Hey all.

Just letting you know that there will be an AMA on Reddit today all about Worlds Adrift. You can ask us anything you want. ANYTHING. How good will that be? All of your curiosity about Jack's inspiration for Worlds Adrift fashion, and how Tom codes the rope physics can now be sated. What a great Monday!

Luke (designer), Tom (developer), Jack (artist), Herb (ship captain) will be taking part, and here are the times for you:

17.00 BST
12.00 EDT

The AMA link is HERE.

Hope to see you there!

Love and kisses,

The Worlds Adrift Team

Hello there!

As always, we've been working solidly on making sure Worlds Adrift is as brilliant as it can be!

This week, Klaudia has been working on some ruins.



Our concept artist, Dan, made a dream one of our fans on Reddit had, become a reality.



Our designer, Luke, made a world using community created islands and it's looking incredible.



Speaking of the Island Creator, check out the on demand version of this week's Twitch stream where we made a Mayan Tomb.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK-Rui0qYHY

As well as that, we highlighted some of our favourite creations from the community at this early stage. They're all incredible!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4iNm1oGMXc

That's it for this week, but head to the forums where you'll always find loads of the dev team, ready to answer your questions.

Love and kisses,

The Worlds Adrift Team

x o x o

The following is our latest blog, originally posted on May 6th, 2016. To see our weekly updates first, register your account at the official Worlds Adrift website.

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Hey, guys!

In the past few months I have been working on environment art for Worlds Adrift.

When I create new assets and vegetation, we need to make sure they work together well, so I always spend some time to create a target island for a each biome. For this I use the Island Creator Tool that we recently released to the public. Not long ago I finished working on the desert biome so in this blog post I want to talk in more detail about the whole experience of creating the island.

Whenever I start on a new biome, I start with the trees; I made a few different types of palm trees, as well as dead trees. To avoid repetition we want to have a few different shapes of branches, different textures, and leaves.









We want some of the desert islands to have some kind of vegetation and foliage. Eventually all of these plants will be tinted in the Island Creator to give each island a different feel.









It’s nice to have different types of rocks for each biome, to set the islands apart. For the rocks and island textures, we use Maya and Z brush for sculpting. Whenever we make a new texture or asset, we try to keep the detail to a minimum.; having too much detail in the textures would create unnecessary noise and we want to keep our art style simplistic.



When exploring these islands, players can come across broken ruins. We needed to find a way to create the illusion of the ruins being there for a long time. One way to blend them into the sand was to put sand on top of them. These ruins can appear in any rotation on the ground, so we made a shader that knows which way the object is facing and generates sand textures on the top.





Once I had enough plants and trees it was time to put them on an island. I wanted to create more of a Savannah feel, so didn’t use the palm trees for this island — those ones fit better with a tropical desert.



For the top of the terrain, I used four textures. The base is a flat rock texture, on top of that, it’s sand with soft blending to avoid sharp edges between rock and sand. I also made some white tiles to make areas of the island different from the rest. The fourth texture is small pebbles. Using those is an easy way to break up the texture and make the ground look more interesting.



For the side of the island, I made a cliff texture that looks similar to the desert rocks, so they will blend in nicely.



The lighting is very important to give an environment a certain feel. For each biome we want to have a different lighting ramp. The temperate biome has more purple in the shadows, the snow islands will have a slight blue tint, and the desert has more yellow and red in the lighting ramp.

Here you can see the difference between the colours used in temperate and desert lighting.



The next biome I will be working on is jungle, I’m looking forward to showing that to you, too.

Klaudia

Artist

Helllo there, Worlds Adrift community!

The Worlds Adrift Island Creator is seven days old and this week, we’ve been revelling in what you’ve been making with this wonderful new tool. If you’re yet to dive in, you really should -- it’s FREE on Steam, right now!

Qyvalar's Artificial Island is looking incredible, for example.



As is Jaguerre’s Shotha paradise.



As well as those, Daft Vader’s Jungle Ruins is a thing of beauty.





Jack’s been working on some new clothes for you to make your character looking as good as it can be.



And we’ve also been sharing some of our entertainment-inspired islands too like this Mass Effect one.









And this I am Bread one, of course!



Finally, on Twitch this week, Colm and OIiver had a bit of fun creating something that resembled a swamp-dwelling ogre.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEB0Xc7odfM

As always, thanks for your continued support with Worlds Adrift and remember, if you haven't registered over on WorldsAdrift.com, go DO THAT!

See ya next week!

Cheers!

Hey there everyone.

