Rain World is set in an abandoned industrial environment scourged by a shattered eco-system. Bone-crushing intense rain pounds the surface regularly, making life as we know it almost impossible. The creatures in this world hibernate most of the time, but in the few brief dry periods they go out searching for food.
You are a lonely nomadic slugcat, both predator and prey in this land. You must hunt enough food to survive another cycle of hibernation. Other - bigger - creatures have the same plan.
Inspired by the aesthetics and simplicity of 16-bit classics, the gameplay consists of platforming and fast paced sneaking; both sneaking on your prey and sneaking in order to avoid larger creatures. A large focus of the development has been on enemy AI: they are cunning, vicious and they are always hunting you.
Rain World is currently in development for PC and Mac, and can be found on Steam Greenlight
Gameplay:
* Sneak, climb, and pounce your way through an exotic alien landscape full of hidden secrets and undiscovered dangers.
* Nimble controls and unique physics-and-code based animation gives characters a natural fluidity of movement and intuitive weight, for lighting quick high-wire action.
* Intense, primal predator encounters will challenge your reflexes. Limited resources and the constant impending threat of rain will test your nerve. This is not an easy game!
* Co-operative and up to 4 player competitive gameplay: deathmatches, endurance, waves, custom challenges, etc.
* Seriously Mega Cute Slugcat character. Hey, I know that's why we're all really here!
Even though it was pretty tedious, its 100% for the best that we had to rebuild it from scratch, because its letting us do everything in a more organized fashion right from the get-go, taking advantage of the powerful modern development tools now at our disposal. This build may LOOK similar superficially, but its actually waaaaaaay deeper in functionality even now at such an early stage.
The first thing to notice in the video (beside the fact that its running at a blazing 120FPS), is that we have the beginnings of a dynamic lighting system implemented. Creatures, clouds and objects cast pretty shadows, and we can vary the lighting and weather for the time of day or for any number of artistic or aesthetic reasons (probably not with the crazy colors in above gif though haha.) This dynamic lighting system has been a dream of Joar's from the beginning, so its amazing to see it start to come together
Secondly, check the slugcat tail physics. Look how squishy and wiggly!!!! This is just scratching the surface too. We're going to be able to do much more with procedural and physics animation for all creatures...
... such as more detailed limb animations for more natural looking creature interactions with levels and environment. Notice how the cat uses its arms and tail as counterweights, then uses the vertical pole for balance. Not a huge thing, but adds a lot to the immersion in our opinion!
And here is a neat thing I've been saving for last:
How cool is that? Each level is actually made up of 30+ layers stacked on top of each other. We're experimenting with some interesting use of parallax and faux 3d effects. Very exciting to see what comes of that!
So anyway that's what we've been up to.
There is obviously still a huge amount of work to do so I'm going to get back to it, but if people seem interested we can probably keep these updates more 'up-to-date' now that the build doesn't look like, well, this.
Also, I should note that we're finally beginning to get into the territory where we can start reaching out to the those of you with in-game content tiers, so get those creature ideas ready!
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!
as for release date: only timelords know, but it certainly better be in 2015
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Cool gifs
Spoiler:
Last edited by prudislav on Thu, 28th Apr 2016 23:45; edited 2 times in total
Made the vulture able to snap after prey, and carry it...
It's a little lameish, but when I went all out with body motion and neck extension etc the range became too big, and it was just impossible. Maybe it doesn't need a super power attack, but this little peck can do quite well... At least for now.
Hunting behavior (except from the flying outside the room / between rooms part) is pretty much down already though, as it's basically all happening in the interaction between path finder, prey tracker and the actual body's locomotion engine stuff. I've already run around with the vulture and several lizards, and seen it pick its prey, hunt for a bit, change its mind to something closer, etc.
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If you are interested here is an older working concept world map, things have evolved far enough from this that I'm comfortable sharing it without fear of spoilers or anything, and it shows you the general idea of the large interconnected world.
Each color represents a region, and each square a screen, with grouped squares being multi-screen rooms. The regions geographically located next to each other are all connected, but there are also a number of fast-travel-esque connections between distant regions as well. The concept is that each room is a sort of movement puzzle to get through, and each region is its own puzzle of those puzzles, exploring various gameplay elements, geometries and creature territories, and then to get through the world you basically have to navigate a puzzle of puzzle of puzzles.
But as it is now, the 4 regions we currently have hooked up are roughly equivalent in size and complexity to the scope of this entire map!
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I have a decent implementation of the white lizard in now. The camouflage is working, and the different - way more passive - AI is running as well. Neither is top notch yet, but pretty functional.
For those of you who haven't read this devlog for years and years, the lizards come in different colors with some different traits. The white one is a chameleon that sits and waits instead of pursuing you.
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These guys mega janky still, they could use a lifetime of polish. But, as there isn't much interaction with them, the jankyness isn't game-breaking, so I'll move on for now.
I've always like the Garbage Worms because they're weird and because you don't really interact with them. It adds to the atmosphere when you enter a room and see this weird creature and don't really know if it's dangerous - and then you realize that it doesn't want anything from you, it just wants to live its own weird life in peace. It adds to the lived-in-ness of the world, somehow.
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The entire game has been built around 16:9 format from the start, the geometry of every room and screen was structured around it, but I think we were so used to our little 4:3 alpha window that we didnt even realize what we were missing. Fortunately our earlier selves planned this out well!
Long story short: the game plays SO MUCH BETTER in 16:9, how its supposed to be. You see paths and lizards and creatures that were previously off-screen, sometimes before they see you, giving you time to plan actual sneaks or escapes like you are supposed to! Plus you can finally really watch the ecosystem interactions that Joar has been working forever on, things like spotting a vulture and waiting for it to to swoop down on a group of pink lizards before you make your move through a tricky room, etc.
11 days to release. Wonder if it will be any good after so many years
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