We're gradually getting closer to a version of Testing that is good enough to migrate Live. I think we'll need 1 more Testing release before it should be ready. In parallel we have plenty of other features and assets in the pipeline which will also be rolled into the next Live release.

We've also been working again to try and reduce any latency issues. The next release of Testing will include some engine changes that improve the performance of the world meshing by making more stages of the pipeline run in parallel, and dramatically (fingers crossed) reduce the number requests to the server for worlds you've already visited. This should help make portals spring into life much faster. Boundless will now take more advantage of PCs with multiple cores. We'll make sure that there are sufficient options so that if you're capturing or streaming Boundless, or talking live with friends, that the game doesn't take all available resources.

We've also been reworking all the client + server combat code to enable much more prediction on the client. This should mean that the combat you see in the client matches what the server is doing. It makes combat much smoother and feel great. I think you'll notice a big change once this is released.

Lots of design work has been happening to tie together all the elemental weapons, tools, buffs, bombs, and creatures in game. The recent HUD updates attempt to communicate this in a clear way.



Code
Testing was updated with version Testing 163. All the details are in the release announcement.

Testing 163: Objectives, Threat, and more GUI!

The Status Effects are being worked through, adding dynamic modifiers to creatures and characters, for example the Slow buff now slows down the target and its animations. Bombs continue adding the throwing animation and it now has a fuze time so you can time your throw. The bombs now bounce off creatures.

The threading of the meshing is now integrated in for the next update and should roughly double the speed, making placing blocks more responsive as well as the world appear more rapidly, if it is downloading the data quickly enough.

We‘ve be adding the meshes for campfire and beacon controls that signify the state of the beacon’s fuel.

The GUI work is focusing on the Furnace and Storage. The Objective also continue to be polished up.

There was further work on the PlayStation 4 version to address some issues around multiple portals and excessive ram use.

Design
Apart from implementing the new objective system, Luke has been balancing different areas of the game for most of this week. He started the week off with the threat generating system and how it affects nearby creatures, particularly how they react to players with higher threat values. He also spent some time on improving how much Iron and Copper is spawned on spawn worlds, in response to player feedback. To finish off the week, he has been balancing the micro-experience rewards for performing certain actions in the game.

Ollie has been working with Andy and Fooks this week to bring the bombs and status effects system to life. He’s been trying to come up with fun and rewarding uses for these new features which will hopefully be coming to the game very soon. A nice break from the project management stuff he was doing last week, but alas he still had some to do this time as well.

Rob’s week has been spent on status effects as well. He’s been working on new concepts for a whole set of icons to show skills, status effects and different colour combinations to better represent on the HUD what is happening in the game.

Status effect elemental table:



Player related icons:



World related icons:



He also put together some new screens that are shown when you log out, when you are defeated and when you return to the sanctum. Some of these can already be seen in the Testing version on Steam.



Art
The art team have been supporting the Testing release, prototyping bombs, developing character customisation and more prefabs.

Amanda has been exploring different visual styles for how player tattoos should be designed. We did a first test exploring hard graphic shapes and gradients with a flaming tattoo decals theme. During character customisation you will be able to select a tattoo design and control the 3 different design colours.



Jess has finished the buying basket model. Now in game. Let us know what you think! The idea was to clearly differentiate between selling and buying.



We’re adding the last few prefabs to our first Earth-like library:

Adding more richness when exploring caves.

Cave ceiling crystals:



Underground remnant:



Underground themed remnant:



Standing stones:



Ancient glacier portal remnant:



Overgrown portal remnant:



Dry desert oasis:



They'll be another weekly dev update soon.

Cross posted from Devlog Forum

We're gradually getting closer to a version of Testing that is good enough to migrate Live. I think we'll need 1 more Testing release before it should be ready. In parallel we have plenty of other features and assets in the pipeline which will also be rolled into the next Live release.

We've also been working again to try and reduce any latency issues. The next release of Testing will include some engine changes that improve the performance of the world meshing by making more stages of the pipeline run in parallel, and dramatically (fingers crossed) reduce the number requests to the server for worlds you've already visited. This should help make portals spring into life much faster. Boundless will now take more advantage of PCs with multiple cores. We'll make sure that there are sufficient options so that if you're capturing or streaming Boundless, or talking live with friends, that the game doesn't take all available resources.

We've also been reworking all the client + server combat code to enable much more prediction on the client. This should mean that the combat you see in the client matches what the server is doing. It makes combat much smoother and feel great. I think you'll notice a big change once this is released.

Lots of design work has been happening to tie together all the elemental weapons, tools, buffs, bombs, and creatures in game. The recent HUD updates attempt to communicate this in a clear way.



Code
Testing was updated with version Testing 163. All the details are in the release announcement.

Testing 163: Objectives, Threat, and more GUI!

The Status Effects are being worked through, adding dynamic modifiers to creatures and characters, for example the Slow buff now slows down the target and its animations. Bombs continue adding the throwing animation and it now has a fuze time so you can time your throw. The bombs now bounce off creatures.

The threading of the meshing is now integrated in for the next update and should roughly double the speed, making placing blocks more responsive as well as the world appear more rapidly, if it is downloading the data quickly enough.

We‘ve be adding the meshes for campfire and beacon controls that signify the state of the beacon’s fuel.

The GUI work is focusing on the Furnace and Storage. The Objective also continue to be polished up.

There was further work on the PlayStation 4 version to address some issues around multiple portals and excessive ram use.

Design
Apart from implementing the new objective system, Luke has been balancing different areas of the game for most of this week. He started the week off with the threat generating system and how it affects nearby creatures, particularly how they react to players with higher threat values. He also spent some time on improving how much Iron and Copper is spawned on spawn worlds, in response to player feedback. To finish off the week, he has been balancing the micro-experience rewards for performing certain actions in the game.

Ollie has been working with Andy and Fooks this week to bring the bombs and status effects system to life. He’s been trying to come up with fun and rewarding uses for these new features which will hopefully be coming to the game very soon. A nice break from the project management stuff he was doing last week, but alas he still had some to do this time as well.

Rob’s week has been spent on status effects as well. He’s been working on new concepts for a whole set of icons to show skills, status effects and different colour combinations to better represent on the HUD what is happening in the game.

Status effect elemental table:



Player related icons:



World related icons:



He also put together some new screens that are shown when you log out, when you are defeated and when you return to the sanctum. Some of these can already be seen in the Testing version on Steam.



Art
The art team have been supporting the Testing release, prototyping bombs, developing character customisation and more prefabs.

Amanda has been exploring different visual styles for how player tattoos should be designed. We did a first test exploring hard graphic shapes and gradients with a flaming tattoo decals theme. During character customisation you will be able to select a tattoo design and control the 3 different design colours.



Jess has finished the buying basket model. Now in game. Let us know what you think! The idea was to clearly differentiate between selling and buying.



We’re adding the last few prefabs to our first Earth-like library:

Adding more richness when exploring caves.

Cave ceiling crystals:



Underground remnant:



Underground themed remnant:



Standing stones:



Ancient glacier portal remnant:



Overgrown portal remnant:



Dry desert oasis:



They'll be another weekly dev update soon.

Cross posted from Devlog Forum

We have our heads down working on iterating the Testing features and preparing them to release to Live. The Objective system is probably changing the most base on feedback from players. We're also working on the world loading pipeline: streaming, caching and meshing to make the game and portals spring into life faster.

Code
A new Threat mechanic has being added to the game. The creatures now display a threatened animation when players get too close for comfort and depending on the damage users have done to other creatures.

The Bombs system is implemented to a first pass, bouncing around with a ribbon trail and hooked into a new throwing animation. A first pass version of Status Effect hooks has been added to help visualise when a character is buffed or debuffed / penalised.

The reskinning of the GUI continues with the character sheet now showing the attributes and skill trees displaying more information on each item.

The character customisation added three colour tattoo decal support and general polish. The backend support for multiple characters per user is progressing.

The campfire and beacon meshes are being integrated into the game and will show when the fuel is running low.

Further work on using additional threads for meshing has yielded good results; it's looking like it will yield a least a twofold increase in performance.

Design
Luke has been implementing the changes to the tutorial and objectives as outlined in his post. Thank you to everyone who has contributed feedback and criticism. He’s also been balancing the new threat system.

Ollie has been continuing to set up and add to the new project management software. The peak of excitement being moving all the bug reports from GitHub to JIRA. It doesn’t get much better than that! He’s also been helping Marc with the profile screen and Fooksy with the bombs.

Rob has been working on the icons in the game, which takes a long time for something so small! He’s also been looking into how the HUD scales with different settings, and settling on good defaults for both PC and PS4.



Additionally, he’s been updating the character profile screen, as well as doing another pass on the beacon screen.



Art
This week the art team were a bit light with illness but development continued apace. Amanda has continued with pole concepts. We’re continuing character customisation development adding eye shapes, iterating face designs and body decals.

Jess completed the new buying plinth asset. Now redesigned as a basket to put requested items into. We think this will be a lot clearer.



We’re approaching the home stretch on building our library of earth-inspired prefabs. We can’t wait to start populating the final version of the biomes with these.


Arid cacti.


Giant sunflowers.


Giant redwood trees.


Twisted trees.

Gerry has completed a set of creature threat animations. These telegraph to the player creature threat intent.

For a comprehensive overview see Gerry’s post:

Creature Threat Animations - Gif Collection (warning - large post)

That’s all for now, see you next week!

Cross posted from Devlog Forum

We have our heads down working on iterating the Testing features and preparing them to release to Live. The Objective system is probably changing the most base on feedback from players. We're also working on the world loading pipeline: streaming, caching and meshing to make the game and portals spring into life faster.

Code
A new Threat mechanic has being added to the game. The creatures now display a threatened animation when players get too close for comfort and depending on the damage users have done to other creatures.

The Bombs system is implemented to a first pass, bouncing around with a ribbon trail and hooked into a new throwing animation. A first pass version of Status Effect hooks has been added to help visualise when a character is buffed or debuffed / penalised.

The reskinning of the GUI continues with the character sheet now showing the attributes and skill trees displaying more information on each item.

The character customisation added three colour tattoo decal support and general polish. The backend support for multiple characters per user is progressing.

The campfire and beacon meshes are being integrated into the game and will show when the fuel is running low.

Further work on using additional threads for meshing has yielded good results; it's looking like it will yield a least a twofold increase in performance.

Design
Luke has been implementing the changes to the tutorial and objectives as outlined in his post. Thank you to everyone who has contributed feedback and criticism. He’s also been balancing the new threat system.

Ollie has been continuing to set up and add to the new project management software. The peak of excitement being moving all the bug reports from GitHub to JIRA. It doesn’t get much better than that! He’s also been helping Marc with the profile screen and Fooksy with the bombs.

Rob has been working on the icons in the game, which takes a long time for something so small! He’s also been looking into how the HUD scales with different settings, and settling on good defaults for both PC and PS4.



Additionally, he’s been updating the character profile screen, as well as doing another pass on the beacon screen.



Art
This week the art team were a bit light with illness but development continued apace. Amanda has continued with pole concepts. We’re continuing character customisation development adding eye shapes, iterating face designs and body decals.

Jess completed the new buying plinth asset. Now redesigned as a basket to put requested items into. We think this will be a lot clearer.



We’re approaching the home stretch on building our library of earth-inspired prefabs. We can’t wait to start populating the final version of the biomes with these.


Arid cacti.


Giant sunflowers.


Giant redwood trees.


Twisted trees.

Gerry has completed a set of creature threat animations. These telegraph to the player creature threat intent.

For a comprehensive overview see Gerry’s post:

Creature Threat Animations - Gif Collection (warning - large post)

That’s all for now, see you next week!

Cross posted from Devlog Forum

This week we've been reviewing all the feedback and ideas from the recent Testing releases. This has mainly focused around the Objective system and exploring alterations that gives players freedom to explore their own path - which has always been the ambition.

The high level aim of the Objectives are to:

1. Tutorial Objectives: Gradually introduce players to all the features of the game. This will start as some basic Tutorial style objectives at the beginning, but continue up to more complex introductions such as building a Portal. To experienced players this may seem like a bore, but we get lots of comments from players not knowing how to proceed in the game. And not everyone is keen to ask for help on the forums or Discord. The aim is to allow players to play Boundless without resorting to a Wiki.

So now you know how to play the game, what should you do next?

1. Rewards for your own direction: If you want to go off explore, mine, gather, fight, build, craft, build a city, develop your character, then there needs to be a reward mechanism.
   
   
2. Rewards for given direction: If you want a mission or an objective beyond #1 then there should also be a reward mechanism. The aim is to make these longer form much more like quests.

I think we have some solid ideas and will make sure they're shared for community feedback.

From a release perspective we're working to migrate the Testing version across to Live, but this will not happen until we're happy that the Objectives are exactly how we want them. So it's likely to be a few more weeks.

Code
We started the first pass implementing the throwable Bombs. These are thrown grenade-like objects that bounce around and have a timed fuse. When crafted they will support a wide range of effects beside explosions, including buffs like healing and penalties like slowing targets.

Further work continues on the Tutorial and Objectives. The GUI skinning continues with the character screens, beacon and settlement screens getting a visual update.

A first pass of the Character Customisation is now complete and is sufficient for us to test the character assets in the game engine. We have some more iteration planned before this feature is merged into the Testing or Live releases. We added some new prop blocks with six variants of plants, rocks and fungus.

We have started work to allow more threads to be used when meshing the world. This should mean that loading (assume you're not bound by networking) and world alterations should appear much quicker. Ultimately this will make the game feel more responsive and make better use of the available hardware. We worked on further optimisation of loading and memory for PlayStation 4.

Design
This week Luke was poring over the feedback on the objectives system and tutorial from the community, and together with feedback from our own internal play sessions he’s come up with a plan for the next iteration. He’s also been preparing some posts for social media, so watch out for those.

Ollie has spent much of the time setting up a new project management system (exciting!). He’s also been prioritising the tasks in our backlog to work out what we should do next.

Rob has been exploring how best to communicate player status in the HUD.

The design captures:

1. The most basic reticle.
   
2. Reticle holding equipment in both your right and left hands.
   
3. Equipment cool down in the right hand.
   
4. Powering up or charging in the left hand.
   
5. Exposure to a toxic atmosphere.
   
6. Oxygen depletion whilst underwater.
   
7. Direction of damage indicator.
   
8. All items together. (If your reticle ever looks like this - RUN!!)

Below is the current visual target for the complete HUD with all elements activated. (Before anyone complains that it looks too busy - this is with all the elements activated, it will not normally look like this!) Let us know what you think, because now is the time to get feedback and make some changes.



Art
The art team has been busy working across a wide range of areas.

• 1st person tools/weapons: Gerry has nearly completed the final pass on the 1st person tools and weapons animations. As mentioned previously these animation positions are designed to work with a less distorted FOV in 1st person. See Gerry’s WIP. Notice how accurate the model proportions are compared to what we’re used to in Live.

• Kit of Poles - Amanda is having fun concepting the poles feature. She’s close to concluding our planned design on these. See her second WIP post here. The poles will be a framework for building lots of different structures: street lights, flag poles, wells, cooking spits, building supports, and poles.

• We’re in production on the character heads. He’s a sneak peek of the ZBrush Orc-inspired head with annotated feedback from Amanda. It takes a lot of work to get the models to match the original concepts.

• Character Customisation - Jess has been supporting Luca who’s created a placeholder character customisation screen, featuring selectable faces, heads, bodies, colours.

• Natural props - Production on natural prop meshes continues apace. Blocktypes have now been added for the full planned set of natural props. In rocky areas if you want to find mushroom-type resources, you'll find it growing on these rocks.

Here’s our progress of the set all here using the same tint as a plant model.

• Sanctum - We’ve started pre-production on the new Sanctum. It’s too early to share any details but we’re very excited creating the first environment the player sees when entering the Boundless universe. More of this to come.
  
  
• World Builder Prefabs - We’re augmenting our set of natural prefabs with some interesting little shrines. Some of these have been updated since last week.

World Builder prefabs are always welcomed especially if you have a crazy or fun idea of something we can hide in the worlds for players to discover!

Cross posted from Devlog Forum

This week we've been reviewing all the feedback and ideas from the recent Testing releases. This has mainly focused around the Objective system and exploring alterations that gives players freedom to explore their own path - which has always been the ambition.

The high level aim of the Objectives are to:

1. Tutorial Objectives: Gradually introduce players to all the features of the game. This will start as some basic Tutorial style objectives at the beginning, but continue up to more complex introductions such as building a Portal. To experienced players this may seem like a bore, but we get lots of comments from players not knowing how to proceed in the game. And not everyone is keen to ask for help on the forums or Discord. The aim is to allow players to play Boundless without resorting to a Wiki.

So now you know how to play the game, what should you do next?

1. Rewards for your own direction: If you want to go off explore, mine, gather, fight, build, craft, build a city, develop your character, then there needs to be a reward mechanism.
   
   
2. Rewards for given direction: If you want a mission or an objective beyond #1 then there should also be a reward mechanism. The aim is to make these longer form much more like quests.

I think we have some solid ideas and will make sure they're shared for community feedback.

From a release perspective we're working to migrate the Testing version across to Live, but this will not happen until we're happy that the Objectives are exactly how we want them. So it's likely to be a few more weeks.

Code
We started the first pass implementing the throwable Bombs. These are thrown grenade-like objects that bounce around and have a timed fuse. When crafted they will support a wide range of effects beside explosions, including buffs like healing and penalties like slowing targets.

Further work continues on the Tutorial and Objectives. The GUI skinning continues with the character screens, beacon and settlement screens getting a visual update.

A first pass of the Character Customisation is now complete and is sufficient for us to test the character assets in the game engine. We have some more iteration planned before this feature is merged into the Testing or Live releases. We added some new prop blocks with six variants of plants, rocks and fungus.

We have started work to allow more threads to be used when meshing the world. This should mean that loading (assume you're not bound by networking) and world alterations should appear much quicker. Ultimately this will make the game feel more responsive and make better use of the available hardware. We worked on further optimisation of loading and memory for PlayStation 4.

Design
This week Luke was poring over the feedback on the objectives system and tutorial from the community, and together with feedback from our own internal play sessions he’s come up with a plan for the next iteration. He’s also been preparing some posts for social media, so watch out for those.

Ollie has spent much of the time setting up a new project management system (exciting!). He’s also been prioritising the tasks in our backlog to work out what we should do next.

Rob has been exploring how best to communicate player status in the HUD.

The design captures:

1. The most basic reticle.
   
2. Reticle holding equipment in both your right and left hands.
   
3. Equipment cool down in the right hand.
   
4. Powering up or charging in the left hand.
   
5. Exposure to a toxic atmosphere.
   
6. Oxygen depletion whilst underwater.
   
7. Direction of damage indicator.
   
8. All items together. (If your reticle ever looks like this - RUN!!)

Below is the current visual target for the complete HUD with all elements activated. (Before anyone complains that it looks too busy - this is with all the elements activated, it will not normally look like this!) Let us know what you think, because now is the time to get feedback and make some changes.



Art
The art team has been busy working across a wide range of areas.

• 1st person tools/weapons: Gerry has nearly completed the final pass on the 1st person tools and weapons animations. As mentioned previously these animation positions are designed to work with a less distorted FOV in 1st person. See Gerry’s WIP. Notice how accurate the model proportions are compared to what we’re used to in Live.

• Kit of Poles - Amanda is having fun concepting the poles feature. She’s close to concluding our planned design on these. See her second WIP post here. The poles will be a framework for building lots of different structures: street lights, flag poles, wells, cooking spits, building supports, and poles.

• We’re in production on the character heads. He’s a sneak peek of the ZBrush Orc-inspired head with annotated feedback from Amanda. It takes a lot of work to get the models to match the original concepts.

• Character Customisation - Jess has been supporting Luca who’s created a placeholder character customisation screen, featuring selectable faces, heads, bodies, colours.

• Natural props - Production on natural prop meshes continues apace. Blocktypes have now been added for the full planned set of natural props. In rocky areas if you want to find mushroom-type resources, you'll find it growing on these rocks.

Here’s our progress of the set all here using the same tint as a plant model.

• Sanctum - We’ve started pre-production on the new Sanctum. It’s too early to share any details but we’re very excited creating the first environment the player sees when entering the Boundless universe. More of this to come.
  
  
• World Builder Prefabs - We’re augmenting our set of natural prefabs with some interesting little shrines. Some of these have been updated since last week.

World Builder prefabs are always welcomed especially if you have a crazy or fun idea of something we can hide in the worlds for players to discover!

Cross posted from Devlog Forum

This week, we have been predominantly fixing bugs, making tweaks and extending existing features for the update this week. Details of the update can be found here. The first person animations missed the cut off for this release. They should be included in the next update.



Over the next coming weeks, we will continue tweaking objectives and making sure that attributes are acceptably balanced (proper 1st pass). This includes properly updating the skill tree GUI. We're still in the process of converting the GUI to the 1.0 design and features.

The Lance has been delayed whilst we've been working on the client prediction of more combat actions, this helps make the game feel more responsive. We have an asset for the Beacon Control and Campfire ready to deploy.

We've also been working on the Character Customisation pipeline so that we can test the different assets we've been creating. Hopefully this'll be released soon we a subset of the assets for you to play around with and make your character feel unique.

Code
The foundations of the Character Customisation are being laid, building the mesh from a selection of body parts (face, head horns or crest, eyes and body shape), colouration and decals.

The slingbow is now predictive so the lag between firing and hitting is now predicted client side making it feel more responsive. The knock back has been reworked to also allow predictive feedback.

Stamina system has been implemented, so it is now drained by various actions like running and jumping. Jumping has been reworked to fit with the character progression. Further work continues on the tutorial and objectives. The skill tree, portals and warps have been reskinned.

We’ve added some first pass effects for item rank (when leveled up at the forge), and character status effects, e.g. when poisoned. Further sound effects have been added including the start of custom creature tier effects, making killing the lower level wild stock even more of a guilt trip.

We’ve improved boot up times, especially on PlayStation 4. Some long standing physics bugs have been fixed, mainly around the more complex shaped objects. (So no more walking along walls next to stairs - magic over.)

Art
This week the art team have been busy on decorative props, 1st person tools animations, hunter animations, prefabs and the beacon control.

Gerry has completed the animation set for the Hunter - our scariest creature yet.
Check out all the latest animations in this monster post here.

Jess has shared the model for the beacon control - here.

Amanda has been iterating on the decorative pole concepts. She will share her progress next week.

As mentioned in previous posts we are building a library of prefabs for the worlds. This will make the worlds more interesting to explore. Here’s some latest work in progress pics of altars and shrines:















If you're feeling creative please submit some of your own designs to include in the world generator.

Cross posted from Devlog Forum

This week, we have been predominantly fixing bugs, making tweaks and extending existing features for the update this week. Details of the update can be found here. The first person animations missed the cut off for this release. They should be included in the next update.



Over the next coming weeks, we will continue tweaking objectives and making sure that attributes are acceptably balanced (proper 1st pass). This includes properly updating the skill tree GUI. We're still in the process of converting the GUI to the 1.0 design and features.

The Lance has been delayed whilst we've been working on the client prediction of more combat actions, this helps make the game feel more responsive. We have an asset for the Beacon Control and Campfire ready to deploy.

We've also been working on the Character Customisation pipeline so that we can test the different assets we've been creating. Hopefully this'll be released soon we a subset of the assets for you to play around with and make your character feel unique.

Code
The foundations of the Character Customisation are being laid, building the mesh from a selection of body parts (face, head horns or crest, eyes and body shape), colouration and decals.

The slingbow is now predictive so the lag between firing and hitting is now predicted client side making it feel more responsive. The knock back has been reworked to also allow predictive feedback.

Stamina system has been implemented, so it is now drained by various actions like running and jumping. Jumping has been reworked to fit with the character progression. Further work continues on the tutorial and objectives. The skill tree, portals and warps have been reskinned.

We’ve added some first pass effects for item rank (when leveled up at the forge), and character status effects, e.g. when poisoned. Further sound effects have been added including the start of custom creature tier effects, making killing the lower level wild stock even more of a guilt trip.

We’ve improved boot up times, especially on PlayStation 4. Some long standing physics bugs have been fixed, mainly around the more complex shaped objects. (So no more walking along walls next to stairs - magic over.)

Art
This week the art team have been busy on decorative props, 1st person tools animations, hunter animations, prefabs and the beacon control.

Gerry has completed the animation set for the Hunter - our scariest creature yet.
Check out all the latest animations in this monster post here.

Jess has shared the model for the beacon control - here.

Amanda has been iterating on the decorative pole concepts. She will share her progress next week.

As mentioned in previous posts we are building a library of prefabs for the worlds. This will make the worlds more interesting to explore. Here’s some latest work in progress pics of altars and shrines:















If you're feeling creative please submit some of your own designs to include in the world generator.

Cross posted from Devlog Forum

This week we've mainly been reviewing and fixing all the issues raised with Testing 161. We'll likely iterate another Testing update before we consider releasing these changes to Live on Steam.



We have also spent a chunk of our time playing the game from the Tutorial to identify areas to make improvements on. Hence, this week has been about fixing bugs and working on the plan to make improvements. We have also been working on some new features too. We are hoping to update the testing release of Boundless again next week with the following:

• Various bug fixes
  
• High priority changes to the Testing release identified internally by the team and externally by the community.
  
• Update 1st person animations.
  
• Updated Machine recipe & queue GUI.
  
• Updated Skill Tree GUI.
  
• More functioning attributes (skill unlock).
  
• Fixes to the broken Objectives.
  
• Updated creature assets for the Cuttletrunk, Hopper and Spitter so that they're more visible in darker places.

Code
There has been further work on the revamped tutorial including re-adding the Elder character. For Objectives and Progression we’ve added more movement tracking Statributes. As part of progression we’ve also been experimenting with jump logic upgrades.

The GUI reskinning is working through the Machine, Beacons and Progression interfaces.

We've added support for attaching VFXs to the different character joints for glowing status effects experiments and additional fade out logic. A few bugs have been tackled including the bright fog in lower caves.

For the PlayStation 4 we’ve been fixing up some Trophy code and further work on the memory manager. Lots of smaller changes have been worked through including reworking some of the fundamental data types to help productivity.

Design
Monday morning this week started with a full team playthrough to look at all the changes that have gone in, but specifically the tutorial and initial objectives. It was a very useful exercise, and threw up a lots of feedback from everyone.

Ollie went through all the playthrough feedback, sorted it and categorised it. We then worked to come up with some changes and polish tasks for the next iteration. He also worked with Rob on the Forge, and has started writing up what will hopefully be a comprehensive first-pass design for the system.

As well as taking part in the playthrough, and working out the next steps for the tutorial and objectives,Luke has been fixing bugs and working with Luca on updates to the character jumping to incorporate variable jump heights (based on skills) and the double jump. Towards the end of the week he started implementing the changes to the tutorial and objectives.

We shared some data about the latest resource changes to help players understand the current online Live worlds.

https://forum.playboundless.com/t/tech-resource-distribution-metrics/7194

Rob, who obviously was also involved in the playthrough, was working with Simon on the updated warp UI, and with Marc on the updated skill tree UI. The rest of the time has been working with Ollie to wrangle with the complexity of the Forge and come up with an engaging, but understandable feature that will keep the keener crafters amongst you interested. The Forge is the machine that enhances your gear with special features, making them unique and special.

Here is a work-in-progress capture of the forge, tentatively named the “Centraforge”:



Art
Progress has continued with the new system of majority of the 1st person tool animations which will share the same default positioning, core animations and perspective for consistency. Some of the new features Gerry and Dave have been looking at this week include splitting the swing animations of the tools (hammer, chisel etc) into a hit or miss action depending on if contact has been made with the block mined. We plan on matching the animations with the trigger cues for SFX and VFX which will provide a much more responsive 1st person experience.

Big progress with the face and head customisation options for the new character models has also been made in the art department. Here’s some of the work Jess has shared with the team this week. During character creation you will be able to select a face and head piece combination.



Finally here’s the latest glimpse of the ‘Pole System’ that Minyi has been busy visualising through her concept work. In particular she has been looking at connecting different widths with the hope that you will be able to walk through some and not through others.

