We’ve been 100% focused on Marrow/Bonelab development, prioritizing it over PR, emails, and a fifth SLZ title, but since today is the one year anniversary it made sense to take an hour to make a post.
Thank you for your enthusiasm for Bonelab, SLZ, and VR in general. Anticipating a content drought, one of our major goals with Bonelab was to make a title that would keep you engaged as we work towards making it possible for Marrow content/titles to be made more efficiently. We’re happy to announce that while playtime, refunds, and active users were great for Boneworks, after one year Bonelab currently has 3x the median playtime, 1/3rd the refunds, and 10x the daily active users of Boneworks. The team is motivated by the overwhelming response, but our VR work is still just getting started.
Our goal is still to get the next update for Bonelab out as a beta this year. We’ll talk about it more in the upcoming months, but here are a few bullets:
- This update is very different from what most would expect, but we thought and think it is best for the long term.
- The Marrow SDK will receive level authoring focused features.
- The focus is on the core tech, optimization, polish, and the Marrow SDK with a few exceptions. Rather than rapid feature release, VR needs a more stable physical foundation for long term growth.
- The content team has been rebuilding the existing content invisibly with new systems as they come online.
- Our goal (while it won’t be fully realized for many years and many games) is that the Marrow SDK is the same externally and internally.
- Tons of work has gone into a long term goal of unifying the player and the humanoid NPC’s, still years from completion, but it’s worth pursuing.
- The player can now use a full body animation as input, is more physically complex than ever, and is 38% lighter on a Quest 2 CPU than Patch 3.
- The future of VR gaming is bright, but incredibly labor intensive and expensive.
Attached is a WIP clip of a torso track being integrated with locomotion and crouch from 5 months ago (not IOBT).
As always, only purchase Bonelab as it currently is and not based on what it may be.
Back to work,
Brandon and the entire SLZ team