This week we announced the Boundless Worlds open project. This open project will contain the biome definitions used to create the Boundless worlds at 1.0 - and everyone is invited to contribute.

For anyone new to Boundless and the World Builder. The World Builder is a sophisticated tool we use to create the worlds for Boundless. The tool is part of the Collector’s Edition or Adventurer versions of Boundless. The tool is the first part of Boundless’ modding infrastructure allowing players to reconfigure the game.

The tool allows you to visually composite the definitions of complete Worlds, individual biomes, and ultimately all the parts that makeup a biome. The tool supports realtime tweaking of parameters and will display the result, either schematically within the tool or with the full rendering in the game. The World Builder is extremely sophisticated and exposes the generation process for creative manipulation.

Our ambition with the Boundless Worlds project is to harness the creativity of the community to build a stunning and diverse standard library of biome parts. These parts will then be used to create the worlds in Boundless. We will obviously contribute to this process as it’s essential for the release of the game. But we have already seen some great designs and ideas from the playing community. Exciting times for Boundless.

Any and all contributions to the project are welcomed - be bold! @nevir has volunteered to help steer the project initially.

Releases

This week, we have been testing Dual Wielding as a top priority as we wanted to get it out to the players for feedback. Functionally, it does the job but after getting the feature tested internally by several team members, we came to a consensus that the keyboard + mouse control was needed iteration before release. We decided to delay the release for this week.

We have also started to test Machine Crafting in anger as the plan is to release it next week. (The game currently contains Hand Crafting where you craft items in your inventory without needing a machine.) Functionality wise, it works as designed but testing the recipes and balancing them is proving to be very challenging. We are currently making changes to the recipes and we may also make some changes to the GUI to make it more user friendly for next week’s release.

World Wrapping is proceeding well and we’re still working towards a July release.

Code

For crafting the full colour tinting has been implemented, so you can craft multiple colour variants of items depending on the input colour of the blocks or items. This means items made from things harvested in one world will vary in colour from items made in other worlds.

We’ve been working on dual wielding and are implementing a second pass on some of the flow to make it slicker to use. The Totem item is now in game, as are many new block drops: ores, gems, coals, fossils, ancient technology. The GUI continues to be expanded and refined.

World wrapping is part way through with the player able to wrap around the edge of the world and parts of the rendering now working. The day/night cycle is progressing with two separate celestial bodies. We’ve also been adding some support for the audio engineer to allow them to use Wwise. The backend engine has had some housekeeping work done and some of the last bits of the shader pipeline worked on. Additionally some basic analytics data has been captured.

Design

This week we launched the github repository for us all to put our awesome biomes into. We really want this to be a community centred thing, and hope that lots of people want to be involved in making worlds for the game. Any feedback or thoughts on that would be gratefully received.

With the crafting system coming along, it’s been possible to start to balance the recipes and the resource generation, which means we’re starting to see a game emerge. It been really good to be able to actually play the beginning stages and craft the first few recipes. There’s still a long way to go, but it’s a good step.

@AndyD has also done a brilliant job of implementing the Dual Wielding, and it’s been great to work with him on polishing it up, and tweaking the controls.

We’ve also been supporting the artists as they come up with concepts for the wearables.

Art

This week the art team has been supporting machine crafting and dual wielding development readying for release.

We’re also been working in pre-production across other areas of the game:

Wearables - concept exploration to see how we can approach this in our visual style. In Boundless we aim to provide a wide range of interchangeable wearable sets to customise your character.

Livestock progression - we’re approaching the livestock (currently the goat-like creature seen in game) as natural wildlife across the worlds. We’ve concepted a selection of different types. We’ll share these with you soon.

Creature Progression - we’re modelling a benchmark example of our creature progression using the hopper.

Here’s a WIP image of the final tier armoured version (with art feedback notes on the right):

Animation has continued on the Cuttletrunk.