This week we finally promoted all the development from “Testing” to the “Live” release of Boundless on Steam. This included:

some final fixes and polish in the Testing 28 release,

Release 144 bundling everything from 15 Testing releases to Live, including a new set of worlds to explore, and finally

Release 145 where we added a little extra polish to the Worlds in the Sky and fixed a startup issue hitting new users.

The Live worlds will be fully maintained (i.e. no wipes) until the start of next year at the minimum but hopefully longer until 1.0.

The development focus will now shift onto:

Delivering a 1.0 quality HUD.

An updated set of sandbox focused creatures - described here.

A full set of 1.0 quality Equipment and Weapon models, including the Slingbow, Grapple, and Spanner.

An initial implementation of the Boundless Tutorial + Achievements system to help guide new players into the game.

A complete set of core SFX, including: creatures, machines, combat, characters and many more.

An update to the music playing logic.

A new and updated set of VFX, including: all torches, mining, combat, creatures and many more.

More player activity animations, including: trading, operating machines and many more.

An initial implementation for the the Start of the Game, presenting how players first enter the Boundless universe.

An updated algorithm for the generation and presentation of block tints between worlds.

More client and server performance and stability.

So hopefully lots of cool stuff coming.

Code

This week we’ve spent time on rolling over the Testing branch to Live, bringing up new worlds and additional regions for this. The release showed up a number of bugs which we have been spending time to resolve, such as the issue new users were hitting.

The new HUD is being to be added into the game with various discussion on it and underlying tech needed for it. The Achievements and Progression Systems are being enhanced, with notifications pop-ups for gaining an achievement as well as a log of them.

We are prototyping the technology required for the Beginning of the Game, where a new user starts, has control over their spawning world and is given direction on what to do. The logging off is also being worked on so the character remains in game for a short while rather than immediately vanishing.

The database work continues with some refactoring to allow the different options to be plugged in more easily.

Design

@luke-turbulenz has been implementing the first pass of the Boundless Tutorial and Achievements, it’s early days, but so far it’s looking good. He’s also been working with our new VFX artist Dom on listing out the VFX requirements for the game, and also a little bit more work on the stats system.

Rob has been mocking up different aspects of the in-game HUD which we will be implementing and polishing in the coming weeks.

@olliepurkiss has been deep in the analytics data trying to work out what’s going on with players in the Live release. There are a number of issues with the data, but we are working to fix those so we can start to improve the balance of the game.

Art

This week, the art team has been working on the following: