Studio Profile
How a group of EA veterans turned Minecraft into an MMO
Meet Turbulenz, the tech company turned maker of the startlingly popular MMORPG Boundless
Boundless is a sandbox MMORPG of uncommon resilience. Consider, for one thing, the hardiness of its geography. Four years since entering Early Access, it still resembles Minecraft with a splash of Avatar, but where Minecraft’s voxel vistas can be stripped to the bedrock, the planets of Boundless slyly repair themselves in your absence. Quarries are sucked back into the soil, trees regrown, structures erased save for those safeguarded by Beacons, each player’s means of establishing ownership. The resources each region contains, however, vary their distribution each time, so even if you know the terrain you’ll still need to poke around a bit. All this reflects a careful balance between allowing seasoned players to leave a mark while ensuring that there’s plenty of ‘unspoilt’ wilderness for newcomers. “You don’t want to go into a cave and discover that it’s like an escalator going down, all lit up,” Turbulenz co-founder and CEO
James Austin says. The regeneration system as it stands was not part of the original Boundless blueprint. It’s the result of years of back-and-forth between the tiny, Guildford-based Turbulenz team and its community, with some players chalking up thousands of hours in a game that has seen over 200 updates. “We might have discovered that was required during development, but when we first planned out the game it wasn’t on the to-do list,” Austin goes on. “It emerged as players were manipulating the environment.”
The roots of Boundless reach back to Austin’s days as a tech manager at EA in the midnoughties. The publisher had acquired a motley mix of game-development technologies via various acquisitions, and Austin’s job was to identify the best tools and promote them to different teams. It was a chaotic time – EA employed well over 1,000 engineers worldwide, production costs were on the rise thanks to the advent of HD gaming, and Sony’s notoriously oblique PlayStation 3 architecture posed difficulties for multiplatform teams. There was an urgent need, Austin says, for tools that would allow the creation of “high production value games without having to constantly fight against tech”. In particular, he saw huge opportunity in web browsers and the idea of streaming parts of a game to the player on demand. Having left EA in 2008, Austin and a small group of former EA directors and programmers set out to make these ideas a reality.
To begin with, Turbulenz was purely a tech company. Over the ensuing two years, it sought to pitch its eponymous engine and expertise to a selection of industry big-hitters. “We spent quite a bit of time talking with platform owners, like people own browsers – Microsoft, Google, Mozilla. We also spent a long time doing consultancy for large-ish companies that had an interest in the web space. What can we do in the browser that has never been done before?” Other studios were hesitant, however, to embrace the concept of fully web-based game development. “We could do stuff in the browser that nobody else could do,” Austin says. “But we were only really getting traction through bits of consultancy, and we were finding it really hard to convince, let’s say, ‘classic’ game developers that this was a viable way of making games. Even though we could demonstrate it, people would say, ‘Well, we already make games with this engine, we already have all this stuff. How do we sell the games? Where’s the store for that?’”
The studio concluded that on its own a proof-of-concept build wasn’t persuasive enough – it needed to actually make and release games using its own tools. The result was 2013’s
Polycraft, a Javascript-based multiplayer tower-defence game, published under the company’s new Wonderstruck label. As a showcase for the Turbulenz engine Polycraft did its job perfectly, but enthusiasm for the project within the team was limited. “And I thought this was weird,” Austin reflects. “We’re quite a small team – how do we make a game that we don’t enjoy? We have to do differently with our next project.”
Where Polycraft was perhaps too obviously a composite of existing genres, 2014’s The
Marvellous Miss Take was more of a passion project with a distinct identity – a retro heist adventure notable for its gadgets and reactive guard AI. Seeking to expand its clout beyond PC, Turbulenz approached Sony about publishing the game on PS4. The publisher was unconvinced, but its attention was caught by the studio’s third and larger project, a sandbox affair then titled
Oort Online, an attempt to turn Minecraft into an MMORPG. To Turbulenz, the game that would become Boundless made sense partly because, as a systems-driven affair, it side-stepped the need for a gigantic art department. To Sony, it appealed firstly because the PlayStation 4 had nothing like it, and secondly because as a crossplatform live simulation, it was a way of extending the brand’s presence beyond the living room.
Sony’s support effected a sea-change at Turbulenz – from using games to showcase its tech, to building tech in the service of a game. “We were struggling to commercialise a pure technology business, and we had a partner who wanted us to focus full-time on Boundless,” Austin says. “And we thought, ‘Okay, fine, let’s go all in on that’.” Prior to capturing the publisher’s interest, the company had sought to crowdfund the project, releasing a prototype in 2014 with funding goals available via its own website. Austin and his colleagues considered Kickstarter, but were wary of its “all-or-nothing” ethos. “We were quite nervous about going all-in with, ‘We need a million pounds’ or whatever – going from low awareness and building up very quickly,” he says.
Thanks to some savvy promotion and the then-scarcity of serious Minecraft competitors,
Boundless soon found a following on PC. One sacrifice the studio had to make, however, was
“WE HAD A PARTNER WHO WANTED US TO FOCUS FULL-TIME ON BOUNDLESS. WE THOUGHT OKAY, FINE, LET’S GO ALL IN”
“THE REASON WE HAVEN’T PUBLISHED A ROADMAP IS THAT I KNOW FOR A FACT THE PLAN WILL CHANGE”
the idea of running it in a browser. “Players said, ‘We don’t want to go to a website, we just want to go to our Steam library’,” Austin says. “They wanted something that wasn’t as technically progressive.” It was the first in a series of adjustments as the studio learned to treat its audience as a fellow collaborator, “another voice” in the room. “Many games historically used Early Access as a stepping stone to release,” Austin says. “We were in Early Access from the very beginning of our development process, which did cause us challenges, because we had this persistent universe we were trying to develop, but which I think ultimately taught us an awful lot.”
Part of the journey was, inevitably, dealing with the community’s lack of knowledge about the rigours of development. “Players don’t appreciate how long it takes to make a game,” Austin says. “We’re not the world’s biggest team, and people were like, ‘We know what we want and we want it now – go.’ And we said, ‘Sorry, but game development takes years, especially when you’re trying to do something that’s new.‘” In a bid to demystify the process, the team has made portions of the data it gathers about player activities visible to players themselves. Planets and biomes, for example, have live resource breakdowns that explicate the inner workings of the terrain regeneration system. By popping a resource into your portable Atlas, you can access a resource heatmap for the area you’re in.
Another major challenge has been balancing rates of progression across a huge range of player disciplines, time investments and degrees of cooperation. Boundless attracts a wide variety of personalities. There are Minecraft veterans who are happy to live alongside others but essentially want to do everything themselves, and migrants from older MMOs who have formed alliances in Discord channels for the sake of grander construction projects. There are players who just want to trade – there are around 5,000 in-game shops at the time of writing – and those who spend their days hunting on the outlying planets. There are players who play for five hours a night, and players who dip in for one hour a week.
Ensuring that everybody can make headway regardless of playstyle is a moving target for Turbulenz. Among the game’s methods of modulating the difficulty is a recurring event whereby a meteor impact unleashes a wave of hostile creatures: the intensity of the threat scales to reflect the number and level of players nearby. Even as it works to even out progression across the playerbase, Turbulenz is mindful that unearthing ways of beating the systems is part of the draw for a sandbox player. The economy, for instance, is largely in the hands of the audience – “if you can sell things for double the price of everybody else, well done,” Austin observes – though Turbulenz has declined to enable certain kinds of wheeling and dealing. There’s currently no formal process for selling land, for example, as this might encourage canny players to bed in alongside new arrivals, forcing the victim to buy their plot before they can expand.
The developer has “made a Herculean effort” to leave the player-shaped landscapes of
Boundless intact from update to update – some of the larger structures in the Early Access universe were years in the making. For Boundless’s official launch, however, it has opted to begin afresh. “We wanted a new, modern universe, because we’d developed features that were very hard to migrate,” Austin says. “And we wanted all players to start the game together, rather than anybody saying, ‘We’ve been playing for four years – catch up’.” Turbulenz did, however, let its Early Access players into the 1.0 version a few weeks ahead, so that launch-day buyers wouldn’t find themselves in an empty world. It’s a precarious moment for a game like Boundless; it’s reliant for much of its complexity on what players have built within it, yet must also leave space for beginners.
The 1.0 build has yet to set any player activity records, but Austin predicts a “gradual build-up” in popularity. “We’re working with Square Enix on PC, and their ambition is that kind of a year after launch it’ll be at full speed, rather than trying to go really big at launch.” The game is a known quantity, he points out, which has made kindling excitement at release difficult, but in the meantime, Turbulenz will stick to its schedule of an update every couple of weeks. Ideas on the table include farming mechanics and player spacecraft – travel between planets currently occurs via portals.
“We’ve got stuff from our original goal funding that still hasn’t been done!” Austin adds. “And the reason we haven’t published a roadmap is that I know for a fact that the plan will change. Maybe when we do farming we’ll say, ‘What really adds to the game now is animal breeding’. Based on what we know of how much Boundless changed during development, for us just to write down that it’ll be like this and this – I already know that’s the wrong answer.”