She has also been exploring the visual value of the core materials so that wood does not become devalued in terms of decorational aesthetics. It therefore wouldn’t be necessary to link a wooden build to the lowest tier of prestige.



More work in progress images are here:

https://forum.playboundless.com/t/art-decorative-props-concept-art-massive-post-4-13-updated/7051

Cross post from Dev Forum

This week we've mainly been reviewing and fixing all the issues raised with Testing 161. We'll likely iterate another Testing update before we consider releasing these changes to Live on Steam.



We have also spent a chunk of our time playing the game from the Tutorial to identify areas to make improvements on. Hence, this week has been about fixing bugs and working on the plan to make improvements. We have also been working on some new features too. We are hoping to update the testing release of Boundless again next week with the following:

• Various bug fixes
  
• High priority changes to the Testing release identified internally by the team and externally by the community.
  
• Update 1st person animations.
  
• Updated Machine recipe & queue GUI.
  
• Updated Skill Tree GUI.
  
• More functioning attributes (skill unlock).
  
• Fixes to the broken Objectives.
  
• Updated creature assets for the Cuttletrunk, Hopper and Spitter so that they're more visible in darker places.

Code
There has been further work on the revamped tutorial including re-adding the Elder character. For Objectives and Progression we’ve added more movement tracking Statributes. As part of progression we’ve also been experimenting with jump logic upgrades.

The GUI reskinning is working through the Machine, Beacons and Progression interfaces.

We've added support for attaching VFXs to the different character joints for glowing status effects experiments and additional fade out logic. A few bugs have been tackled including the bright fog in lower caves.

For the PlayStation 4 we’ve been fixing up some Trophy code and further work on the memory manager. Lots of smaller changes have been worked through including reworking some of the fundamental data types to help productivity.

Design
Monday morning this week started with a full team playthrough to look at all the changes that have gone in, but specifically the tutorial and initial objectives. It was a very useful exercise, and threw up a lots of feedback from everyone.

Ollie went through all the playthrough feedback, sorted it and categorised it. We then worked to come up with some changes and polish tasks for the next iteration. He also worked with Rob on the Forge, and has started writing up what will hopefully be a comprehensive first-pass design for the system.

As well as taking part in the playthrough, and working out the next steps for the tutorial and objectives,Luke has been fixing bugs and working with Luca on updates to the character jumping to incorporate variable jump heights (based on skills) and the double jump. Towards the end of the week he started implementing the changes to the tutorial and objectives.

We shared some data about the latest resource changes to help players understand the current online Live worlds.

https://forum.playboundless.com/t/tech-resource-distribution-metrics/7194

Rob, who obviously was also involved in the playthrough, was working with Simon on the updated warp UI, and with Marc on the updated skill tree UI. The rest of the time has been working with Ollie to wrangle with the complexity of the Forge and come up with an engaging, but understandable feature that will keep the keener crafters amongst you interested. The Forge is the machine that enhances your gear with special features, making them unique and special.

Here is a work-in-progress capture of the forge, tentatively named the “Centraforge”:



Art
Progress has continued with the new system of majority of the 1st person tool animations which will share the same default positioning, core animations and perspective for consistency. Some of the new features Gerry and Dave have been looking at this week include splitting the swing animations of the tools (hammer, chisel etc) into a hit or miss action depending on if contact has been made with the block mined. We plan on matching the animations with the trigger cues for SFX and VFX which will provide a much more responsive 1st person experience.

Big progress with the face and head customisation options for the new character models has also been made in the art department. Here’s some of the work Jess has shared with the team this week. During character creation you will be able to select a face and head piece combination.



Finally here’s the latest glimpse of the ‘Pole System’ that Minyi has been busy visualising through her concept work. In particular she has been looking at connecting different widths with the hope that you will be able to walk through some and not through others.

She has also been exploring the visual value of the core materials so that wood does not become devalued in terms of decorational aesthetics. It therefore wouldn’t be necessary to link a wooden build to the lowest tier of prestige.



More work in progress images are here:

https://forum.playboundless.com/t/art-decorative-props-concept-art-massive-post-4-13-updated/7051

Cross post from Dev Forum