next »

[iambored]

Hahaha wow that's awesome! Especially like the little mini flaps in between... You should release it for the iPhone, it has one entire more dimension of freedom than flappy bird, so it should do ^2 the $$$ according to simple maths!

Heh, thanks! Of course, every button I add will halve the profits, but you can't argue with simple maths!
Anyway, I wanted to ask- why do the lizards have a limited FoV? I get that it's realistic, but consider this- the player has a full FoV. In fact, he's practically omniscient. Wouldn't making the lizards know as much as the player be more realistic?

[Christian]

Hahaha wow that's awesome! Especially like the little mini flaps in between... You should release it for the iPhone, it has one entire more dimension of freedom than flappy bird, so it should do ^2 the $$$ according to simple maths!

Heh, thanks! Of course, every button I add will halve the profits, but you can't argue with simple maths!
Anyway, I wanted to ask- why do the lizards have a limited FoV? I get that it's realistic, but consider this- the player has a full FoV. In fact, he's practically omniscient. Wouldn't making the lizards know as much as the player be more realistic?

Well it's a stealth game, right? Stealth survival? If the lizards knew as much as the player, sneaking up on them, tricking and surprising them, ambushing them, would be impossible.

I think the flip side of that could be cool. Kind of like New Game Plus in Mark of the Ninja. You could only see what was in your line of sight, everything else was obscured.

[eigenbom]

Eating the fly is planned as a Premium feature for Gold Subscribers.

But all of us TIGers are automatically Platinum, right?

[jamesprimate]

so after a brief (2 hour) crash-course from Joar on the level editor basics, ive been on the world-building warpath. We're looking to be pretty ambitious with the size of the world (200+ rooms? id like to do even more than that), so this is what im going to be staring at for the foreseeable future:



A really significant change in the new unity build is that rooms can now be multiple screens in width or height, which opens up huuuuuuge possibilities for gameplay that i've been mulling over the past few months. We're planning on using them as larger set-piece levels to base regions around for a dramatic effect. But first I have to get my level building chops up and do some tests with multi-screen room implementation.

Here I took inspiration from a level of joar's called  colosseum, and basically just extended it into 2 screens:


The red and black overlay lines indicate the multiple camera positions. in order to format for both 16:9 and 4:3, we're making each level work for both simultaneously. its a little tricky, but hey.


We can also go vertical, as this 3 screen concept that spans from a rooftop into the canopy:



That was one of my first multi-screen tests, so i flubbed the height a little. no matter, camera placement to the rescue.




A horizontal 3-screen concept for the underhang region:






This next one is definitely my favorite of the 25(!) i've done so far. A 5-screen set piece concept for the garbage pit region called garbageWastes:





Its a bit hard to make out in such a tiny picture, but imagine each one of those rectangle overlays is a 1600:900 screen. Quite Exciting! Check it out here for a bit more detail: https://i.imgur.com/aYGLNkY.png 

But.... that level broke the editor, so perhaps ill step it down a notch for a bit 

[Christian]

I remember during the Kickstarter, one of the Twitch streams, you guys had said that the current world (at the time) was small. How many rooms would that world have been compared to the envisioned 200 rooms in the full game?

[jamesprimate]

by the end of the kickstarter, joar had around 70 completed levels i think? so thats a pretty fair amount. but a good many of those were multiplayer levels or concepts. the actual knitted-together, navigable world was around... 40 i think? maybe half of those being place-holders

im thinking (ambitiously...) that the game world of the alpha will be about the size of maybe 2 of the 14ish regions planned for the game.

but we shall see! after a few months in the level editor i may have changed my tune 

[JLJac]

@iambored2006 & Christian,
Yeah, it's a sneaker. All the other creatures have a limited FoV, except the player. The idea is that you don't question the player's omniscience as much, as it stems from the weird duality of player/avatar that comes from having a third person perspective. The slugcat is in the world and shouldn't be able to see through walls, but you're looking at it all from the unfathomable third dimension, so you know things you shouldn't know. This is actually the core aspect that makes the game fun as well. You look at the lizards and you see what they do, and can kind of imagine what they might know or think, as you try to play around that. Your ability to see through walls is also pretty much the only leverage you have on the lizards, if they were able to ambush you from behind a corner the game would be virtually impossible. I could easily add a mode where other creatures are invisible if there's not an actual line of sight from your avatar to them, but that would essentially break the core mechanic. It would be extremely scary though hahaha! So it might be fun to try.

