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[Polyflare]

I love the amount of detail that's going into the rain! Definitely going to be one of the best game over screens ever made.

[Rhatos]

Looks awesome! (posting to follow)

[JLJac]

#shelters, I'm basically agreeing with you guys' reasoning - for world building purposes they should definitely close, for gameplay reasons they should definitely not. Like hypedupdawg points out, the idea is that they should not really feel like they're designed for you - nothing in the world is. That said, looking at them it seems reasonable to assume that they are built as shelters, which they can be without specifically being built as shelters for you. This is world building stuff that is a bit fuzzy, and I don't want to explain or make explicit too much about the world. I think though that maybe we can sort of walk a line where not everything needs a very reasonable explanation - one of my favorite games is Matt Thorsons "An Untitled Story" a strange metroidvania where there is a million things throughout the large world that doesn't have an explanation, little hovering sparks that you can jump on for example. It's all very weird and if you start thinking about who placed the little sparks everywhere and why, you can't really come up with anything reasonable except "the game needed to work". STILL, the world feels really good, because it follows its own logic rather consistently. There's a ton of gamey stuff, but that just feels like the way this particular world works.

Rain World is perhaps a world that attempts to approximate physical reality more closely than An Untitled Story, but I think we must count on at least a little bit of lea way like that in this project too. There is a ton of weird stuff going on already, the shortcuts being the most notable example (you crawl into a thing, become a couple of dots and tick away through some kind of pipe until you pop out elsewhere, wtf? Not to mention all of it being 2D!!) and some of these will just have to be made a part of this world - once they feel like a natural part of the world they won't be jarring any more, and might even add to the experience by setting this world apart from ours.

Right now the shelters and the region gates trigger the same way - you run to a specific spot, and have to stand still for a couple of frames for them to activate. This is a little piece of logic, but it obviously doesn't make much sense from a physical or technical point of view. A motion sensor would've rusted, right... This is more the game's logic than anything else, and you could even argue about whether it's canon - maybe in the World of RW it works some other way, but in the Game of Rain World it works this way, similarly to how Master Chief probably will lose the bullets left in a clip if he reloads in the World of Halo, but they've excluded that part from the Game of Halo. Really fuzzy grey areas here!

@easternDragon, maybe, yes, don't know, yes! Saving might depend on how rough serialization etc is, so it's a technical thing. It's obviously going in sooner or later. Spears disappearing should definitely be fixed! Fun bug trivia - actually they don't disappear, they turn into rocks while remaining stuck to the creature, but because most creatures are black and the rocks are also black you don't see them... Vultures through short cuts, I don't know... James and I never considered it a bug and we rather like it, but no one else seems to, so maybe. Region gates should definitely be in, that's basically the big thing with this build we're working on!

@New peeps, hi and welcome! Thanks for being interested

[JLJac]

Update 430
Have the rain hooked up to the game now, so it goes through some different stages of death rain according to a semi-random pattern. I don't sweat it too much about a little bit of randomization maybe being unfair, as if you're out and about as the rain timer reaches zero you're on borrowed time anyways - you should basically be thankful for each extra second you get  The rain has two distinct fade in behaviors, the more common being that it simply transitions from normal rain into more and more intense rain until you have the death rain. The other one has a "calm before the storm" moment where everything suddenly turns still and quiet, and then instead of fading through normal rain you will first get singular death rain drips which turn more and more dense until the wall of water strikes. I think this latter one will be really cool with the sound!

Now I have moved on to flash-flooding of underground rooms. The game recognizes three death rain modes, "rain", "flood" and "flood and rain" - the first two are self explanatory, the latter is for semi-underground rooms where you might want to see rain coming down through a skylight or something, but you'd still want to rely on flooding to actually off the player as the room is too underground-themed for it to make sense with the rain drips in front of the terrain and all that.

Flooding is going okay - I have moving water surfaces, which took a bit of work to adapt stuff (mostly the waterfalls) to work with, but now it seems to work. Where I've run into a bit of resistance is with rooms that don't have any water in them to start with - a bunch of things are uncomfortable with water suddenly being added to a room for various reasons. I definitely could add water to all rooms, and just have it hibernate off screen or something until the flooding is about to start, but that would seriously mess with my sense of cleanliness haha!

Another interesting challenge is that it seems like a Futile sprite with a shader that runs a grab pass will run that grab pass even if the sprite is turned invisible, which creates a bit of trouble. Basically the level sprite and the water sprite use the same grab pass, reading from the same register. The rain effects are supposed to do their own grab pass after that, but also write to the same register to save some memory. This has been working fine so far, but with the post-startup added water the order seems to be jumbled, and the water renders after the rain with the wrong stuff in the grab register, turning it opaque. Fun challenges!

[Teod]

I think shelters would look more natural if there was something in them that isn't tied to their ingame function. As far as I know, currently they're just boxes with doors - perfect for slugcat, but not much else. But what if they were shaped more interestingly and less shelter-y, and/or had some sort of unique technological stuff in the background?

As for how they work - gates have those wire floors, which are probably subtle levers. And since we have water-powered machinery of gates it can be a reasonable assumption that shelters work in a similar fashion, but instead of having storage tanks they use water of the rain itself. They're kinda spring-loaded in that regard: closed as long as force is applied, opening when there's no pressure.

[RainWorldIsAwesome]

the vultures shouldn't necessarily go through pipes though, if they wanted to track you in say the sky islands, instead of going through a pipe could they go around one of those antenna thingies?

[Christian]

Oh wow, we're actually getting flooding!

I think shelters would look more natural if there was something in them that isn't tied to their ingame function. As far as I know, currently they're just boxes with doors - perfect for slugcat, but not much else. But what if they were shaped more interestingly and less shelter-y, and/or had some sort of unique technological stuff in the background?

As for how they work - gates have those wire floors, which are probably subtle levers. And since we have water-powered machinery of gates it can be a reasonable assumption that shelters work in a similar fashion, but instead of having storage tanks they use water of the rain itself. They're kinda spring-loaded in that regard: closed as long as force is applied, opening when there's no pressure.

I always imagined that shelters were actually a kind of runoff valve/drainage system to drain excess water after the rain. Which would explain the heavy gates and why they open after the rain stops and why you wouldn't be able to enter them once the death rain came. After the rain falls, gates open and the little remaining rain drains through.

A semi-intelligent creature like the slugcat could probably learn the relationship between the gates opening/closing and the rain patterns and realize they would make good places to hide from the rain

[jamesprimate]

Honest question: is there a point where there is too much content? No, right? Like, as long as a good portion of it is optional, then it's there for people who want to explore the world, but doesn't bog down the casual player. Interested to hear your thoughts.

[Christian]

Honest question: is there a point where there is too much content? No, right? Like, as long as a good portion of it is optional, then it's there for people who want to explore the world, but doesn't bog down the casual player. Interested to hear your thoughts.

Depends IMO. Look at Ubisoft's template for their recent games. I think that's a good showcase of "too much content can be a bad thing"

But I think with Rain World, the game is so laser focused on exploration and experiencing the ecosystem and following bat migration, that more content (aka more species and more rooms and regions vs less) is a good thing

[JLJac]

Also the super mega amount of content is mostly in terms of rooms, when it comes to creatures we have a pretty manageable amount - not necessarily by choice but because I can't cram them out fast enough hehe. So it seems like what we're going towards is a very large world with not quite as many (species of) creatures in it, for good or for worse. This definitely creates the risk that people will find the world "dull" as there's a lot of rooms, but not a lot of variation as to what you actually find in it. However I think we have some measures to steer clear of that - first of all the region system, where the regions are not too huge in themselves and they each provide some visual variation. Then to that comes that many of the rooms are interesting in themselves, you'd want to explore them for the sake of it, Knytt-style. And then we have the set-pieces, which will be a boon to the explorer every now and then. So I don't think we need to worry all too much, but hey, who knows!

If it does become a problem that the world is too big, I think you could pretty easily hook up the regions with a few new connections to solve that. Like, if each region has just a few "highway rooms" that connect its region gates, that would effectually make the world smaller, and then the other rooms would exist more in the periphery to be explored or not. That's sort of the idea we're already working with right, just a bit more extreme?

Update 431

Now I have the three game over modes working, rain, flood and floodAndRain. Each of them exist and work, but I don't yet have a system for how to decide which will occur in which room - that leads into a small can of worms which is some kind of interface for manipulating room-specific settings. I've also connected them with sound triggers, so James can get started on that. We have run into a bit of a catch 22 with some of the sound stuff that requires more sophisticated code - what generally happens is that I ask James if I can get the sounds in advance because I feel I need them to tune the sound manipulating code. Then James tells me that he can't really work on them until I've placed the triggers so he can see how they behave in the game... I think the solution we're gonna roll with is that I put in a simple placeholder behavior to get James started, and then when he has some material I can go back and do a bit of tuning. We'll see how it works.

Other project of the day has been hooking the vulture up with sound triggers. Making the woooosh loops for the wings was a lot of trouble, but now I'm pretty happy with how it sounds using a placeholder sound. There's a sound trigger for when the hard (metal/glass?) feathers bump into terrain, which pitch-shifts according to feather length, which sounds pretty cool, I'm really looking forward to what James comes up with for that! There are a few triggers left to be placed, then I'll try to get a few water interaction sound triggers in as well before shipping it to James so he can get started on sound stuff after finishing the Shadow Urban region up.

