The following is our latest blog, originally posted on July 12th, 2016. To see our weekly updates first, register your account at the official Worlds Adrift website.
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Hello, aspiring world builders! Tom here. For the past eight months, the Island Creator tool has taken up the majority of my time. It started life as a modest development only tool made purely to work on our procedural generation. As the tool matured, I began making it user-friendly enough for our artists to use at Bossa so that they could create target islands. That was all well and good, but after a complete UI and UX redesign, I was convinced it had the makings of a consumer grade product, and it should be a much bigger part of our game. It was always going to be a tough sell to get approved as my time was 100% taken up by gameplay programming and procedural generation code (Not to mention it is a hundred times more challenging to make a tool that is consumer ready as opposed to something only for use internally).
Somehow, It got approved, and it was full steam ahead to get the tool out there and into the hands of the players.
We had no idea what would happen (if anything), but the idea was to put it out, with no restrictions on who can use it, and just ‘See What Happens’™. At best, we’d get some feedback and potential indicators in how players would like the world to look. Worst case, we had a useful tool we could see being used internally at Bossa in some form or another for many level design tasks.
A relatively short 12 weeks ago, we released, and within days, all expectations were exceeded. Peoples creations were so far beyond our comprehension, pushing the tool to its absolute limits so quickly.
Within a month we had 1200 unique user created islands. An incredibly high standard of quality, and it seemed, people were taking their creations really seriously. The Worlds Adrift lore is indeed very rich, but you would only know the extent of it if you’re following the development. Many people were playing with the tool without having heard of Worlds Adrift. Even so, the works that players came up with were fantastic, profound, and deep in environmental storytelling. A testament to our art team and their incredible assets that inspired many people to use them in creative ways.
As of right now, the latest update is live on Steam, and I’d like to showcase some of the great new features that make creating islands orders of magnitude easier and more fun than ever. This also serves as a testament to the perseverance of the following authors, as their achievements without the added ‘quality of life’ features we’ve developed since, is outstanding.
“The Makers Sundial” by rykaan.
The placement of all these assets on the top of the sundial building is a work of art in itself. Each one would have been hand placed then numerically positioned based on some formula the creator derived.
Now with the duplicate function and multiple selections, this is as easy as pressing Ctrl+D a few dozen times.
“The great cathedral” by JetSet.
The work of a great architect. The surprising thing is, all the pieces used here, were never designed to go together. We have designed purpose built ‘ruin-kits’ with base pieces to allow you to let your creativity run wild. The latest release includes the first batch of Saborian pieces.
Here’s a quick fly over our artist Jack’s latest island showing how easy it is to create structural features that seamlessly blend with the island terrain.
“Arid Island” by SuspiciouslyAwesome.
A perfect example of making a few textures go a long way. We only supported four surface layers in the previous version, but this island makes that look like more than enough. However, you were crying out for more so we somehow managed to squeeze in an extra four.
“Mountain Ruins” by Daft Vader.
This is an incredible display of sculpting prowess. The mountains are so well defined and this was before the sculpt tools overhaul. In the latest version, we have a rotatable flatten plane, carving and adding mass are now extra smooth, keyboard shortcuts to change brush size mid-sculpt (Square Brackets [ and ] ), and as an added bonus, we also added pressure sensitivity support for graphics tablet devices.
There are too many changes in the new Island Creator to go through them all in this post but click here to check out a full list.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39mKAMEvle4
So what’s next?
Firstly, the Island Creator is an on-going effort, parallel to the main title. It will continue life through many major updates, adding features, creating more assets, player control and camera updates in line with the game, and optimisations as we get closer to a release for Worlds Adrift.
After the game is playable, the Island Creator is still entirely relevant. The game will have a good amount of procedurally generated islands alongside the community and our artist’s creations on the first release. But what I would LOVE to see in the distant future, is every single island in our world… completely bespoke and handmade. Imagine that, 10,000 islands all lovingly crafted, each one unique and ripe for exploration. That is a huge drive for me, and I believe it would be the first persistent shared world to attempt something on that scale.
As for the distant future, we already have plans for systems to ‘refresh’ the existing islands in the world, by making them sink into the void beneath the extreme pressure of the ‘death clouds’ and new islands rising to take their place. Ultimately this allows us to replace islands without taking the server down. So even if the world were to reach a theoretical ‘full’, there would always be a place for community created content many years after release, making the skies of Worlds Adrift an ever evolving, ever moving and compelling place to be. I cannot wait to see you all out there .
Tom
@quickfingerz
Coder