Update 319
Made the flies able to move between rooms, and exist in abstract rooms. James and I had a little talk, and decided that bats (yes, I'm using fly and bat every second time) didn't need to be saved as individual creatures in abstract space. There's really never no need to identify one fly from another, a bat is a fly is a bat. Also it seemed ridiculous to save the individual positions of ... idk... 10 000+ flies on the entire world map, especially as they are all moving the entire time. So instead I created a system where they are saved as just numbers, per node in each room.

As always when I've spent the day doing something boring I'm going to try to appease you with saying that it's a generalized system that can be applied to any creature from here on! It's a boring update, but it'll make fun updates be more frequent in the future! We call this system Quantified Creatures, as they are not remembered as individuals but just reduced to their quantity. I think this system can be cool for some small decorative insects and the like as well.

The system supports free movement between rooms, abstract to abstract, abstract to realized, realized to abstract and realized to realized.

One thing this system is capable of doing which I'm looking forward to is to create extremely large migrations through the world map. We have been talking a bit back and forth about whether or not bats should migrate - it might not be a good idea for gameplay reasons. If they don't though, some other creature definitely should. My idea is that I could have huge quantities of the creature moving between abstract rooms, as this would be no harder than just shuffling numbers (minus one in this room, plus one in this room). Then when you move through the rooms and view them one by one, as many of the creatures as the computer is capable of could be shown moving around. You could follow the flock and see them consistently existing in many rooms, moving in the same direction, suggesting an epic world-map-scaled movement with thousands of creatures, even though not all of them are necessarily realized at a time.

James has really been killing it with the level editor 0______o He's been sending me some pretty amazing looking levels. Looking at his levels, I've come to realize that he's way better at composition than I am haha... Look at those hills in the wide one, that's some pretty damn smooth line work for a musician! Still I'll be necessary in the creation of these 200+ () rooms, because actually placing the tiles demands knowing them all by heart. So it seems we're zoning in on a setup where James creates the geometry and I decorate it and give it the RW aesthetic. Which seems like a perfect match! But nothing is settled for sure yet, we'll have to see how things develop as we get into the focused world building phase. Until then I should probably fix the level editor so it can output larger levels ...

[iambored]

So basically, as long as gameplay makes sense, realism is secondary. Sounds good to me! I think an additional Teleglitch-style FoV mode would be fun, though!

[JLJac]

I think that in fictional universes, you can't really speak of realism per se. I mean, look at it. But you can talk of in-world consistency. My philosophy is something like this:

* Make simple, understandable rules
* Stick to the rules
* When it's necessary to make an exception, try to
   -Promote the exception to a rule. If the exception is in many places, and consistent, it's not an irregular oddity any more.
   -Demote, minimize and hide the exception. A fallback solution, as it'll always be an exception, but better than nothing.
   -Clump exceptions. Many exceptions in one "weirdness zone" is less jarring than having them everywhere.

So, rain world creatures have certain rules going for them, one of which is inability to see through walls. This applies to all of them. This is a gameplay rule, they have "canon" rules as well, such as that they need to hide in a hole when the rain comes, or aesthetic rules, such as that they consists of several moving parts but few, flat colors.

The player creature is by necessity an oddity, because it's controlled by the player. So I've sort of been gravitating towards making the player creature an exception cluster. The ability to see through walls is one of those exceptions.

Then there's other stuff as well, such as aesthetic choices, I wouldn't want the sprites to pop or fade into existence when you see them, as I try to keep HUD and game graphics as separate as possible - essentially my goal is that everything you look at should either be very clearly an object that *is there* in the physical game world, or something that is extremely clearly a HUD overlay which is not in the world (promoting the exception to rule and clustering it). So these kinds of decisions have developed together with gameplay decisions into what I'm thinking of as the current design idea.

