creatures can be seen in darkness, either underground or during the night. Here’s a sneak peek:
Gerry is continuing with a polish pass on the 1st person tools and items.
We’ve also continued production on our library of earth inspired prefabs. More to be revealed soon.
Weekly Dev Update: 2017 April 7th - HUD, Prestige, Prefabs and more!
This week there was no update to the Live version of Boundless but this doesn't mean development has slowed. We have a big collection of features accumulating in our internal staging environment. Many of these features are interconnected and are best released together.
The changes ready to go are the collective Settlement, Beacon and Prestige updates, a revised set of Tutorial Objectives, and the new Statribute system that enables all the RPG elements. This update will be release to the Testing version of Boundless as a Steam beta next week. Likely on Wednesday or Thursday. Whilst the features (as usual) are a work in progress, they should be playable and make a significant difference to the game.
We also have a collection of updated and re-skinned GUIs, updated Wildstock skins, updated 1st person animations and lots more.
Code
We continue with the beacon updates, adding more of the first pass GUI and Beacon Fuelling logic.
The HUD has added more detail to interactive blocks, such as machines and plinths, to explain the beacon permissions available on them. The GUI reskinning has been working through the crafting and machine screens. We have also spent time fixing some of the bugs related to smart stacks.
The new tutorial is now in and being tested. We continue the work with attributes and the skill unlock features. As part of this the higher tool upgrades now support damaging multiple blocks with a single action, examples include a cross shape, horizontal and the full nine. The point projectiles now also break blocks, if they are powerful enough, but only tools will create block drops for natural blocks.
The character animation updates are progressing with a new consume animation added so you no longer mine meat.
We added message coalescing to the network traffic that will reduce the number of packets sent. This should help reduce latency spikes, especially on lower bandwidth connections and Wifi.
Design
Luke has been continuing to reviewing all the biomes we have made working out how best to make the next set of worlds. If you want to contribute biomes to the game, please checkout the public repository and let us know. He’s also been supporting Andy on the objectives and tutorial.
Ollie has been back onto balancing, with tool and weapon damage taking a step forwards. He’s also been looking at the creature data with a view to more balancing. In between he’s been doing more Forge design.
Rob has been mainly improving and polishing existing HUD elements this week including additional compass states and icons, an updated newsflash and status effect HUD. He’s also been looking at icons for the various sized settlements.
Settlement Icons:
HUD Updates - can you spot the changes?
Art
This week Gerry has continued on the final animation pass on the hammer and tools. There’s quite a few changes to the asset structure under the hood so we will release when all is fully complete.
Minyi has expanded her exploration of decorative props with poles and a more kit of parts approach. Checkout the work in progress here:
Jess has been integrating all the creature tiers in to game for Hopper, Cuttletrunk, Roadrunner and Spitter. She’s also integrated the Bottles and assorted misc items shown last week into game. (Now Ollie has to design a use for these before we make them available.)
As mentioned in the last couple of updates we’re currently building a library based on Earth-inspired prefabs for the 1.0 worlds. Here are some screenshots from the prefabs in development, these will hopefully create more interesting worlds to explore and more variation per biome and world:
Cavelights - a pretty source of gleam:
Fruit trees - but we wouldn't recommend you eat these fruits:
Gleam forest - imagine stumbling across a hidden gleam forest:
Tree canopy - high canopy trees create a dark forest to explore:
