This is a suggestion I’ve already somewhat made in other threads, and it’s not something new, but here we go.
The current way updates are presented is in the Announcements section of the forum.
Sometimes, we’ll see pop-out a picture such as the one below :
This lets us know that things are coming. Not necessarily in the order depicted. As we all know, some other things can come out of no-where to be added to the game, like the Chrysominter or the Venerable Gum. They’re good things, no doubt about it, but before they come into testing, we have no info, and that’s a problem!
This above is just a picture : no interactivity, no information conveniently added to it, no idea of when each update might come out.
There’s a LOT of others things in the works, like furniture, clothing, ladders, new playables races, totems, stickers, Titan creatures, rental worlds, parasites hidding in blocks, etc. If any information have filtered about these, they’re lost somewhere deep in this forum, only to be seen by a handful of players.
For the common player, there’s just some (really cool) concept arts in the DevArt section of the forum, with 0 context or explanation, where already released features are chaotically mixed with unreleased ones depending on which one got a comment last. For Pete’s sake, the “First look at The Lance” thread from 2015 is still open!
For all we know, some of these things could be abandonned features, until they spring suddenly into the Announcement section, fully fleshed-out as updates to be tested.
Look at farming. Here’s pretty much what we know about it :
There’s A LOT of unknown about how farming will work.
But this is a building game! So players are already making plans blindly, preparing their bases for this update, as best as they possibly can, trying to make space for water/lava irrigation. How will placeable water behave? How well will it flow? Will we need hundreds of buckets to collect it? I could write up many dozens of questions about farming.
This lack of transparency can lead to some unhealthy behaviors in the community. I myself shamefully fell into that hole yesterday, trying to figure out why some things that have been teased as concept-arts in 2015 weren’t already released. But we can’t know.
All of this could be fixed with a good roadmap.
This has already been suggested, but look at Trello.
When I first started to play the game, I found this trello page made by another player and thought it was an official one. When you google “Boundless roadmap”, it’s the first result that comes up!
Don’t put dates if you can’t, write something else like “Soon”, “Later”. Or “High priority”, “Medium priority”, “Low priority”, “actively being worked on” or “Stand by”.
With such a template, you can write up long in advance the features that the team is working on for all the player-base to see in one convenient place to find.
What sold it to me was how you could write in one page a LOT of features, and you can click on one, which displays a pop-up window which could contain links, concept-arts, context, explanations, etc :
A good roadmap is needed, that is a certainty to me.