And simplicity has a certain weight as well! If the simplest, default mechanic of a 2D game is that you can see everything on the screen, that should be a slight bias to keeping it like that as well, in my opinion. Otherwise you're adding stuff, and whenever you're adding stuff you need to be careful that it's stylistically in line with everything else.

Sorry it got a bit long! I'm not defensive against your question, I just like to talk about this stuff

[iambored]

You should talk about it more! I love reading people's design philosophies, and you seem to have some interesting ideas!

[JLJac]

Update 320
Finally we went through and got the Unity pro license, and now for the first time I've been able to see the new animated creatures together with the backgrounds!





This is just a very first look, still a lot to do, so I might come back in the evening with a more detailed update. Just thought you guys were so starved of visual stuff that you might appreciate seeing that the graphics are starting to come together.

[qwurp]

Looking amazing! Seriously. Love the shadows, you guys are doing sensational work. And the bats, wow like everything else in Rain World, they look alive... This just gets me excited to see what you guys do with the creatures the KS backers come up with. (And by that I totally mean the one I submitted haha).

[jamesprimate]

Update 320
Finally we went through and got the Unity pro license, and now for the first time I've been able to see the new animated creatures together with the backgrounds!





This is just a very first look, still a lot to do, so I might come back in the evening with a more detailed update. Just thought you guys were so starved of visual stuff that you might appreciate seeing that the graphics are starting to come together.

LOOKS

ABSOLUTELY

INCREDIBLE

 

[DarkWanderer]

Okay now that looks great!

[rj]

damn i'm stupidly excited for this now

i mean i already was
but damn

[JLJac]

Thanks thanks thanks!

Update 321

The old lizard bubbles are back in:



I also made a few impact effects, such as little water droplets. When I grab the lizards with the mouse and smash them in the ground (don't worry, these stunts were performed by trained professionals) there's really a lot of water, that's because the mouse movement impact speed is much greater than most in-game scenarios, and because there are three of them at the same spot. To get a feeling for what it actually looks like most of the time, take a look at when they impact the ground from natural falling.



And one extra, for hilarity. I had forgotten that I had activated grabbing other creatures when I introduced the bats, so when playing with some lizards I accidentally pressed the wrong button and.... Hahaha this looks too funny! Just grabs the bastard by the throat like it's nothing!



I don't think that the actual game will have the ability to grab lizards, and if it will, it will definitely be factored in that the lizard weights more - in this gif the lizard is just moved to where the player is, meaning it essentially has 0 mass. Also if the game was finished the lizard would bite you if you attempted this. So rest assured, there won't be anything that looks like this ridiculous scenario in the actual game, I just wanted to show it to you because it looked funny.

[Christian]

So great to see the game looking like it's awesome old self again! Now more fluid than ever before. The move to Unity really did wonders for Rain World. Can't wait to see more!

Edit: oh wow, the shadows on the background...such a cool subtle effect!

Also, what are the bubbles supposed to be or indicate?

[JLJac]

No real world equivalent really - sometimes I think of it as smoke, but mostly as bubbles. They're also similar to the emotional signifiers you might see in cartoons or anime (lines, squiggles, signs) except they do have some sort of physical presence. You know how some animated characters has some feature that is physically there, but is used mostly to convey emotion (the one that comes to mind is hades' fire in disney's hercules), something like that. It's a mystery

[Sparrow]

Long time lurker here.
I tip my hat to you guys.
This just looks amazing, agreeing with Christian that the move to unity was a good choice.

[Rojom]

The old lizard bubbles are back in:

I thought I recognized that area!



Man, those shadows really add depth. Is the lighting dynamic, or are you changing it for this area in the new build? I just realized you posted the same area with different lighting in the other gifs of that post lol.

Also, that shudder/bubble effect of the lizard when the slugcat pops in... sick.