Our main focus this week has been the launch of the awesome Worlds Adrift Island Creator Tool. Yes, it's now live, and it's FREE - your beautiful creations could one day end up in the game. Neat, right?

The Island Creator has been the main focus of this week's blog post too. Check it out if you haven't already.

Want to see more of the tool (while you're waiting for it to download ;) )?

Of course you do. Here:





We've also been having a little bit of fun creating some islands - take a look:











That's all for this week. Be sure to head to the forums to talk to us. We'd love to hear what you think of the Island Creator.

Love and kisses,

The Worlds Adrift Team

x o x o

The following is our latest blog, originally posted on April 28th, 2016. To see our weekly updates first, register your account at the official Worlds Adrift website.

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Greetings future sky architects! It's Tom again, developer here at Bossa, and for the last few months I've been working on a tool that we are now ready to release to the public. It is a free application that anyone can use to create, share, and explore islands that will form the Worlds Adrift universe.

From the initial concept of Worlds Adrift, the plan was never to rely entirely on procedural generation for all of our content. We believed that a genuinely mappable (albeit massive) world, partially created by real people, would be much more compelling to explore. The only way we saw this happening was to use procedural generation mainly, and follow up by running over as many islands as we could with a level designer's eye, changing the odd thing or placing the odd ruin in the appropriate place.

Coming across an island in the world such as this ring world concept by our designer Luke would be a much more stand out moment and definitely not something that could be created with procedural content only.



As I was tasked with the procedural generation part of the islands, I started building a tool to generate and visualise the islands. The more developed this tool became, the more obvious it became that it could be a genuinely fun experience for players in itself. Terraforming lands, building stories through environmental design, and swinging around them became something worth talking about. So we made the decision to make it available to the public.



Below you can see a video tutorial that goes through the features of the tool and shows creating a simple island step by step.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ4Sxqj4h08

After we'd decided to make the creator available to the public, the next step was to find a way to encourage the community to share their islands and be able to view and explore the works of others. Thankfully, the solution was right under our nose with Steam Workshop.

We implemented an island sharing area on the Workshop, and even with a relatively small pre-alpha group of testers we were really impressed by the quality of our fans' work. Not only does it inspire us further, but the ones we like will become a permanent feature in our game world.



As far as we know it is the first time a game has allowed the player community to have such a profound impact on a persistent, shared universe.

It was a scary decision to allow this kind of engagement. The added development cost of keeping a consumer grade tool fresh and responsive alongside trying to make an MMO was a big consideration. But we've already seen great results from the fans we've released it to, so we're super excited to finally have this available to everyone.

Looking ahead, we'll want to update to the Island Creator when we have a new set of assets finalised - don't worry, when you update the app on Steam, the new goodies will automatically be downloaded. Of course, there are many improvements and enhancements we want to make. We have ideas to expand the workshop so players can make individual prefabs by combining the assets we already have into a specific layout and allowing those to be downloaded and placed by others as if they were single objects. Look out for this functionality in a future update!

For now, we hope you enjoy playing around with the Island Creator. See you on the forums and hope to see some of your creations on the Workshop soon!

Tom
@quickfingerz
Coder

Hello Worlds Adrift community!

Tomorrow at 17.00 BST over on the official Bossa Studios Twitch channel, we'll be broadcasting something BIG for Worlds Adrift for a whole TWO HOURS.

Be sure to tune in so that you don't miss this massive announcement!

Bossa on Twitch - 17.00 BST until 19.00 BST - BE THERE!

The following is our latest blog, originally posted on April 22nd, 2016. To see our weekly updates first, register your account at the official Worlds Adrift website.

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It’s hard for me to blog about the story of Worlds Adrift in the same way that the designers talk in-game features, procedural generation, or creature behaviours. I think that’s because to me, Foundation is a real place, it just happens not to exist anymore.



The place you will investigate isn’t Foundation, or rather, it has since become something else. But how, why? Fragments of the old world remain, but can you piece them together, and truly understand what Foundation once was?

Of the wonders to be uncovered, foremost must be the land of the Saborians. It was a society perfect in every regard. A utopia without crime and sickness, its citizens lived in perfect health, wanted for nothing, and were as pure in mind as in body. Perhaps one day you could rebuild their dream among the clouds, by learning to live as supremely as they did.



So far, I have only been able to fully translate these few bits, which celebrate that far-away place. My Saborian isn’t too great, but with every new ruin I find, it seems to get better, and I understand more of their language. Any thoughts on what this one might mean?

Utopia

The hanging tree is hung

in a righteous land.

