This week we finally released the World Wrapping in the Boundless Client. Now the worlds are edge-less and can be circumnavigated. Details of this update can be found in the release announcement.

The next significant feature release will not be until mid/late August. We are planning to release the Trading Plinths and Player-to-Player Trading. If we are lucky, we should also see an early preview of Player Progression and Warping before the end of August.

Whilst these larger items are in development we are planning to update the game with the following:

Correctly tint and colour all assets and props, for example the Workbench and Furnace.

Replacing outstanding grey boxes with the assets, for example the Glue Bottle and Beacon Plotter.

Tweaks and user experience improvements to the GUI.

Correctly position all items in the World, in Storage, in Inventory and GUIs, and in players’ hands.

Add Machine animation so that you will know if it is on or not.

Other general tweaks and bug fixes.

We are also working on the sound effects (SFX) for Boundless. We plan to have a first pass before the end of August. This would include making sure everything makes a noise. We’ll then gradually specialise the noises per weapon, per block material, per creature, etc.

We’re also planning to add more content to the Boundless.Worlds biome project. Hopefully this will make it easier for everyone to contribute to the process.

Code

The World Wrapping was released and some issues addressed.

We have started work on adding Prefabs to the World Builder. This allows everyone to create Prefab nodes in the World Builder and then design the Prefab in the Boundless Client. The Prefabs can be made from natural blocks, crafted blocks and many of the props (for example, doors). When the Prefabs nodes are used in the World Builder they are placed in the world during generation. This process will allow us to populate the worlds with simple structures, hand made trees, and other creative elements.

You should think of the Prefabs as blueprints that the World Builder can use. The Prefabs will be included in the Boundless.Worlds community project.

Other items in development include:

The GUI has been made quicker to make it slicker to use.

We have also reimplemented the original mini map code.

We have started to look at the Warping from one location to another that will replace the current teleport options.

The trading and buying/selling implementation is continuing.

Support for Machine animations has been added to show active and inactive states.

Player progression has begun with the basic foundations of tracking stats used, for example, blocks hit.

We have also been working on the textures arrays to simplify the texture use.

Design

This week has been illuminating, as the main task has been to look at the lights in the game. We’ve added different types of torches, and balanced the settings for those and all the other light giving objects against each other.

We’ve cracked the functionality for buying and selling plinths, which will be fully implemented soon. The next thing on the list is the HUD which is a key part of the game. We hope to nail the design down.

There was also a boring, but necessary task to start organising all the text in the game into a format that can be localised. We’re about to add a lot more text with information for all the objects in the inventory, and it seemed sensible to do some housekeeping first.

Finally we’re preparing for the arrival of two new designers next week. The first is Luke, and he will be picking up much of Ben’s system design, as well as balancing and general gameplay work. Expect him to be quite active in the community once he’s found his feet. The second is Matt, who some of you will be familiar with because has done QA work for us over the last couple of years. He’s coming back for a few months to work full time on building biomes, so he’ll be working with @nevir and anyone else would like to be involved. We really want to see lots of new worlds and biomes being added to the game, so please talk to him if you’re interested in seeing your creations in the game.

Art

This week the art team has been working across a number of areas whilst supporting animated machines, making the tinting work correctly and item placement:

Beacon Plotter modelling has started from the following design.

We’ve modelled the Crates that the Machine parts first arrive in. Each machine crate has a colour coded machine glyph to help you match the machine components.

Here’s the compactor crafting animation we now have working in game. Next we’ll be spinning machine rotators and workbench buzzsaws.

Concepting the Ground Basher to improve the current mesh we’ve used to animate. We’re making him more powerful looking and will share the final design soon.

We’ve concepted a group of wild livestock to populate the worlds..

We’ve done a model block out of the Hunter Progression Stage 5 ready for rigging next week.

As you can imagine we’ve been playing a lot of our current game and decided that the torch would be improved with some light progression so we’re also producing torch progression concepts this week - wood, wood and cloth and gem. We’ll post as soon as it’s ready.

Animation

We’ve continued with Creatures pre-production: