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[Teod]

I want to clarify my understanding of some of the ideas being thrown around.

Firstly the bubbles. I thought of them as equivalent of circles on traditional UI: transparent and opaque bubbles represent empty and filled circles that show how many bats you need to eat and eaten already. They are created each time you eat a bat as a reminder.
They can also have some other uses if you can burp on press of a button. If burping is silent, but bubbles pop in a few seconds making a noise, then that can be used to distract predators. There could be other interactions with different species. Some may be afraid of popping noise, or play with or eat bubbles themselves.

Secondly, the gradual starvation mechanism. From the point of gameplay I think it would be great. It gives room for error to novice players and more choices to experienced ones. Occasional screw-up won't kill you and if you're doing well you can choose to sacrifice food for some other goals.
However, this comes with a challenge. It obviously should not affect the controls. Height of your jumps, your speed, etc. That with the devs being against significant visual changes to the character (and I agree with them on that) leaves a rather slim array of possibilities to convey the character state to the player. And without the player understanding this mechanism it becomes dangerously inconsistent and potentially very frustrating, since the same amount of bats eaten can lead to different outcome in the next cycle. Simple "eat that many" indicator is no longer enough, because it's too vague. You need separate indicators on how many you need to eat to not die, how many you need to keep your current weight and how many  you need to get to the normal state. Well, at least the first one of those.
Going back to bubbles that could be conveyed through the different types of shine and fake reflections (see anime eyes for reference), but that would make them look even sillier (probably unnecessarily bigger too) and it would still be vague as hell.
Another way of showing the character state would be the closeup that can be shown at the beginning of every cycle. Imagine level of detail similar to the logo artwork, maybe even with some animation, that shows the state of the character. And then the camera goes in the normal position where none of the detail is shown and everything is left to imagination. But that way leaves out the numbers that player needs to make any sort of meaningful decisions.

how about just not grabbing bats, if you are not intending to eat them? would be pretty obvious, that slugcat is not hungry. or do the bats have other uses, besides eating them. can i throw one at a lizard, so he loses interest in me?

Player will be just frustrated constantly "missing" the catch.
And lizards don't eat bats. In fact, somewhere in this thread I saw a mention of bats being attracted to lizards as their natural defenders against slugcats.

[JLJac]

@Tiredvd, Hi, welcome! Okay, I'll try to clarify. You know the basic laws of perspective, right? Lines converge at the horizon. Imagine standing on a street, pointing a camera down the road and shooting a picture. Then you take ten crab-steps strafing to the left, and shoot another picture.

Each screen in our game is such a "photo" of a small voxel-based 3D world. The reason why we can't just put one next to the other and scroll between them is because the perspective is different. In the camera example, imagine trying to combine the two photos into a panorama. It wouldn't work, because everything in the photo will have moved a different amount depending on its distance from the camera. The lamp post right in front of you will have moved all over the picture from one end to the other. The tree two blocks down will have just inched a tiny bit to the right. And the same phenomena applies to every single point in the picture. The perspectives are not  compatible.

This shows the overlapping area between two "screens" in a room from the game. Note that in the middle, you see the same structure, but it's rendered at different angles because the perspective is different.



This is the reason why not several screens can be attached to each other to create a scrolling continuum.

Also just to highlight a valid point that Torchkas raised earlier, that I feel you might have missed.

Totally didn't miss that, just hoped for it to pass under the radar 

#bubbles, if the bubbles change their appearance a lot to show different states of the slugcat, that sort of takes them beyond the point where they'd make any sort of physical sense, and don't we just have ordinary good old HUD then, but presented in a slightly different way?

Another way of showing the character state would be the closeup that can be shown at the beginning of every cycle. Imagine level of detail similar to the logo artwork, maybe even with some animation, that shows the state of the character.

I'm really into this idea!  This provides a perfect opportunity to get to know your character a little more intimately than just as a tiny cluster of pixels on the screen! I've wanted to include more artwork in the game for a long time, but because of the minimalist UI etc I haven't really seen any opportunity - but this is it! While being in the den you are sort of half in-game, half not, so it's the perfect context to include something like this. A little could go far with this I think - just some illustrations of the slugcat sleeping in the shelter as a "win screen", maybe with the pups if you have any, would really add a lot of narrative quality to the game without really intruding on the actual game, because in the den you're half out of the game anyways!

Oh man oh man so much cool stuff! On cycle start, there could be some events that could happen, communicated through pictures. For example that one of the pups is sick or starved. Maybe the cycle starts with a black screen where you can see an illustration of each member of your little pack waking up. Under each illustration is a row of bat symbols (which is okay, because this is not a HUD overlaying the game, this is just the cycle's establishing screen!) and if one individual is sick or starved or something that's communicated through the illustration and reflected in that they need a few more bats. Then the intro screen fades out, and you start playing in the shelter!

I'm really enthusiastic about this Gotta see what James has to say though, and run it through some discussions with him to see if it holds up, but I'm digging it!

[Crispy75]

This shows the overlapping area between two "screens" in a room from the game. Note that in the middle, you see the same structure, but it's rendered at different angles because the perspective is different.



This is the reason why not several screens can be attached to each other to create a scrolling continuum.

What does it look like with an oblique projection instead of perspective? No problems scrolling that.
The amount of parallax doesn't look that much, so would you really notice much if it's consistent, rather than varying from screen to screen?

EDIT: Or, for that matter, maintaining the vanishing point in the same place relative to the world and panning the camera around independently? That would allow the "walls floor and ceiling" to still show at the edges. Lots of traditional 2D animation backgrounds work like this, as do the side-scrolling painted backgrounds in fighting games, eg:



EDITEDIT: Although the effect could get a bit extreme at the edges of a particularly tall/wide room...

[Christian]

That pre-gameplay art screen is a cool idea. Especially because I love the scarred look of the slugcat in the logo so if we get more art like that, that's awesome. Also it wordlessly and concisely provides the player with an immediate goal when they venture out

[theEasternDragon]

I second that.

[JLJac]

EDIT: Or, for that matter, maintaining the vanishing point in the same place relative to the world and panning the camera around independently? That would allow the "walls floor and ceiling" to still show at the edges. Lots of traditional 2D animation backgrounds work like this, as do the side-scrolling painted backgrounds in fighting games, eg:

This is how we're going to have to do it for split screen and some platforms with smaller screens (when the viewport is smaller than an in game "screen" we'll have to scroll stuff around within that camera position), and I'm sure it'll work out okay. Doing it for multi-screen rooms becomes problematic though, because at the edges stuff becomes so skewed you lose your player avatar behind extruding terrain. The alternative is to have the edges always be the same amount of skew, but in that case the central screens become completely flat. Unity has a texture size cap that's way below the rooms sizes we want as well - and the room textures are actually pretty large memory wise.

oblique projection, yeah, totally considered it. It would open up some technical possibilities for sure. Actually the level editor can spit these out super easily, just have to change a few lines of code:



It has benefits, the rooms might be a little easier to read visually. But it's less aesthetically interesting according to me, because you only get either the lit or the shaded sides of each surface, which makes the image look flatter and gives less room for visual contrast. Also it looks more technical and video-gamey rather than the wonky and slightly unsettling perspective. It's an art style choice, I guess!

[tortoiseandcrow]

Another way of showing the character state would be the closeup that can be shown at the beginning of every cycle. Imagine level of detail similar to the logo artwork, maybe even with some animation, that shows the state of the character.

I'm really into this idea!  Grin This provides a perfect opportunity to get to know your character a little more intimately than just as a tiny cluster of pixels on the screen! I've wanted to include more artwork in the game for a long time, but because of the minimalist UI etc I haven't really seen any opportunity - but this is it! While being in the den you are sort of half in-game, half not, so it's the perfect context to include something like this. A little could go far with this I think - just some illustrations of the slugcat sleeping in the shelter as a "win screen", maybe with the pups if you have any, would really add a lot of narrative quality to the game without really intruding on the actual game, because in the den you're half out of the game anyways!

Oh man oh man so much cool stuff! On cycle start, there could be some events that could happen, communicated through pictures. For example that one of the pups is sick or starved. Maybe the cycle starts with a black screen where you can see an illustration of each member of your little pack waking up. Under each illustration is a row of bat symbols (which is okay, because this is not a HUD overlaying the game, this is just the cycle's establishing screen!) and if one individual is sick or starved or something that's communicated through the illustration and reflected in that they need a few more bats. Then the intro screen fades out, and you start playing in the shelter!

I love the idea of having close up illustrations/animations that convey these states. I'd imagined that it would be still zoomed out and conveyed just through different "waking up" animations, but this is much better! You could even do neat things like add scars and stuff if you've survived different creature attacks. If these establishing screens are the only time you ever see how many bats you need to collect for yourself and the pups, the room for uncertainty if you forget/lose track is nicely on par with trying to guess how far away the rain is. There could also be equivalent screens for when you return to the shelter, which would let you know if you got enough bats and give you some feedback on what the future holds. When you go to sleep, you don't necessarily know if one of the pups will have survived the rain cycle when you wake up, but you might get a hint from the particular artwork shown.

Speaking of the the rain: is the rain always going to be exactly the same amount of time? I've often wondered if it should be slightly randomized each rain-cycle, to keep players paying attention to changes in the environment and not the clock.

[Crispy75]

oblique projection, yeah, totally considered it. It would open up some technical possibilities for sure. Actually the level editor can spit these out super easily, just have to change a few lines of code:

It has benefits, the rooms might be a little easier to read visually. But it's less aesthetically interesting according to me, because you only get either the lit or the shaded sides of each surface, which makes the image look flatter and gives less room for visual contrast. Also it looks more technical and video-gamey rather than the wonky and slightly unsettling perspective. It's an art style choice, I guess!

I went through the exact same quandry in my abortive attempt at game making a few years ago. Was even going for a similar layered pixel art style, except top-down and with vertical traversal through the layers. I can sympathise. In the end (or rather, as far as we'd got) we sacrificed the art style in order to keep a fluid camera. Programmer art ahoy:



RW's art is so strong, you're justified in making sacrifices in the other direction.

[theEasternDragon]

Sweet damn, this game is coming along so well. I can already lose myself in the first alpha, (can't play the second one for whatever reason), and once there are these opening art scenes and waking up animation, along with the music, it is gonna be simply awe-inspiring. 

[JLJac]

Thanks! Yeah that's my thinking as well, the visual style is such an important component we don't necessarily want to compromise it.

Update 408
Took a small pause from overhaul to implement a bloom filter for the Sky Islands palette:



The shader is active, so when stuff moves in front of it the bloom is affected by the sprites:



It's most prominent towards the top/left corner of the screen (where the light source is). Still needs some tuning, I think it might be a bit too much right now.

The shader only adds, never subtracts, meaning that any given color can only be made lighter, not darker. This is why the black vulture gets affected by the bloom, but not the white slugcat.

I don't know if you can notice, but this time around I made the blur check for neighbors diagonally rather than in the straight lateral directions, which looks a bit nicer IMO. The truly ideal case would probably be a circular gaussian blur, but that'd be several times as expensive, so I don't know if it's worth it. I suspect my computer has a pretty strong graphics card, so I have to be careful not to program the shaders too heavy to actually work on most machines.

[marcgfx]

It would be cool to have a before/after bloom comparison (static would be good enough). It looks quite nice on the environment. I don't like it much on the animated gif, the vulture and smoke gets swallowed by it. in slow motion the diagonal rays are very visible. You can't always hit a home run . maybe you can use it when coming out of a dark area, as if the eyes need to adjust or something?

[JLJac]

Yup it's definitely not all the way there yet! But it's a start for getting a better picture of what the area might look like. I agree that the diagonal rays are a bit too jarring... I should probably try a square blur - though that'd be twice as expensive. I could make the blur radius smaller though to save some cycles, which is perhaps not a bad thing actually.

[marcgfx]

it does add atmosphere! maybe it could be very slowly pulsing? a smaller radius might be a good idea, then the square blur might be of similar cost.

[theEasternDragon]

Took a small pause from overhaul to implement a bloom filter for the Sky Islands palette:



The shader is active, so when stuff moves in front of it the bloom is affected by the sprites:

I am not sure I like the look of sky islands. It has an almost fairytale-like quality, with the ornamental ace shaped things in the background, and the overall cleanness. Couple this with the light and it creates a rather rosy impression, which, (this being Rain World), I personally don't like. Obviously there are the usual vines, and caked on grime in some areas, but it looks kind of mashed together, if you know what I mean.

Just my 2 cents.

[Christian]

Took a small pause from overhaul to implement a bloom filter for the Sky Islands palette:



The shader is active, so when stuff moves in front of it the bloom is affected by the sprites:

I am not sure I like the look of sky islands. It has an almost fairytale-like quality, with the ornamental ace shaped things in the background, and the overall cleanness. Couple this with the light and it creates a rather rosy impression, which, (this being Rain World), I personally don't like. Obviously there are the usual vines, and caked on grime in some areas, but it looks kind of mashed together, if you know what I mean.

Just my 2 cents.

Perhaps it's meant to juxapose the grimy, dank, dark, overgrown lower regions and underground

What are the sky islands supposed to be? Drainage System and Chimney Canopy are obvious. Are the "islands" part of an Antenna or something? I think James mentioned that before

[JLJac]

Oh, this room is actually just a room I threw together for James to demo the tiles. It has aaaall the ornament tiles in it, and no slime or rust effects, so it totally doesn't look Rain World enough for Rain World. The actual rooms James has been making are  more worn down and less fairy tale-ey. They do have a bit of that quality though, and at least I think that's an interesting visual contrast - as the huge antennae rise towards the sky they take on a lighter and more ethereal quality.

@Christian, yeah it's some sort of antennae and relay technology. Some sort of signal is being broadcast or received. In this area there'll be less heavy machines and pipes, and instead more fine machinery (assumedly more information technology rather than heavy industrial technology)

[gimymblert]

Did you look at current shader implementation or  did you roll your own from scratch?

[jamesprimate]

oh snap! that bloom is going to look great. i just bothered him about it when comparing one of the old sky islands concept rooms from the lingo to the updated one:

old:

detail: https://i.imgur.com/olhAtS0.jpg

new WIP:

detail: https://i.imgur.com/vorCIjt.png

clearly the bloom is a big part of the mood for the original, so ill be psyched to have it in the toolkit!

SKY ISLANDSS

Talking levels ehh? its like the Bat James signal! for the actual sky island rooms, lets take a look at what we've got going so far...

scaling some large antennae:

detail: https://i.imgur.com/qhVExHB.png

crumbling information relay structures:

detail: https://i.imgur.com/MqZX9Yz.png

and finally, a taste of the sky islands themselves:

detail: https://i.imgur.com/wZY9fYM.jpg

[Kytin]

I'm really into this idea!  Grin This provides a perfect opportunity to get to know your character a little more intimately than just as a tiny cluster of pixels on the screen! I've wanted to include more artwork in the game for a long time, but because of the minimalist UI etc I haven't really seen any opportunity - but this is it! While being in the den you are sort of half in-game, half not, so it's the perfect context to include something like this. A little could go far with this I think - just some illustrations of the slugcat sleeping in the shelter as a "win screen", maybe with the pups if you have any, would really add a lot of narrative quality to the game without really intruding on the actual game, because in the den you're half out of the game anyways!

Oh man oh man so much cool stuff! On cycle start, there could be some events that could happen, communicated through pictures. For example that one of the pups is sick or starved. Maybe the cycle starts with a black screen where you can see an illustration of each member of your little pack waking up. Under each illustration is a row of bat symbols (which is okay, because this is not a HUD overlaying the game, this is just the cycle's establishing screen!) and if one individual is sick or starved or something that's communicated through the illustration and reflected in that they need a few more bats. Then the intro screen fades out, and you start playing in the shelter!

While this doesn't seem like a terrible idea, I do think there is a significant problem with it. Namely, that it sounds like you will be showing the illustration with the bat symbols once at the very start. The player will then need to remember how many bats they needs to eat, as well as how many they have already eaten, through the rest of the cycle with no feedback to indicate when they have had enough. Add in the number of bats each pup needs to eat, and try to keep track of how much each has already eaten and it become very easy to lose track and have someone starve.

Will you have loading screens or something similar where you can reinforce and update the information about how many bats each character still needs? I don't think that telling the player once at the start of each cycle is going to cut it.

[Woodledude]

-snip-

While this doesn't seem like a terrible idea, I do think there is a significant problem with it. Namely, that it sounds like you will be showing the illustration with the bat symbols once at the very start. The player will then need to remember how many bats they needs to eat, as well as how many they have already eaten, through the rest of the cycle with no feedback to indicate when they have had enough. Add in the number of bats each pup needs to eat, and try to keep track of how much each has already eaten and it become very easy to lose track and have someone starve.

Will you have loading screens or something similar where you can reinforce and update the information about how many bats each character still needs? I don't think that telling the player once at the start of each cycle is going to cut it.

I don't believe that's what he means. He wasn't addressing the U.I. problem with the bats; rather, he was addressing our comments about the slugcats looking hungry, or fat, etcetera. Previously, it seems like he wanted to do this, but didn't want to compromise the visuals during gameplay, and this seems like a good solution.

With this in mind, I would guess that he plans on implementing "soft hunger", or rather, the ability to not quite catch the total of bats, but still scrape through with the requirement of catching more in the next hunt. I'm sure testing will show whether this will be enough to do away with the bat u.i. entirely, but I have a feeling it's going to stick around in some form or another.