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Rain World - Hunt prey, evade predators, survive as a Slugcat (March 28th, PS4/PC)

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woopWOOP

Member
Like with Shantae, I just realised I've backed this with some sorta early exclusive tier. Oops. Why do I always remember these things too late :V

Might as well wait for the full release in a few days now. Will try to go in mostly blind and discover terrible monsters first hand.
But man, those killer roosters at night look nerve wrecking just watching that gif.
 
Old slow-mo GIF. You can really appreciate the animations here

cRguK.gif
 

Raticus79

Seek victory, not fairness
Anyone know a desktop video capture app that supports 120 FPS? I was hoping to get some slow motion GIFs myself, but shadowplay only has 30 and 60.
 
@RainWorldGame is one of the very few games—I feel—where all progress is in the player's head. All challenge is really player inexperience.
That's a particularly cool tweet to see because that's the whole sentiment the devs were going for. A few years ago, they had written in the devlog how they wanted to do a metroidvania where the gates weren't based on keys or abilities to unlock, but the player's skills and their knowledge about the world.

===

Stop it More_Badass! It wasn't on my radar and I just bought it because of your posts… XD
My bad! :p

I'm working on a lengthy article about the game's development, so been going through the game's devlog for research/fun and seeing all the GIFs and early screenshots/posts has been really cool. Comparing then and now makes it all very impressive

(Doesn't hurt that I'm like a Rain World superfan)
 
More_badass with the drip feed of impressions and gifs making Tuesday take longer to get here. Some kind of reverse time dilation happening in this thread.
 

Crispy75

Member
Stream i was watching got past Shoreline and then SPOILERZ, so that's enough for me. I'll have to wait for the real thing like everyone else :)
 
New update says Kickstarter keys/digital rewards are going out today
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rain-world/project-rain-world/posts/1840531

A summary of release and future plans
For this initial release, Rain World is focusing on the single-player experience: the journey of a little, lost slugcat though a vast interconnected ecosystem spread over 12 regions and over 1600 rooms with an expected 30-50 hours of gameplay and significantly more if a player wishes to persue the deep world lore through post-endgame content!

Where to from here?

The journey continues, of course! We have content updates already in the works, including multiplayer, as well as additional narrative arcs and game modes which will we detail as soon as the initial release madness subsides. Since it isn't being included in the initial release we've had to keep all of this stuff top secret for the past months, so we seriously cannot wait to show you.

Also up next we will be detailing our progress in bringing Rain World to additional platforms and systems. Please pardon us being tight-lipped about the specifics of this for now, as we have quite a lot of compatibility testing and fussing about with code before we will be comfortable making any official announcements or timelines. Our tiny team can only handle so many platforms at once!
 
I havent followed it at all. Any details on what exactly happened making the dev time so drawn out?
I'm actually writing a lengthy article on its development for IndieGames/Gamasutra

You can check out their very detailed and exhaustive devlog over on TIGSource. Over 300 pages: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.0

But the basic breakdown is that the game was originally built in a very old outdated engine (Lingo, a predecessor to Flash). With the KS funds and publisher support, they were able to rebuild the game in a modern engine, and fully explore the potential of the world and mechanics (that was pretty much the promise of the stretch goal)

So it kind of just grew from there. The devs hand-made 1,600 rooms and 30+ species; that combined with working on the AI, nailing down a story and set pieces and pacing and progression, took a lot of time

They were actually trying to get it out last year, going through 3-hrs-of-sleep-a-night crunch mode, but some stuff with localization caused them to postpone till 2017, which gave them time to polish more and not cut stuff to meet the deadline
 
This is really an ideal game to watch Let's Play (in case you won't play it or don't care getting spoiled). It's 50% a fictional nature documentary in an alien world, 50% thriller with suspense and action full of clutch moments.
 

Crispy75

Member
I havent followed it at all. Any details on what exactly happened making the dev time so drawn out?
To start with it was just a part time hobby project. It only really became a proper game in 2014 with the kickstarter. After that, you can just blame ambition :)
 
But the basic breakdown is that the game was originally built in a very old outdated engine (Lingo, a predecessor to Flash). With the KS funds and publisher support, they were able to rebuild the game in a modern engine, and fully explore the potential of the world and mechanics (that was pretty much the promise of the stretch goal)

FYI, Lingo is a language; Director is the now-discontinued development platform it's used in. I'm very surprised to learn they used Director for the prototype. Even in 2011 it was already extremely outdated, and it's a very slow environment to build any kind of action game in. (I made a couple games with it back in the day) It's actually a pretty good for quickly prototyping things, but why they'd choose Director over Flash for that I'd love to know.
 
I feel like this game kinda got brute-forced into my radar. I kept seeing it pop up every once in a while (and it did somewhat intrigue me), but at first I ignored it cuz most of the bumps were by a mod (not to mention that roughly 40% of the posts in the thread are from said mod) and that felt a little weird. That said, after seeing some gifs I've come around and now I'm mostly sold on it, just waiting on previews and reviews. I could see myself getting lost in the game for a long while.

tl;dr More_Badass your insistence sorta sold me on the game (pending reviews/impressions.)
 
I feel like this game kinda got brute-forced into my radar. I kept seeing it pop up every once in a while (and it did somewhat intrigue me), but at first I ignored it cuz most of the bumps were by a mod (not to mention that roughly 40% of the posts in the thread are from said mod) and that felt a little weird.
To be fair, I only became a mod last year :)
 
To be fair, I only became a mod last year :)
Ah, fair enough. Regardless, I hope the game ends up being really great. After Inside (which I loved) I've been hungry for another smaller-but-insanely-imaginative game, and this looks like something that will be up my alley.

*and by smaller I mean not another "epic" sci-fi/militaristic first person or third person shooter. I'm aware this game seems to be rather substantial in terms of playtime.
 

Crispy75

Member
Ah, fair enough. Regardless, I hope the game ends up being really great. After Inside (which I loved) I've been hungry for another smaller-but-insanely-imaginative game, and this looks like something that will be up my alley.

Please don't let me put you off, but this is not a small game at all!
 
Ah, fair enough. Regardless, I hope the game ends up being really great. After Inside (which I loved) I've been hungry for another smaller-but-insanely-imaginative game, and this looks like something that will be up my alley.
I post and write about any and all indie games (check out my thread history), but Rain World is kind of special.

I got into indie games and PC games in 2013, about the same time I learned about Rain World, so it's very emblematic of indie games for me, coloring my perspective on indie game development, the transparency and feedback betweens devs and fans, the complexity of making games, and so on.

So yeah any impressions from me on RW should be taken with a grain of salt and hyperbole, and be seen as more biased than the average player
 

data

Member
Does anyone know in how many hours reviews go live? Wanna pre-order with the discount but I'm not sure what to think of the game from all the videos
 
To continue this
I havent followed it at all. Any details on what exactly happened making the dev time so drawn out?
Been reading through the devlog from the beginning, and this quote does a good job at showing how much the scope changed from their original Lingo build to the new one (and then the final game)

This is from 2015
Some of the regions are loosely rooted in old concepts from the tiny world attached to the lingo build - in which a region was generally no bigger than 3-4 screens.

...The lingo world was about 20 rooms if I remember correctly, whereas James estimates the Unity world to be around 700 rooms
Final game is over 1,600 rooms
 

CHC

Member
Excited to see some reviews for this. I already pre-purchased it on Steam, but I'm still interested in if the developers managed to pull off what they set out to and to hear some stories that come from the sort of emergent gameplay.
 
Excited to see some reviews for this. I already pre-purchased it on Steam, but I'm still interested in if the developers managed to pull off what they set out to and to hear some stories that come from the sort of emergent gameplay.
The early streamer/reviewer impressions certainly sound promising. The checkpoints and controls seem like those are aspects that might frustrate, and the lack of hand-holding and the difficulty might be divisive

Some are from Twitter and some are from GAF
@RainWorldGame is one of the very few games—I feel—where all progress is in the player's head. All challenge is really player inexperience.
I will say, @RainWorldGame is really, really brutal. It's like a Herzog documentary about cute animals surrounded by predators.
I just screamed the most honest ''ooooh FUCK!'' of my life while playing this game.

Im so glad I went on this pretty much blind
Rain World is probably one of the tensest, most stressful games I've played in ages. It's awesome!
I just started playing this today and as others have said or shown via vids, this game is bonkers in the best possible way.  It's almost deceptively simple in how it's laid out, but there are deeper elements which are waiting to be accessed through experimentation within the world.
Animation, colour palette, soundtrack, and enemy behaviour all combine to make @RainWorldGame utterly terrifying
i like:
-the world
-the art
-the creatures

i don't like:
-the controls
-the checkpoint system
-the giant underwater creature
so @RainWorldGame is fucking amazing! i love the look and feel of the game, also Slugcat is the best animal!
 

Mutagenic

Permanent Junior Member
I completely passed on this thread for months because the thread title makes the game sound like some typical Steam survival game. I caught the video on PSN today though and I'm all in.
 
Some interesting dev posts from the Steam forums

1) Sandbox mode planned for a post-release update
We're planning on adding a sandbox mode in a later update (along with multiplayer, etc), so players can throw creatures that they've discovered into a room and "see what happens"

2) An unexpected emergent AI moment the devs encountered while making the game
Ah! There is one that I'll always remember...

To start out the story, note that each of the limbs of the creatures can take damage. Like, if you hit a lizards arm or leg with a rock, it can cripple that limb, meaning that the lizard cant use it for locomotion; it will move slower, and if it is trying to climb a pole or something and it weighs too much for the other limbs to support it and will probably slide down, with its broken arm or leg dangling, etc.

Another thing to note is that the creatures pathfinding will learn from its mistakes, so if it attempts a path a few times and is unable to for whatever reason, it will seek out alternate routes.

SO! We are testing all this on a white lizard, which can normally walk on walls etc., making sure that when its limbs break, its pathfinding AI chooses a floor based route rather than trying to climb a wall and fall off over and over. We break the legs and then the arms and everything seems to be fine.

What we DIDNT take into consideration was its tongue. White lizards have a long sticky tongue like a frogs that can be used to grab onto prey and into its jaws. So after the lizards legs are crippled and it should be just a pile of twitching meat, we notice the tongue starts flailing around. Then it starts sticking to things. Then the lizard starts PULLING ITSELF ALONG using its tongue, grabbing onto things, reeling itself over, etc etc. :O :O :O

None of that was programmed or intended in any way. The pathfinding AI just found a way to solve the locomotion problem using the limbs it had available. But it was SPOOKY AF.
 
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