Its ropes moor dreams

to a busy wharf.



The axe is buried.

The stone is slung and forgot.

The song is sung.



The knife is not bloody

in a golden realm.

The knife cuts each child down

a bright balloon.



Antillo, 2843.
—



I also managed to recover an entry from this log book written by the captain of the Epilomelos.



Day 1829.

After a week of travel and petty engagements, we find ourselves on a diplomatic mission over Verduba. The intention was to discuss sharing a supply of untapped Atlas in the north sea. Communication was proving difficult, but we were making progress. We had arranged to meet an aide of the Ice Chamber outside the citadel at Muskdog, and my culture officer, Dormio, tried to offer some advice;



“…and they insist that you must wear simple dress. They are very moderate-”

“-I have heard stories of their so-called ‘moderation’,” I chuckled.

“The stories of nudity are, generally, unfounded stories, sir,” he smirked, “We need you to be on best behaviour. If we can guarantee Atlas here, the Stalk council will be appeased, and we will have the chance to continue our mission as set out in the charter.”

“We have a duty to the Verdubans’ best interests. We cannot coerce them into accepting.”

“We have the authority to use-”

“-that’s enough now Dormio!” I smiled, “If the negotiations fail you can blame it on me. Now…what else can I expect?”

He’s a good man, Dormio, and like all of us he’s worried about our livelihood, but I can’t allow personal gain to interfere with what I consider our moral obligation – to treat all humankind equally.

—



Then there was this flyer from a “Stalk Committee”.



Congratulations Saborians, this is a time of celebration. Take your book of entitlement to any storekeeper, and receive a free item of your choice from the selection.

Expect to witness a victory parade tomorrow afternoon at Redusa pleasure gardens, and a speech by Admiral Methusan, a god among us. He will announce that, out of very positive negotiations with the Gall come new deals on technology. In particular the provision of fifty Sky Hulks that will render any retaliation by the Kioki trivial.

Regrettably many of your loved ones must remain in Melliflua for the foreseeable future. But by preserving order, and shoring up our interests, they bring us a step closer to god. Sabor will have her golden days again.

Freedom, Equality, We are god!
—



Lastly, I found a Memo that once accompanied a photograph. I don’t suppose it’s much use without the picture.



Index to the accompanying photograph of the Saborian Stalk Committee Secretaries 1st of Dibi 3023, from left to right:

Scribe Barius(Brown Robes), Economist Nalo(Green Scarves), Admiral Methusan(Red Robes), Premier Telemon(Purple Robes), Utopian Zelic (White Scarves), Employer Ourus (Yellow Scarves), Overseer Bulgus (Blue Plate), Secretaries’ Secretary Filiga (Grey).

Matt Cook

Worlds Adrift Writer

@goatflip

Hello followers of Worlds Adrift. Fancy seeing you here again. Want to know what we've been up to this week? Of course you do.

Let us tell you...

The blog post this week is full of awe and wonder...beautiful concept art, and some more detail about the story of Worlds Adrift. You can check it out here, but here's some of the concept art as a teaser.





Iain has been making guns. Massive guns. It's been The Gun Show all week at his desk.



Tom has been working on desert environments and making everything work.



Luke has been taking some snaps of sunsets as he goes about his designer duties.





That's all for this week. Be sure to head to the forums to talk to us. We get lonely, and you are the remedy.

Love and kisses,

The Worlds Adrift Team

x o x o

Hi Drifters!




My name is Damien, and I’m the QA Manager here at Bossa Studios.

Henrique spoke about convergence in his blog post a few weeks ago and it’s at this stage of games development where major features start interacting together where QA becomes crazy, chaotic... but (honestly) fun!



 




This is even more the case on Worlds Adrift given the nature of the game - how can you predict what one player, let alone many players, will do in the game, given that everything you see is persistent, everyone is together and everything is physics based?



It’s a difficult question to answer... and it means we have to work extremely closely with the development team in order to make sure we can test the game in the best possible way in order to make it as good as it can be, and also make sure no stone is left unturned. This is also where community feedback is a vital source of information - how you ultimately play allows us to test the game always with you, the players, in mind.



 



I’ll leave you with one statistic: since the alpha playtests started last year, we have had over 1,000 bugs and feedback submissions from the game, as well as countless forum posts on the website- which is absolutely amazing! I would like to thank all those who have participated so far, and also thank in advance everybody who will join in over the coming months - please keep the feedback coming!



- Damien (@DamoPeter), Charlotte (@Chazoo) & Malford (@malford_)