That's actually both awesome and easy to do! Might give that a go
Update 196I'm at crossroads again. Have I been talking about how I feel about single player, with it being a bit goalless and all? In case I haven't, quick recap:
(For those of you who know the basic premise of the game, jump to "
jump to here" further down")
Rain World is set in a rainy place, where the rain is intense enough to kill a creature. Whenever the rain stops, for just a minute, creatures emerge from hiding to hunt for food. You are one of these creatures.
Single player is about surviving a certain amount of days (might be called "the rainy season", but might also not. I haven't decided on if
every season in rain world is rainy season, or if it gets extra bad a few months). The catch is that most days it's raining, so when there's a hiatus in the rain you have to go out and catch enough flies to survive in hibernation until the next dry spell. This has been simplified to the creature digesting exactly one fly per day. So, if there are five days of rain ahead, you need to catch five flies.
Then there's another factor - you can't hunt in the same place twice. Next time the flies will not be there. So you have to go further and further from the shelter to hunt.
The amount of extra flies you catch, on top of the ones necessary to survive, is your high score.
JUMP TO HERE.I like this game set up, because it has an element of old school infinite games like Pac-Man. It's a story in itself, you're introduced to a world and you'll just have to try to survive. The story isn't stitched on, it's in the game, self-contained. Problem is, Pac-Man, Snake and the like are infinite games, where you are destined to fail and it's just a question of how many points you can get before that.
For Rain World I want to have some sort of winning condition, mostly because it has metroidvania elements and a game session is much longer than in Snake. In Snake it's OK that you die, but imagine having an rpg where your chararcter
will die... I guess we all know that everyone dies eventually, but if you've spent some time with a game character you feel good to have a story ending where the character survives to die another day when you aren't watching.
These two things make Rain World single player a bit of an awkward hybrid. It's a simple-goal game like pac-man or snake. "Survive! It will get harder and harder," is that simple goal. At the same time it has an ending. We are used to endings as devices to frame narratives, but here we only have a gaping lack of such a narrative. There's no personal development or anything, just survival for an arbitrary amount of days and then a lame "congrats!" screen.
I have been thinking about what sort of narrative I could insert into Rain World, without breaking the things I do like about it. A while ago I had a conversation with James, and he gave one specific type of narrative a name: "Silver lizard stole your girlfriend"-narrative. Rain World should
NOT have a "Silver lizard stole your girlfriend"-narrative. Everything about it is wrong. I think what bugs me the most is the anthropomorphization of the bear creatures. Waaaay to many human qualities implied. Girlfriends. Individual villains. Revenge motifs. The bear creatures actually have very few human qualities. They obviously utilize simple tools, but they don't seem to be able to manufacture them, and there's no indication that they have a language.
"Silver lizard stole your girlfriend"-narratives also have another problem, that they're linear in just the same way as every other game out there. That's not very interesting. We've all defeated enough girlfriend-stealing last bosses, who are evil for no reason or for bad reasons.
Rain World is not about those kind of stories. Rain World is about survival, in a nature-like setting. The world is harsh and dangerous, but there's no evil or sadism. No-one want to steal girlfriends. Everyone just want to eat. There are no opposing wills or political clashes, just the harsh conflict of who gets to eat tonight.
When the "Silver lizard stole your girlfriend"-narratives were dismissed, I had another idea. This one would be that the environments would tell a story of the past of the place. This could potentially be cool, though a bit disconnected from gameplay. It would be like playing the game, and have a parallel and optional little story going on at the side.
Problem here is that this would, once again, go against the core of the game. The core of the game is that you're an animal trying to survive.
I'm interested in the industrial environments of rain world, obviously. I spend quite a lot of time creating them. There's a reason why I didn't just have the game be about wild animals in a tropical jungle (though there are references to that setting - for example the levels set high up among the chimneys are called "canopy area" in my dev documents. I'm also pretty sure that the original biome of the place, before becoming an industrial area, had rain forest characteristics). But would they be enough to tell a story? Perhaps not. And most importantly, that would be the story of someone else, of those who built the place. For some reason, if there's anyone in Rain World I'm not very interested in, it would be those forerunners. They came, built their industries (changed some life forms?) and now they're not around any more for whatever reason. Probably economic reasons. There's no interesting apocalypse that we are post- , and Rain World is about the
now, not the past.
The environments are industrial because I'm fascinated by the idea that animals interact with artificial environments. I'm interested in how those environments are perceived by animals. I'm almost 100% sure that animals don't ponder too much about who built what and why. So if my goal is to re-create the experience of being an animal in an industrial landscape, past mysteries are not the way to go.
So that brings us to my current idea for a story. The story is extremely simple, but as of now I like it.
There are a few shelters around the map. In one shelter, you find three pups. Their mother has not been able to make it back with food, or at all for that matter. Now you can choose to take care of them. It's not a menu choice in a dialogue box or anything, it's just a question of giving them some food or not.
They are a burden. They eat,sometimes you have to move them to another shelter, and then they're in danger and you have to lure lizards the other way etc etc. Maybe the amount of food you have puts you in a situation where you have to choose between giving all of them too little food, or give enough food to only one.
If the pups die, they die. It's up to you whether you want to load your last save. It's always a possibility to abandon them all together.
This means that there is a story, with narrative, but it's not stitched on, it's all in-engine. No events are scripted. Also, the entire story is optional. If it's too hard, you can just skip it. Maybe save it for your next play through.
What are your opinions?
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