We’re on track for a new release of Boundless to Testing next week. We have continued to develop, test and balance the following high-level features:

Trading (Buying + Selling) Plinths.

Player XP and Progression.

Weapon and Equipment Durability.

Creation of Location Markers between Worlds.

Creation of Warps between Worlds. (We will disable teleporting between Worlds!)

3 new primary Worlds configs with new biomes and prefabs.

Initial Music and new SFXs, both with volume settings.

Balancing the beginning of the crafting tree, resource collection and resource usage.

Radial menu & control update.

Item description in the inventory.

Improved player spawning logic.

Pop-up expansion and smart stacking for inventory slots.

Smoother portal transition.

Death penalty.

The next release will not contain:

Any progress towards the polished GUI design.

Any updated creatures.

However, during the next 2 weeks we plan to release the final concepts for the first batch of Boundless creatures. Adding these creatures will become the development priority after this release.

Code

Significant work has been done on enabling Warps between Worlds. This is a prestige feature for Boundless and we’re excited to finally expose it to players to explore and give feedback. It’s now possible to:

create Location Markers between Worlds build Warp points in your current World initiate the Warp point to the remote Location Marker open (and close) the Warp point to the destination Location Marker step between Worlds via the new Warp.

For clarity:

A Warp is a one way doorway between worlds. Once open you have a limited time to step through the Warp. Anyone else in the area can also use it. But once you’ve passed through the Warp you can’t return. (Unless you build another Warp back again.)

A Portal is a two way doorway between worlds.

As we have removed Teleporting between worlds, we have added a new “golf drop” inspired feature that allows you to instantly Teleport a short distance if you’ve become stuck. This can happen if you’ve fallen into a hole in a foreign beacon and you’re unable to extract yourself - however there will be a penalty for using it.

The dual wielding has been updated to allow more options for changing items. Thanks to everyone who contributed opinions. It’s now possible to cycle both right and left held items at once. This is still a work in progress, so let us know how it feels once released. The inventory UI has been reworked to make it simpler to equip items.

We have continued to enable the Stacked Items component in the GUI, where similar types of items can be stacked into a single inventory slot.

As part of creating Location Markers between worlds the Planetary System has progressed with additional support for Worlds orbiting Worlds. These are represented logically correct in the Sky. (This was the Secret Cool feature that caused a whiff a few weeks back. )

We been adding in more hooks for the SFX audio and analytics. Also we are exploring how to make the republishing of game balance data (in response to analytics from players) more rapid for simpler tweaking and balancing of the game once live.

We have improved the process for importing new World Colour Schemes into the game from the Palette Generation algorithms. This will hopefully allow the artists to balance the generation algorithm so all worlds look super cool.

Some time has been spent on fixing up engine bugs and looking again at the backend database options.

Design

This week has seen further work on getting the release together and polished, as well as trying to look to the future and be prepared for the next set of features.

@Tobelawe has created many more biomes. He’s also put some of his biomes together into slightly more weird and interesting world configs. We’re close to settling on the configs for the next set of worlds.

Rob has been polishing up visuals for many of the screens in the game. He has also tweaked the control scheme somewhat, so be prepared to test out new button configurations soon.

@olliepurkiss has been writing text descriptions of everything in the game. There are still many to do though! The idea is to give a short idea of what an item is, but also include direct information about what items are used for. This should make finding things out in the game easier. He has also been working on analytics, warps, controls and fuel balance.

@luke-turbulenz has been formalising the ideas around character and item stats and how they feed into the Forge and Character Progression. These are big, complex systems and there is still much to work out. He will post his ideas for feedback once they have taken some shape.

Art

We welcomed a new starter this week, Dom who’s joined us as a VFX artist. He’s currently auditing our in-house VFX tools so that he can deliver our chosen direction. We’ve settled on a stylised VFX look that we think will be cohesive in the Boundless world of chunky characters and creatures, painterly textures, 1x1x1m voxel block environments and quite naturalistic lighting. More about this soon.

As well as VFX we’ve been collecting reference for Otherworldly biomes, worlds and Natural Prefabs and Props. We’ve also completed some initial high level Natural Prefab concepts. These will be used to decorate the more alien and otherworldly biomes.

Starting next Monday for the next 2 weeks, we will post a Creature Master design sheet per day that showcases the final visual design for creature Progression, Element, Exotic and proposed scale. These are the first creatures that will be fully animated and polished in Boundless. (They’re not part of the coming update.) Stay Tuned!

Final production modelling of the tools has continued with Hammers. The Shovel and Chisel are next and should hopefully be in the next update before the game is released to Live.

We’ve set up block tinting for: Compact Coal, Gems and Seams.

And animation has been creating dynamic poses of the Hunter rig.

Noise

We’ve completely replaced all the SFXs for all Tools, all Blocks and their interactions. These will be included in the next release. Hopefully everything should now make a suitable and believable sound.

We’ve finally (ok finally!!) agreed the mix combinations for the Boundless music. The next release should contain 3 (or maybe 4) themes. Each theme will generally have 4 variations, but this depend on the composition of the track:

Ambient Mix - a background bedding mix that keeps you company whilst playing.

Solo / uncut Mix - a simple and pure acoustic solo (or duet) instrument mix.

Full Mix - the full OST album quality mix celebrating a moment in the game.

Drone Mix - a deep background mix that will hopefully build tension.

The initial release will play a track once or twice per day. This is required until we have all themes in the game.

Exciting!!