Five months later, NullBound turned sideways

NullBound is a side-scroller now, set on a floating archipelago that doesn’t end. The last devlog here was v0.76, back in May, and that game was a top-down dungeon crawler with a countdown timer and five tiers of bosses. Today’s build is v0.93.6. Close to ten thousand commits happened in between.

An empty room that was fun to move around in

Over the summer I built a movement toy on the side. A character, gravity, a jump, a dash, and an empty room. I wanted to know one thing: is it fun to just move around in there with nothing else going on? It was.

So in v0.90.2 I stopped calling the side-scroller an experiment and made it the game. Most of that release was demolition. Line-of-sight fog makes sense when you’re looking down at a floor plan and none at all when you’re looking at a room from the side, so it went. Aim-down-sights went too, along with the drop shadow and about six and a half thousand lines of dungeon generator written for an overhead camera. 681 commits, and the codebase came out roughly five thousand lines smaller.

A couple of things you could see right away. Currency used to be a coin that popped out and sat there. Now it’s dust, called cycles. It falls until it hits something and then drifts after you when you run past, like a comet tail. Dash also became one verb, and you choose whether it follows your movement or your cursor.

Your character isn’t a class anymore

In the old game you picked a protocol the way you’d pick a class: Sentinel, Seeker or Spectre, each with a fixed kit. v0.90.3 threw that out. Your weapon, dash and jump are gear you wear. A protocol is an item you slot in, and it brings its own body and abilities with it.

The loot system followed. In v0.91 every weapon, dash, jump, core, plate, scroll and charm started coming out of the same place, and any of them can roll its own affixes. Then I got rid of consumables. Speed and shield are now processes you switch on, and they drain your power core while they run. The grenade has four charges and recharges. Potions and flares are gone.

Stats got simpler around the same time. Pulse, Static, Flux and Void each own an element, and Luck owns crits. As of v0.92.1 each element actually does its own thing. Static arcs to the next target, Flux spreads through a crowd, Void stacks Exposed and Pulse stacks Dragged. Channel lets you pick one and put it on every hit.

A world instead of a dungeon

The biggest changes all landed in the last two weeks.

v0.93.0 gave NullBound a real world. You make a world from a seed, make a character, walk out into terrain that streams in as you go, quit, and come back to where you were standing. Worlds and characters save separately.

v0.93.3 turned that world into a floating archipelago. Islands of every size hang in open sky in every direction, with catwalks strung between them, and you start on the island with the Workshop. In the fiction, root (the drive CORE-1 lives on) got fragmented by the Null. The design reason is simpler: islands give you somewhere to go and a reason to jump.

v0.93.4 made the world remember what you did to it. Break a sconce and it stays broken. Beat up the training dummy, leave, and it’s healed only as much as the time you were gone. Loot you drop waits for you. Enemies carry real gear now and move the way you do.

And today v0.93.6 shipped the Terrain Shaper. Point it at a tile or an object and break it, and that thing’s spec goes into your Index for good. After that you can place as many as you want, in front of you or behind. Right now that means island rock, bulkhead panels, pipe runs and whatever objects you’ve found. The Index starts empty, which means every new thing you run into out there is worth grabbing.

What I’m building toward

When people ask, I’ve been saying it’s a 2D No Man’s Sky with ARPG loot, plus an inventory that doesn’t turn into a chore when your bag gets huge. That’s still the best short version I have.

There’s no run timer anymore and no tier ladder. You head out, get stronger, and push a little further the next time.

The site caught up too

Until today this website was still describing the May game. It has new screenshots from v0.93.6 and copy that matches what you can actually play. All art in them is placeholder for alpha testing. There’s also a new roadmap page that pulls from my development plan every time a build ships, so it stays current. The release notes have the details for every version above.

What’s next

The Interior is next: doors and windows into the space behind island walls, which the Terrain Shaper will be able to make. Biomes come after that, so islands stop all looking the same, then wild places like pockets of low gravity, and then a darker world where you need flares and your map only shows what you’ve lit. The roadmap has the full order. Come say hi in the Discord.