[jamesprimate]

probably rejected RW track 31 https://clyp.it/dwrl0wgk

[TheWing]

...This definitely creates the risk that people will find the world "dull" as there's a lot of rooms, but not a lot of variation as to what you actually find in it...

Hmm.. I haven't seen anything but sticks and stones for stuff that you yourself can pick up? Will there be different stuff to utilize for throwing around, and if there will, that'll surely help in getting the place feel not so dull?

Also, where the hell can one get this game? I looked around google and came up with a completed (very nicely completed, good job ) kickstarter from last year... am I just late on this and have to wait for ..some time?

Anyhow, keep the work up, loving to see it develop, even more when it's documented in this high detail o/

[jamesprimate]

oh there is still plentyyyyy of time left for dev. so dont think ill let him get off so easy on the creature bestiary XD

also, its not like each creature has to be MIT CS research paper level. hes been enthusiastically tackling the hardest ones first, but sprinkling some easy to implement / dum AI creatures that flop around will add a TON to the atmosphere but shouldnt kill us with time.

[Crispy75]

There's a sound trigger for when the hard (metal/glass?) feathers bump into terrain, which pitch-shifts according to feather length, which sounds pretty cool

The Wind Chimes Of Death

[hypedupdawg]

probably rejected RW track 31 https://clyp.it/dwrl0wgk

Okay, definitely buying the soundtrack now - if I buy now on Humble, I presume the content will be Steam accessible as well as the main game?

Edit: @jamesprimate - PM'd you

[chriswearly]

After not picking this side project of mine up since... October? yeesh. Well here's a little Gameboy Rain World :D

(edit-just link): http://i.imgur.com/lmnvaup.png

edit: in-game palettes sure do this justice :D

[gimymblert]

can't wait for the rainworld amv with the song "every i'm hustling"

Beautiful gb render   

[JLJac]

Oh those are awesome Chris Love the little slugcat face! Suburban, Drainage System, Heavy Industrial and Sky Islands (or Chimney Canopy, but that palette is the Sky Islands palette now, there has been a little switching around). I know them all too well by now!

Today I don't really have a good update for you guys, the work day has not been going amazingly I started out by finishing the vulture sound trigger placement, and then moved on to water sound trigger placement where I got stuck because my sound engine has become a convoluted mess. So I cried to James about that for a while before giving up, had lunch and walked the dog. If I didn't tell you guys, I've moved from NY to the swedish country side, and NY problems have been replaced with swedish country side problems - long story short the dog chased a cat up a tree, in the middle of the woods. It was a really tall tree and it seemed the cat couldn't get down, why I spent most of the afternoon in angst over the cat in the tree, and attempted a very failed rescue mission involving me climbing up with a sports bag that the cat did not want to get in. Don't worry though, last time I returned to the scene there was no cat in the tree and also no dead cat in the perimeter below the tree, so the cat seems to have been able to climb down after all. I basically had the same amount of trouble as I usually have with my digital little animals, just with meat space animals instead...

Sooo, I finally got back to the grind, where I've gotten started on an interface for changing what rooms will be flooded and what rooms will be rained on, and it's going quite well so far. This interface will also allow for some other room settings such as palette fades etc, that are well due by now.

In the mean time, James has been finishing up Shadow Urban, and I've given it my first spin! Don't want to say too much as we decided that this would be our semi-secret region, but I can say that it's quite beautiful and really creepy at times :D

[jamesprimate]

probably rejected RW track 31 https://clyp.it/dwrl0wgk

Okay, definitely buying the soundtrack now - if I buy now on Humble, I presume the content will be Steam accessible as well as the main game?

Edit: @jamesprimate - PM'd you

ahh thx thx! Yes indeed, the humble will include steam keys!

we rarely post the link, but for people who are interested: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/product/rainworld_earlyaccess_soundtrack/FpSDLkj8s

[Caspar2000]

probably rejected RW track 31 https://clyp.it/dwrl0wgk

Okay, definitely buying the soundtrack now - if I buy now on Humble, I presume the content will be Steam accessible as well as the main game?

Edit: @jamesprimate - PM'd you

ahh thx thx! Yes indeed, the humble will include steam keys!

we rarely post the link, but for people who are interested: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/product/rainworld_earlyaccess_soundtrack/FpSDLkj8s

I bought the bundle pack, does that give me early access to the alpha? (Would be so nice :-)