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-turbulenz 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.

@olliepurkiss 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 @gerryjacobs 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:

@jesshyland 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:

