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_)

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

Hey Drifters!

Jack here to talk to you guys once again about the characters of Worlds Adrift, and more specifically their clothing.

Over the past couple of months I've been busy working on the first set of customisation pieces for our characters. This set includes starter schematics as well as schematics that can be found in the world (some rarer than others).
https://youtu.be/2Xu9tN6mAic
For the starter schematics the aim was to create a set of clothing pieces that looked cool, but felt like the simple trappings of a traveller just about to begin their adventure. They're a combination of flowing makeshift ponchos and leather-belts and straps to allow plenty of space to hang pouches and equipment off. This set will grow with time and I want to cover a few roles that I've seen you guys talking about in the forums. Pirates, engineers, traders, hunters and explorers should all have relevant clothing pieces to choose from at the start of the game but if they want to stand out from the crowd they are going to have to get exploring and discover new items. 



Clothing pieces can be found throughout your travels with the schematics being much rarer than the items themselves. Learning a schematic will let you craft the item as many times as you want and by adding optional dyes you will be able to customise your items further. The three types of clothing are head, torso and leg pieces and clothes will be wearable by either gender. As with all our systems we hope our customisation system will combine with our other systems to create some unique stories and emergent gameplay. 


Next up for me is the male character and getting all these pieces to work on him and then more hats, more hairstyles and more everything!

Jack @jackgood16

Whew, it's been a busy week here at Bossa Studios, but Friday does mean that we have a round-up of all the week's Worlds-related news for you.

Alpha Playtest 3.5 happened this past week, but if you weren't one of the few to get in and play the game, you can have a look at our Twitch live stream where Colm spoke with both Luke and Herb about the recent changes to the game.



We shared an image on Reddit of what will be possible with our ship-building system in the future

We also shared some fancy new images on Facebook of Iain's engines, Klaudia's new cave plants and a character striking a pose!







And finally, we had some incredible fan art from Mark Faulkner sent to us on Twitter. Thanks so much, Mark!



So that just about does it for another week at Bossa HQ! If you've got any questions, jump into the comments and ask away, or head to the official forums and get chatting to the rest of the community!

See you next week for another weekly round-up of all things Bossa!

Cheers!

The following is our latest blog, originally posted on March 24th, 2016. To see our weekly updates first, register your account at the official Worlds Adrift website.

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Hello travellers! It’s Matkins here once again to give you my third update into how the creatures of Worlds Adrift are coming along.

For some time now creatures have been living out their lives in their simulated world. Wandering, feeding, breeding, migrating, and often just lazily lying around too. So our focus has shifted towards the interaction between players and creatures. More specifically we have been working on making the creatures a formidable threat to players, and their ships.

The beetles are mostly passive towards players but they are supposed to defend their habitat. So any player cutting down trees may find that any nearby beetles will try to avenge their deceased woody friends with an onslaught of head-first ram attacks.

The manta rays, on the other hand, need no excuse to attack players because they are gits. But they are especially enraged by the sound of nearby ship engines. They will chase such ships, latch on and break them apart piece by piece.

We decided that it should be “sound” that triggers these aggressive behaviours so that they only depend on being within range and not necessarily having line-of-sight. The sound analogy also leads to interesting dynamics that affect gameplay. For example, you can potentially avoid a fight with a flock of manta rays if you turn your engines down and just coast along until they’re gone.

Its great to have the attack behaviour working in the game now. It was a tricky thing to get right and no doubt will be refined further as development continues. I should remind you that the movement of the creatures is entirely controlled by physical forces. This is really important to make the creatures a believable and cohesive part of the world. But it creates challenges in achieving the desired aesthetic whilst also enabling the creatures to achieve their goals.

Here is the attack routine I came up with for attacking players. It’s just a few simple steps:

1. Close in on the target until within striking range.
2. Accelerate to a high velocity towards the target until it has been hit.
3. Retreat away from the target until outside of striking range.
4. Repeat from step 1.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of2g4UIpUpc

The results of this looked good, until we tested it on moving targets, ie. real players. It was just too easy to dodge a creature attack because the creatures couldn’t change direction anywhere near as quickly as a player. There are two main reasons for this.

Firstly the movement of the player’s character is designed largely for player satisfaction rather than for realism. This is something we gamers have become very accustomed to. In games we will stand for nothing less than being able to sprint faster than Usain Bolt, indefinitely, and to be able to change direction near instantly as if our character’s body weighed about the same as a squirrel.

The second reason why players could (and should) dodge so easily is that they have feet on solid ground, whereas these creatures just have wings in air. I’m talking about traction. If a bird tried to fly into you at high speed, providing you were on your feet and saw it coming with enough time to react, you would be able to dodge it by diving one way or the other. The bird will not be able to steer quickly enough to remain on target and will miss you. The fact that you’re then lying crippled on the floor as the bird comes at you a second time to peck your eyes out is besides the point.



So it was apparent to me that creatures needed a lot more traction in order for their attacks to feel dangerous to the player. The player should still be able to dodge it, but not so easily. So I started thinking of the creatures less like birds and more like sharks in the sea. Water is a denser medium than air and therefore offers much better traction; observe how quickly fish can accelerate, decelerate and change direction. By simply simulating much more drag (air resistance) on the creatures, and increasing the amount of movement force they can use to compensate for it, they became a lot more agile.

Not only did this make their attacks on players more effective, but it also improved how manta rays hunt down beetles. And for an additional win; this new agility makes the creatures look far more spectacular than they did before!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECHSdV7o8lM

That’s all for now. We’ll be sure to catch up soon when we’ve got some more exciting stuff to show you.

Matkins

Hey there everyone. It's Friday, and you know what that means? Not just the end of our week, when we can relax (and think about all of the work we have to do next week). It means we have things to show you!

Hmm, what first? How about this concept art from Jon Betts - way back when we started making the game. I know it's not TECHNICALLY from last week, but it's too good not to share.



Amazing, right?

Jack's been working on some more hairstyles. Take a look...







Klaudia has been working on desert plants...



Luke has been playing around with custom ship hulls and procedural ship parts.






Amazing, right? We'll have more to show you next week, but until then - jump into the comments and ask us any questions that you need answers for. And don't forget, you can talk to the Worlds Adrift community over on our official forums!

The following is our latest blog, originally posted on March 24th, 2016. To see our weekly updates first, register your account at the official Worlds Adrift website.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello everyone, my name is Murillo and I’m a programmer on Worlds Adrift. One of the systems I’ve been tasked with programming is the weather walls that we spoke about a few weeks ago.

We wanted the walls to present serious challenges for players as they tried to cross them, having to fight through very strong winds to get to the other side. The storm needed to spin your ship around, buffet it with powerful gusts, and generally make it difficult to keep your bearings. The idea behind these is to make sure only capable enough ships may cross — if your ship isn’t powerful enough to overcome the wind, it will be dragged or spun around out of control.



These ideas worked fine in what some MMO veterans would call a “gear check” (a test where all you need to pass is a strong enough ship) but that wasn’t good enough for Worlds Adrift. Once you had the gear, crossing these storms didn’t feel very interesting and you weren’t afraid of doing so anymore. We knew we wanted player skill to be a really big part of dealing with the weather in Worlds Adrift even if you had a great ship, so we decided to spice things up a bit; we switched off some of the components for these constant forces, removed the constant spin and tried shooting gusts of wind at random intervals on different parts of the ship.

As these gusts are pushing a random part of the ship they also make the ship rock in all directions, forcing you to compensate at the helm to maintain the ship’s level. Being a good pilot definitely makes a difference!



When we first tried storms, a combination of bad guesses for how strong the gusts should be and a couple of poor implementation choices (a.k.a. bugs) meant the gusts’ maximum forces ended up way too strong. The ship would suddenly spin around its axis several times or get flung hundreds of metres away. Once that was all solved and we figured out balanced values for it, crossing storm walls felt much more hazardous and more what you would expect it should feel like.

