Support NeoGAF

[More_Badass]

I've seen that exact comment leveled against Rain World in early GAF threads. People are silly.

In this very thread

Neat idea but man I'm getting real fatigued of 16bit inspired "indie" games.

I expected a awesome 3D game, but nope, another retro-style game. I'm not tired of them, but there are a lot of very good ideas that aren't completely exploited because of retro-style.

Edit: thank god, finally a new page! That last one was a pain to load on mobile

 

[Shredderi]

This looks so unique and cool. Beatiful animation. Do want.

 

[epmode]

In this very thread

The backhanded "Neat idea" comment is so transparent. Gotta get that agenda out there!

edit: Oh god, the second post is worse.

 

[Rei_Toei]

Color me impressed with the way they document their progress and manage to write rather technically but still accessible about development. I'm learning lots of stuff about physics and AI I never even had thought of. What I'm most curious about at the moment though, is the music. What they've shared in the trailer I'm loving, looking forward to what else is going to pop up.

 

[More_Badass]

Here's the TIGForum Devlog link if you guys wanted to chat with the devs, provide feedback, etc. Been following the project for like two years now, easily the gold standard for development blogs IMO
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.0

---

This has turned out to be quite fun - to the degree where my productivity suffers because I just have to fill this and that level with water and swim around in it.

When swimming you have a "swim power", some sort of momentum, which can be made to increase by doing certain movements, such as changing your angle. This means that just holding a direction isn't always the most effective way to move, you need to work with the water a little bit. If you bump into a wall you lose your momentum - so generally when you're under water you want to stay clear of the walls, which is trickier the faster you're going.

Swimming comes in two modes - surface swimming and deep swimming. The surface swimming is generally pretty lame, the slugcat will just keep its head up and you can steer left or right. What it does have is the ability to do a little hop by pressing the jump button, enabling you to maybe reach for some pole or ledge above you. Underwater swimming is faster (if you work up momentum) and more fun, but will be dangerous in one way or another. You have some buoyancy pulling you upwards, so you can do some pretty fun stuff by swimming down and then come up through the surface fast. If you have really good timing, you can manage to press the jump button during the few frames you're in "surface mode", get a little extra momentum from the mini jump, and do a pretty sweet jump up into the air.

I still haven't gotten around to doing anything about the coloration of the water, but I think it's going to be pretty straigh forward as the entire underwater environment is basically just a gradient between two colors - so it's just a question of picking two colors that fit the above-water palette.

As you can see the slugcat is made dark when submerged... I have tried a few other things as well, such as having it be the original color but with a multiply overlay, or similar. Any solution with the actual colors visible turn out to be less cool though, for some reason. I think it's because when everything under the surface has the same colors it really feels like a different "realm", whereas if the original colors are visible it just feels like a blue overlay. The problem here is that it's harder to see your player character, and also that in a multiplayer scenario it might be hard to keep them apart, if several players dive down simultaneously. Still it kind of is that visual obscurity that makes for the effect, so idk... What do you guys think?

 

[Messofanego]

Oh oh swimming in games have a bad rep

 

[More_Badass]

The water keeps looking better and better. Love the distortion effect, I don't think I've seen that before in a game

And someone pointed out how the slugcat watches the water wearily when it's closer

Finally I got to color - I needed to rewrite my way of handling palettes (and thereby also my shaders) so that each palette is its own png. Feels much more reasonable. I think that we can also do gradient changes between palettes using this system without writing a shader for it - the palettes are 32*8 textures, and I think that a palette swap effect could be achieved by just doing copy pixels on the currently active one in the CPU, the GPU wouldn't even know anything was happening.

That said, I'm feeling a bit weird, because everyone has been telling me that performance is super important when writing shaders... And my experience has been that I can get away with anything. Maybe my computer has a very fast graphics card? Pretty much whatever I do they seem to run perfectly fine, the only problem is that they tend to sometimes not work at all, which seems like a different issue...

Anyhow, messed with the palette stuff, and made it so that the palettes contain positions for water coloration as well. I also added an option that the water can be "behind" the foreground, as James requested being able to do puddles and pools without necessarily having the entire level look submerged.

Water colors are still WIP, but at least more reasonable. Creating palettes is for some weird reason one of the most time consuming activities in making this game hahaha! I can tweak those colors for weeks before it feels right - so I'm pretty sure that the water is going to go through a few such iterations as well

 

[KimonoNoNo]

Watch how the the water goes back into the screen with foreground and background sticking up out of the water complete with refraction distortion. It really gives a sense of depth on a 2D plane, and sells the effect that you're looking at a living breathing world.

Needless to say that with every new update my anticipation for this game get ratcheted up another level.

 

[More_Badass]

This guy is a machine. I don't know he can make so much progress so fast

Here's the slugcat almost drowning, but getting up, recovering and continuing its dive.

Here's how I imagine you're supposed to work with the water - quick in quick out operations taking advantage of the physics and controls, and drowning won't be a problem.

And the most part is that it's all expressed through visual cues and animations, not some Air meter. Here's his breakdown of the mechanics

Worked some on drowning mechanics, and I'm pretty happy with it! Basically, it's an interaction between two paramaters, Air In Lungs and Lung Exhaustion. The air meter is just an air meter, when it reaches zero you die. At 2/3 air left, the slugcat will give a single bubble, which can be spotted by an attentive player and is basically your cue that it's time to stop doing whatever you're doing under water. At 1/3 air, the slugcat will start to move its arms more and faster, emit a lot of bubbles, move a bit slower, the input direction will involuntarily tend upwards. This is the panic mode, now it's really time to just get up to the surface.

Here's the thing though, when in panic mode, your lungs get exhausted. This is bad for several reasons - when your lungs are exhausted, you take in air more slowly once you've gotten up. If you dive down again with your lungs still exhausted, you lose air faster. Once your lungs have become exhausted, you need to get up, fill the air meter (which is now slower) and then when the air meter is full the lung exhaustion meter will start to tick down. You can see that the slugcat is exhausted because it's closing its eyes and breathing heavily - once it opens its eyes it's safe to go down again.

This sounds complicated, but when actually playing it the implications are pretty simple: go up for air every now and then, and you'll be fine. If you really try to stretch your stay under the surface though, you'll need to stay up longer the next time you get up, to get rid of the exhaustion. This means that if for example some creature is harassing you above the surface, you can't stay away for ever by just popping down and up - if you're down for a long time, you'll need to be up for a long time as well.

If you dive down with fully exhausted lungs, you get only half as much time on the air meter, 4.5 seconds instead of 9.

I have implemented a mechanic which is that if you're in panic mode, and the only input you give is straight up, the air meter will deplete slightly slower. Basically I'm just cutting the player some slack - you're moving straight up towards the surface, it just feels unnecessarily unfair to have you die 40 pixels from the surface, especially as rain world death is a binary switch.

The entire system means that if you're just like, in a pool swimming and diving, it's perfectly comfortable. You can be confident you're not going to die. But as soon as you're trying to do anything under the surface it becomes tricky as you'll really have to work with the swimming mechanics and the air meter. Especially anything that involves swimming in under a ceiling separating you from the surface feels super uncomfortable - which is just the way I want it.

 

[More_Badass]

Dev working on vents/shortcuts

That age old Rain World question - Where the hell will I appear if I go in this shortcut!? - has been given some clarity.

Some feedback, what do you guys think? Am I overdoing it? To me it feels a bit too modern with the color fading - I'm thinking about if it might be possible to have it look more old scho

I'm not sold on the idea of having only the blinking arrows, because it's not in all scenarios where it's only the player alone triggering those things. Multiplayer can have 4 slugcats running around, and then you can't just look for where it's blinking. But I totally agree with you on it being too saturated and bright, it does look a bit too much like neon lights. Maybe if the wave motion stays, but is toned down some? That would make it more about the blinking arrows, but there'd still be some motion to follow in order to get to the right arrow.

 

[More_Badass]

Compared to the old build:

Polish, polish, polish. I'm trying to wrap up the mechanics I have to a playable state now, before moving on. That means a lot of tiny little things that needs fixing. Today I revisited spears - how they stick, how they do damage, etc. The new spear stuff in combination with the lizard damage stuff means that the game is much more of a game recently, which feels kind of cool.

The player has also finally got a throwing animation, if you look closely you can see the slugcat lean into the throw a bit, and some hand movement as well.

Other additions of the day include lizards being able to understand that they should return to their holes when injured, and the ability for lizards to casually attack some close by creature they're not actively hunting if they think the creature looks tasty, or are just generally pissed.

As it's becoming more of a game the differences in difficulty between Unity and Lingo version also becomes more obvious, and I've been trying to tune that a bit. The difficulty was way too low, and now it might be a bit too high - but I've implemented it so that it's dependent on a few breed-specific variables in the lizards that can be tuned up and down very easily, so we'll get there.

 

[More_Badass]

Dev on game's current status

We've been working on the next gen version for so long, you forget how it used to be. its crazy to see the same sorts of scenes side by side. The frame rate difference is RIDICULOUS. And the gif is only at 30fps i think? in game its like 100fps+, laser crisp and smooth. Plus notice how much more depth and detail is present in the backgrounds?

The lizards in the new version are still lacking a lot of the "personality" behaviors that were in the lingo, so they look a bit "im running straight towards you to bite you", but other than that WOW what a difference! The arm motions, the limping, the escape behavior. There is still TONS more to do with that stuff and it compares well already.

Still feel the throw motion is a bit off somehow. Maybe not quick enough arm? Also the spear rebound animation is pretty wacky, haha. BZZZOOOM! Could probably be slowed down if possible.

Yep, the lizard heads are armored to various degrees. The point being that you shouldn't REALLY be taking them on head to head unless as a last resort.

ANYWAY!

I just got back from a week in Korea studying rain world tiling with Joar, and i think the results are looking pretty nice:

Finishing up the first tiling pass on the initial area of Rain World proper: the ~25 room "suburban" region that will be teased in the first build... which we are planning on having ready pretty soon!

Gentlemen, it looks like this might actually turn into a videogame after all!

 

[More_Badass]

http://gfycat.com/EvenCircularDevilfish

Effects for approaching rain!

Other than that, today has included a lot of polish in various areas. Added screen shakes for when heavy objects impact the terrain, sparks when weapons hit the walls, fixed a bug where the player's hands were invisible, and so on an so forth.

Oh, and maybe more important than that stuff - I made the picking up / throwing / putting down of items work. It's a pretty complex system that takes a lot into consideration - the basic idea is that you have two hands and can carry a thing in each (fly, rock, spear), but there are many special cases.

For example, you can't dual wield two spears, but one spear and one other object is allowed. And flies have lower priority - if you are standing on a weapon holding a fly, the fly should be released in favor of the weapon, but only if you don't have a free hand to use instead. If you hit the throw button and are holding a rock and a fly, you probably want to throw the rock, not the fly... And so on. Basically a huge amount of special cases where the game should cater to the player and try to be user friendly.

 

[More_Badass]

Kickstarter update! New gameplay!

And from the devlog:

James and I have decided to do a push on adding back the core features to the game - we want to "catch up" with the lingo version ASAP. Catch up is a weird wording, as the unity version is insanely more advanced and complex than the lingo version already, but some of the more mundane features have been lagging behind. So, today I present to you: fly eating!

It's interesting how many things you forget has to be implented - for example I spent a couple of hours today adding the ability for flies to be dead, which was pretty necessary to proceed haha. The amount of weird little things like this, that seem to be so obvious that you tend to overlook them, has also increased further with the addition of water. Basically everything I do, I have to do twice now. How does a fly move? And how does it move when in water? How does it move when dead? How does it move when dead and in water?

For most land creatures the water behaviors are reduced to just a couple of lines that basically describe "panicked writhing" so it's not really as bad as it sounds. The problem is that there are a lot of these scenarios. A few days back I made spear and rock behavior for underwater conditions, and the flies and lizards seem to be handling it OK as well though the lizard AI really needs to be more careful not to fall in. The scary thing is that whenever I think of something that was in the old version, or something we've promised to put in the new version, there's also the big question mark of how it'll interact with water. Pups + water? No idea, haven't given it any thought yet o___0

I think keeping most of these interactions simple will be the best route. And despite all this, James and I are super agreed that adding the water was worth it - it does add a bit of extra work, but it adds way more in terms of gameplay depth.

 

[Puruzi]

This needs to be out already.

 

[epmode]

The water improvents from that Kickstarter update are incredible. These guys are really talented. It's great to see people pushing the boundaries of procedural animation.

 

[More_Badass]

WIP death rain

 

[More_Badass]

Game over screen finished enough for now!

The sound is pretty important for this one. As the level becomes darker, there is a violent rain sound that becomes louder and louder. When the screen suddenly turns black, there's a drum-like sound, and then everything is quiet. This contrast makes for a pretty dramatic effect! Then, in the quiet, you hear the first couple of rain drops hit the ground, and then the real death rain comes very suddenly, with a deafening noise.

In the lingo version this transition was really sudden, but here I have given the transition to the death rain a little more build up - I don't really know which one is preferable. It was kind of cool to have the wall of white rain suddenly just be there, but this build up approach seems more organic.

 

[Elixist]

holy shit at death rain. looks pretty incredible.

 

[More_Badass]

The devlog updates just keep coming. This is a big one

PRETTY BIG NEWS:
The first region of the game world actually is up and running!

For the past few months I've been planning out and constructing the first playable area of the game world, a somewhat self-contained 30-ish room "suburban" region. Joar and I have been calling it "vanilla Rain World", as its all about the vibe and scope of the original rain world game concept, before the game branches out and begins exploring interactions with new areas, mechanics, creatures, etc.

Anyway, the process to get it all rendered and connected and working with the new engine has been a bit tricky (to say nothing of the work actually constructing it!), requiring multiple updates to the level editor and tons of fiddling with fussy details in the individual rooms etc. But this morning after a new build and some time fiddling, it booted up smoothly and OMG IT FINALLY WORKS:

See those colored squares at the top? That means the whole region, all 30 rooms, are up and running and interconnected and talking to each-other, just like they're supposed to. You can move fluidly from room to room and it all works without a hitch. It's one thing to know that *theoretically* it should work, and totally another to have the pieces come together and it actually happen. If I had ten bottles of champagne i'd pop them all right now.

There is still quite a bit of polish to add, some of the rooms are still connecting a bit funky, but this is some solid progress. And now Im going to go get a meatball sub to celebrate!

 

[superbank]

Kickstarter update! New gameplay!

And from the devlog:

Still looking so good. Looking forward to its release.

 

[LUFTRAUSER]

I like the game's art; if the gameplay is fun, I will probably get this one after release... whenever that is, anyway.

 

[More_Badass]

Devlog update

Huuuuge step. Got the entire world up and running, with migrating bats and lizards spawning in their dens, later emerging to hunt, and then returning as the rain approaches.

Good news and bad news. Good news are that YYYAAAYYYY it's up and running! Everything basically seems to work - the creatures spawn, move about, you can encounter them, they don't disappear or randomly appear, the ai seems to be able to somewhat handle most situations.

Bad news are not really anything unexpected, it's just that in this new - vastly more complex - context every little glitch and lack of polish becomes more prominent. The lizards getting stuck, the AI throwing missing reference exceptions, the AI not always making the best decisions, all of that is now way more visible. In my previous test environment there was just a single room, or a few interconnected ones, and I'd hit restart over and over while testing stuff. Now we have way longer sessions of gameplay, making every error stick around for a longer time and becoming more visible. This, in combination with the environments and situations being generally more complex and error-prone, makes for a generally more glitchy experience.

But, as I said, this was pretty much expected. Now the glitchy stuff is there, all visible, and I'll just have to hunt the issues down one by one. Everything essential and important is working.

It's probably too early to say anything about the game design implications of this new environment, I just haven't had enough time to play the game. I've noticed a few things, such as despite sprinkling the world with what seemed like quite a lot of lizards, lizard encounters seem sparse while moving through the world. Maybe this has to do with the amount of lizards, but I rather think its about their mobility. I might want them to move more between rooms.

Gonna play the game a bit more! Brb!

 

[More_Badass]

And slugcat's moveset grows

After digging in the lizard AI all day I decided to do something more fun, and implemented this hanging animation for the lower end of vertical poles

 

[KimonoNoNo]

New gif from the devlog.

Bat chains.

 

[Rei_Toei]

Maybe it's the bats but I keep associating Rain World in my mind with Chrono Trigger, specially the post-apocalytic era. This is not a bad thing.

 

[Rembrandt]

god, this is shaping up so well. looks fantastic. cannot wait for it release.

 

[Persona7]

this just looks better and better

 

[More_Badass]

Hunting flies with rocks

Also:

The little blinking number is back

Together with a whole bunch of other stuff. We're working on a somewhat playable alpha, so I got some introduction screens in, as well as the game recognizing when you've died, displaying a message and restarting if you hit enter. There's also a win condition that's as simple as can be - return to the starting room with a certain number of flies eaten.

And some details on a new area

Messing about with the lizards for most of the day, just trying some stuff and fixing little details. Then I moved on to drawing some sketches of a new creature (!) but I still don't feel ready to start implementing it. However, I do feel ready to start implementing leeches in the water, because I basically know what I want them to be like - so I got started on that. No gifs yet as they still just look like red swimming boxes, but maybe tomorrow I'll have something fun to show you Smiley

The next area James is moving on to is one with some water stuff going on, so I might do a few water related things now for a couple of days to give him the tools to play with that.

 

[More_Badass]

And now with 100% more leeches

Yeah, the idea of leeches came up when James and I discussed the implications of the recently added water. We really liked swimming around, but we wanted the water to be an exception from ordinary gameplay - we didn't want the game to become a Swimming Game. So we decided to add some creature that is in most of the water, and makes it a bit uncomfortable and dangerous to be there.

Swimming just became a whole lot less comfortable

I originally planned to make them more as a fish/leech hybrid, with a bit of a head, but when I got the triangle mesh for the body in I liked the leechy softness of it so much that I went with a more conventional leech. Too boring? I could spice them up a bit with some more alien element as well.

They're not entirely done, but pretty much so. I want to have them crawl along floors if they end up out of the water, and they should air-drown after a little while as well. Also they need to respond to the rain cycle, and they need to forget targets that have been out of the water for a little while. They should also probably give up on a target that has been dead and leeched for a while, or one single dead creature will make an entire body of water safe for ever.

Aaaand the big, boring thing - I need to write some kind of framework for "a thing being stuck to another thing" in order to have these leeches follow you between rooms. That same framework would then be applied to make bats stick on spears, and then it'd probably make sense to throw out the old "spear stuck in creature" hack and use this new thing instead.

I thought I could make a special case for only spears, but I've come to realize that the game has quite a lot of things being stuck on other things, so the engine probably needs to be able to handle that.

Back to the leeches - they don't actually hurt you themselves, they just weight you down. If enough of them attach you'll drown. On one hand I like this, because it creates a very visual "health" system where you can see how many of them are attached - 4 or 5 is usually enough to do you in. Once you get out of the water your "health" is reset by the leeches detaching themselves. The problem with this system is that 1 or 2 can never be an actual threat, only an annoyance as they impede your movement a bit.

Maybe that's not too big of a problem though. Especially as I imagine a situation with 1 or 2 of them as being pretty rare, in most cases I imagine a body of water as either having leeches or not, and if it has them they'll appear in schools of 10-20 or the like.

Catch ya later, I'm off to feed some lizards to the leeches

 

[block tower]

slugcat is too cute. this game looks like a lot of fun, will this game release on Xbox One?

 

[More_Badass]

Leech land behavior is in now, though very simple. This creature really has no AI, it just works on some very simple rules and has some swarming behavior going on. On land it moves either left or right, hoping to fall back in the water. If it hits a wall it'll reverse its direction. After a while it'll dry out and die.

In the gif you can kind of see how I'm having trouble getting out of the water. This is the main danger of the leeches, they'll weight you down. The effect gets a bit of a bonus in water, but is also present when you've gotten out - jumps are a little weaker, you glide down poles, etc.

Added the little afraid relationship, as you can see by the first bat which almost gets caught and then freaks out and gets out of there.

---

slugcat is too cute. this game looks like a lot of fun, will this game release on Xbox One?

Asked the devs before and they said it's too early to tell, right now they're focused on just making the game

 

[More_Badass]

Big devlog update

New area

We've made some solid progress into the second region of Rain World, "Drainage System", which as the name implies is a kind of pervasive sewer that spans the near-surface subterranean and connects a few key regions. It is huge rusted pipes, aqueducts and contained water elements, etc., to creep and crawl through.

We've been spending some time getting the mood right, showcasing Joar's work with the water physics, ambient water lighting, the new waterfall element, etc., and i think it has paid off hugely, producing a really distinct vibe

and then of course we infest the area with nasty leeches!

Lizards will also be in this area, but probably confined to the parts closest to the surface, as they are afraid of water. (with very good reason  >)

Heroically, even after getting sick Joar was able to send me a new tileset for larger "inside pipe" environments, so I'll be experimenting with them the next few days. This is the principle area that will have "water surrounded by tiles", so I'm trying to make the most of it!

Waterfalls

Waterfalls! Note, work in progress ~ I could still be happier with how it looks under the water line. Things are becoming tricky, as I have like 4 different shaders colliding and overlapping here. The dark bubbles under the surface would be a lighter color if I could choose freely, but I have to draw them in the default sprite layer, and then they'll also get the default underwater color. I'll try to mess around with it some more in the future, but this seems good enough as a place holder to get James started with the new watery area.

The left one is a standard waterfall, as I imagine most of them will look. The right one is a weaker one that's a bit broken up, I want this for cosmetic purposes. The standard one looks very square, so the weaker one can be used to make a room look more alive. Both of them could use some more work though! Let me know if you have any tips

Right now the waterfall affects you while you're in the water - if you're close to the surface it'll pull you in and push you down, further down it will push you down and away. Above water it's purely cosmetic, you don't collide with it but move "in front of it". I'm contemplating making it so that the waterfall hits creatures above water as well, and pushes them down. There are a few things to consider here though. First of all, could I make the creature/water interaction look good enough to be happy with it? It'd want some kind of water splatter, and that seems very difficult to implement in a way that looks good. Also the waterfall should probably be affected somehow. This could probably be accomplished by breaking the sprite up in two where the creature breaks the waterfall, and use the weak shader (right in the images above) below that point. But there are also gameplay implications. Waterfalls generally cut rooms up horizontally, and if they are (somewhat) an obstacle, rooms might feel claustrophobic as you'll find yourself locked into little cells without freedom of movement. This might be okay for the player, but lighter creatures such as bats will get pushed around more by the waterfalls, and be even more limited as a consequence. Bat movement might be incredibly limited if the room is cut up by vertical barriers that the player can move through but the bats can't. So, still thinking about that one. Will consult with James and get back!

In shader news, you might notice a some water glimmer on the walls. Adds some atmosphere according to me! I'm really going crazy with the shaders here, but this one is actually not baked into the main shader, it's just a sprite that's placed on top of everything. So some graphics options can easily be implemented where that sprite is simply not created, and the GPU can be spared some pain and suffering. The effect is not for an entire room, but only above water surfaces and extending a few hundred pixels upwards.

Red leeches

An artistic decision I guess. Almost every creature is black already, and it felt nice to spice the leeches up a bit. I really like the contrast between the red leeches and this green water here - it feels a bit more fun and unexpected than just black. Also, the leeches spend most of their time deep under water, where you won't see their color, so it becomes a bit of a surprise when they get closer to the surface.

When they're out of the water for a while they slowly turn black before dying of dehydration.

We were talking about perhaps having both black leeches and red leeches, and giving them slightly different properties, and that's not entirely out of the question, but probably a later issue.

 

[KimonoNoNo]

I like how they're thinking about the world as a self contained ecology.

Watching these gifs you can almost imagine Sir David Attenborough narrating it as a wildlife programme.

 

[UrbanRats]

This game has grown into something pretty mind blowing, holy shit.
Is it slated for 2015?

 

[epmode]

I like how they're thinking about the world as a self contained ecology.

I love when non-sims have complex simulation layers. This game impresses every time I read about it.

Watching these gifs you can almost imagine Sir David Attenborough narrating it as a wildlife programme.

I'd pay for David Attenborough commentary DLC in all sorts of games.

 

[More_Badass]

This game has grown into something pretty mind blowing, holy shit.
Is it slated for 2015?

I asked the devs about their release plans

as for release date: only timelords know, but it certainly better be in 2015

Also asked about the world structure and how Metroidvania-ish it will be

Yep! thats the idea: each region is a little open-world metroidvania, usually with a few thematically linked sub-regions, and then the layout of the world is laid out in a similar fashion: world -> region -> sub-region -> room; mazes within mazes! there are 36 rooms for the first region, "suburban", and thats probably a bit more than they will be on average. This drainage area im working on now looks like it will probably be in the 20-something range, and a few might be even simpler than that. We'll see!

So we know two regions so far: "Suburban" and "Drainage System"

 

[Servbot24]

This looks so good :O

Would love if a Vita version came out, but I'm glad it will at least be on Mac.

 

[UrbanRats]

I asked the devs about their release plans


Also asked about the world structure and how Metroidvania-ish it will be


So we know two regions so far: "Suburban" and "Drainage System"

Thanks, sounds great.
I wish i had backed this.

 

[DouglasteR]

Gorgeous !

 

[UrbanRats]

Is there any explanation of how the rain works? Sorry this thread is pretty long.

 

[Dr. Buni]

It saddens me that this game doesn't have a release date yet. ;_;

 

[More_Badass]

Is there any explanation of how the rain works? Sorry this thread is pretty long.

So these two GIFs basically show off the rain
http://gfycat.com/EvenCircularDevilfish
http://imgwiz.com/images/2014/11/19/9Vo68.gif

The idea is that the periodic rain batters the planet. Anything caught outside is crushed and drowned by the unrelenting bone-shattering downpours. So your goal is to be to venture from your shelter, gather food, and then return safely before the next rainfall comes. However the bats you hunt are finite and they migrate through the world, forcing you to travel farther and to new areas during each rain-free period.

Essentially the rain functions as a timer, but rather than a countdown, it's portrayed through visuals: the world darkens, rumbling thunder, flashes of lightning, a light drizzle starting.

 

[UrbanRats]

That sounds awesome.
I'm sure i'll get paranoid pretty quickly about it.

 

[Crispy75]

I remember being intrigued by this game ages ago when it was just a devlog on a forum.

I've just caught up on this thread.

GOOD LORD.

Love love LOVE the careful thought that's going into this. Dude's amazing. Will buy for sure

 

[More_Badass]

Some more info on the game's different regions:

[Each region is] built out of different materials/tiles (so they have their own look) and explore different gameplay aspects ("horizontal", "vertical", various flavors of "water region", "underground", "mazes", etc etc) but they will also have their own color distinct color palette! Joar just sent me this one for the Drainage System region, and man it is GORGEOUS:

Rusted pipes, weird greenish murky water, it sets the dank underground mood perfectly and adds so much to the atmosphere.

Also from a recent comments, it sounds like there will be 12 regions in the game

As for the soundtrack, I cant wait to start talking about that , but we need the game content to catch up first! Seems like we are getting there though. I'm putting together what might be the last few rooms for the second region this weekend. Then only 10 more regions to go!

And I think it's been confirmed already, but Rain World is definitely coming to Vita. In regards to scaling and resolution:

So the solution we came up with is that basically we're designing everything around a few key 16:9 and 4:3 resolutions simultaneously as to accommodate things like the PS Vita.

 

[More_Badass]

Showing off the new palette in action. Check the ambient water lighting, new pipes, leeches, DS_A05 has it all. Kind of gives off a nice "terrarium" feel. Also on the right with the water coming out is a tile ive been begging Joar for: the spigot! Behold its glory.

 

[UrbanRats]

Hey Badass, is the game gonna be 4:3? Some of the gifs you posted seem perfect for the format, and some of the 16:9 shots in the OP trailer look cropped.

EDIT: Duh, it was answered in the previous post.

 

[Athreous]

Neat idea but man I'm getting real fatigued of 16bit inspired "indie" games.

me too >_< every facking indie game comes with those graphics...

I like the 16 bit era, but we are in 2014...

 

[BulletTheory]

me too >_< every facking indie game comes with those graphics...

I like the 16 bit era, but we are in 2014...

I disagree, to me this looks far more visually exciting than the majority of AAA titles released this year.