We have had great weather all week here in beautiful Guildford, but don’t worry everyone Wonderstruck has been hidden away busy working on all the cool features coming to Boundless. Only 1 minor feature update to the C++ development version that re-added the playable character mesh variations. Welcome back old friends!

As a team we’ve been beavering away on:

Finalising the creature plan.

Finalising the last few props (for now - many more to come in the future)

Making the servers / worlds more stable

Finalising the remaining tasks for World Builder release

More Machine crafting

Planning for world regen testing and release next week.

We are certainly gaining momentum on developing new stuff. Feels awesome!

Code

We are continuing the machines, hooking in the power cores and engines. The GUI work has also been focusing on crafting and machines. We have merged the 16 bit block data changes into the master line to greatly increase the possible block and prop types. We have also updated many of the blocks to enable slope variations. (These were prerequisites for the latest World Builder features.) For the server backend we’ve been working on how we handle entity ids to make it scale up more simply and robustly.

A new programmer @AndyD joined the team so we spent time getting him up to speed with the engine and game code. He hit the ground running and added the character model switching into the game that we released. He has also started adding some of the wonderful new character animations created by @gerryjacobs. The first animations we’ll integrate and release will be the emotes demonstrated here and here and probably somewhere else…

We’ve also spent time on fixing crash bugs users were seeing, especially over last week end - thanks to everyone who reported issues. There’s been some more polish on the VR support to fix a few rarer glitches. The shader pipeline work is still in progress with more PS4 driver updates. The engine is pretty solid now.

Design

Working together with artists, animators and coders we’ve arrived at our creature set for 1.0. We’ve tried to produce a set that covers a wide variety of creatures from simple combat-based ones, to large powerful ones, to interesting non-combat ones. Within this set we are also planning on have a large amount of variations to provide much interest as you explore the worlds of Boundless. Checkout this post for an idea of how the creatures all look together.

Other work this week has been helping out with art investigations, and also collaborating with @lucadeltodecso and @michaelb on the world builder and a plan for when we would like to release it on the beta branch.

Also given that the machine and crafting implementation is coming along so well, we’ve needed to get the recipe data in a good shape, and get it exported from our spreadsheets where it lives to a format that the game can read. < export >

GUI

This week saw the new GUI system functional in game powering the new crafting system. It’s a functional prototype (dev speak for: “it don’t look so pretty right now”) so as an effective distraction here’s the latest development on the Boundless icon palette. For bonus points: how many icon meanings can you guess?

We’ve also played a little with the elemental representation in the Boundless GUI - a first version is here. Let us know what you think.

Art

We’ve been working on the creature progression language. @claudiotolomei shared a demonstration of the progression for the Cuttletrunk here.

We’ve been working on a number of prop art concepts:

A mannequin that allows you to store and show off your spare wearables.

Iteration on the mystery box which contains a desirable surprise item. Ooooh.

We’ve also been concepting signs and a new trapdoor.

3rd person character animation has continued with hammer dual wielding. More to come on this when we integrate dual wielding as a playable feature. We’ve also completed our latest emote: the Mexican wave.

Work has continued apace on new block types and their textures: ash, sponge, growth and thorns. Yummy.

We’re also busy migrating the art team over to the C++ version ironing out any teething problems with our setup and tools.

“Boundless Out!”