Another hazard players will definitely have to deal with within storm walls are lightning strikes. As you fly through a storm, lightning will very likely hit and damage parts of your ship, which will require you to have some redundant parts or be very quick to repair if you want to stay afloat. We plan to expand this mechanic further in the future; for example, the damage a ship part takes will depend on the material it’s made of, and certain ship parts will malfunction when hit by lightning – but even in its current form it adds a lot to the challenge.



To round it off, we’ve added (and are still working on some more) special effects to really sell how dangerous crossing a storm wall is supposed to be. Screen shaking, rain particles and the crackling of thunder is what really seals the deal when it comes to making you afraid you won’t make it out of the wall in one piece.

This is still work-in-progress, but I hope it gets you excited at the prospect of braving the dangers of Worlds Adrift. I, for one, am anxious to see you all on the other side!

The following is our latest blog, originally posted on March 24th, 2016. To see our weekly updates first, register your account at the official Worlds Adrift website.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello everyone, my name is Murillo and I’m a programmer on Worlds Adrift. One of the systems I’ve been tasked with programming is the weather walls that we spoke about a few weeks ago.

We wanted the walls to present serious challenges for players as they tried to cross them, having to fight through very strong winds to get to the other side. The storm needed to spin your ship around, buffet it with powerful gusts, and generally make it difficult to keep your bearings. The idea behind these is to make sure only capable enough ships may cross — if your ship isn’t powerful enough to overcome the wind, it will be dragged or spun around out of control.



These ideas worked fine in what some MMO veterans would call a “gear check” (a test where all you need to pass is a strong enough ship) but that wasn’t good enough for Worlds Adrift. Once you had the gear, crossing these storms didn’t feel very interesting and you weren’t afraid of doing so anymore. We knew we wanted player skill to be a really big part of dealing with the weather in Worlds Adrift even if you had a great ship, so we decided to spice things up a bit; we switched off some of the components for these constant forces, removed the constant spin and tried shooting gusts of wind at random intervals on different parts of the ship.

As these gusts are pushing a random part of the ship they also make the ship rock in all directions, forcing you to compensate at the helm to maintain the ship’s level. Being a good pilot definitely makes a difference!



When we first tried storms, a combination of bad guesses for how strong the gusts should be and a couple of poor implementation choices (a.k.a. bugs) meant the gusts’ maximum forces ended up way too strong. The ship would suddenly spin around its axis several times or get flung hundreds of metres away. Once that was all solved and we figured out balanced values for it, crossing storm walls felt much more hazardous and more what you would expect it should feel like.

Another hazard players will definitely have to deal with within storm walls are lightning strikes. As you fly through a storm, lightning will very likely hit and damage parts of your ship, which will require you to have some redundant parts or be very quick to repair if you want to stay afloat. We plan to expand this mechanic further in the future; for example, the damage a ship part takes will depend on the material it’s made of, and certain ship parts will malfunction when hit by lightning – but even in its current form it adds a lot to the challenge.



To round it off, we’ve added (and are still working on some more) special effects to really sell how dangerous crossing a storm wall is supposed to be. Screen shaking, rain particles and the crackling of thunder is what really seals the deal when it comes to making you afraid you won’t make it out of the wall in one piece.

This is still work-in-progress, but I hope it gets you excited at the prospect of braving the dangers of Worlds Adrift. I, for one, am anxious to see you all on the other side!

Hello there!

In the UK, we have a long weekend this week, but that doesn't mean we've been sneakily eating some Easter Eggs while the bosses weren't looking instead of making Worlds Adrift -- not at all!

And that's why we're here with another update on what we've been up to in the office!

Klaudia shared some cool-looking plants that you'll see in caves across the world.



We shared some cool images of Dan's concept art that he'd created a while back when envisioning the world.





Jack's been working on a new hairstyle that we like to call, "The Boris."

https://youtu.be/oGyTgdQRdoA

As well as that, Jon's created some concept art for a fountain.



Andy's character model's had a mishap and thinks its skeleton is 100 times smaller than it should be, leading to undesired , yet hilarious results.



We'll be back again next week with some more updates on all things Worlds Adrift and what's been happening at the office.

Jump into the comments and ask us any questions that you'd like! And don't forget, you can talk to the Worlds Adrift community over on our official forums!

Cheers!