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[jamesprimate]

The way its working is that each cycle survived increases your "karma level" (currently capped at 5), and each time you die reduces it. Each gate has a certain karma level that required to pass through from 1-5, and certain directions require more than others. The idea being that if you are an experienced player that is able to quickly hunt and stay alive through a bunch of consecutive cycles, all the gates will be passable to you and you can adopt a more aggressive pace. But if you die, it forces you to slow down, regroup and be cautious, hopefully improving your skills.

Ive been playing a LOT more since this went in, and i cant even tell you how much more fun it is, even for me who is far too intimately knowledgeable about the region layouts. All these little creature neighborhoods open up to you that previously you'd just see once passing through. In my current save, im in Heavy Industry right next to a water tank filled with snails that has 2 blue lizard living nearby. Initially the lizards would just snoop around and I'd quickly swim through to escape, but over a few cycles they seem to have learned my tricks and position themselves better, so now its a mad dash to dive and grab snails to detonate and knock them out.

But in my year+ of making and playing this region, none of that had ever happened before! You'd rush through once and that would be that. Spending more time with the fauna allows for all these emergent experiences as the procedurally generated personalities of the individual creatures interplay and your interactions with them shape their behaviour in subsequent cycles.  Im kind of blown away right now to be honest. 

[ActualDog]

Initially the lizards would just snoop around and I'd quickly swim through to escape, but over a few cycles they seem to have learned my tricks and position themselves better, so now its a mad dash to dive and grab snails to detonate and knock them out.

But in my year+ of making and playing this region, none of that had ever happened before! You'd rush through once and that would be that. Spending more time with the fauna allows for all these emergent experiences as the procedurally generated personalities of the individual creatures interplay and your interactions with them shape their behaviour in subsequent cycles.  Im kind of blown away right now to be honest. 

This is all so ridiculously cool. I'm beyond pumped to get my hands on the game and experience this stuff firsthand.

[Teod]

Are resources within one region replenish fast enough to sustain a player indefinitely? Because if they don't there's a risk of cornering player in a dead end with no chance of winning.

And how are you going to explain this mechanic from the story perspective? In most games either player death falls out of continuity entirely, "no, wait, that didn't happen" style, or the world allows main character to be resurrectable (like in Dark Souls). Maybe it would be easier to use total cycles instead of in a row? The result will probably be mostly the same.

Edit: Also, any news on your GDC talk being available somewhere somehow? Almost a week passed.

[Wlad]

Maybe it would be easier to use total cycles instead of in a row? The result will probably be mostly the same.

I think that wouldn't work, I imagine this karma level as global variable. If this karma level restriction wasn't about consecutive cycles, it would mean that I would play few cycles in starting area and then I would have whole world opened despite of later deaths in more challenging parts of the world.

Edit: Also, any news on your GDC talk being available somewhere somehow? Almost a week passed.

I would love to see it too.

[Teod]

Maybe it would be easier to use total cycles instead of in a row? The result will probably be mostly the same.

I think that wouldn't work, I imagine this karma level as global variable. If this karma level restriction wasn't about consecutive cycles, it would mean that I would play few cycles in starting area and then I would have whole world opened despite of later deaths in more challenging parts of the world.

That problem would occur in both systems though, even if a bit rarer in the consecutive one. It should reset for each region either way to work well.

[Wlad]

Maybe it would be easier to use total cycles instead of in a row? The result will probably be mostly the same.

I think that wouldn't work, I imagine this karma level as global variable. If this karma level restriction wasn't about consecutive cycles, it would mean that I would play few cycles in starting area and then I would have whole world opened despite of later deaths in more challenging parts of the world.

That problem would occur in both systems though, even if a bit rarer in the consecutive one. It should reset for each region either way to work well.

Yeah, you are correct. I kinda like more consecutive approach, because it sounds more challenging. 

[JLJac]

Sorry about being quiet, I have one more big SECRET thing to do and I wanted to clump together the devlog silence rather than start devlogging just to stop again a bit later. The karma system is really prominent though, so let's talk about it a little bit!

The karma system is the solution to a problem we noticed when connecting the entire world. It shows that what was driving player motivation wasn't survival, but exploration - the treat you're looking for is seeing new environments and new creatures (which is natural as humans are curious). This is all good, but it incentivised a pretty destructive play style. Instead of trying to survive, you would throw yourself out into the world as far and quick as you could over and over, not caring if you survived as long as you had the chance to reach new areas. The key problem here was the not caring if you survived part - that is very contrary to the mood we wanted to create, which should be all about survival. We're making a survival platformer after all, and want to create the feeling of being an animal in an eco system - which should be all about staying alive. Also as James said, players could move very quickly through the world just blazing through the carefully crafted environments and situations. Basically, a way too high movement to survival ratio.

Another problem was that any cycle that you didn't manage to reach a new shelter felt like a complete waste. I actually had one person on a convention floor, that had after much effort managed to make it back to the starting shelter with enough food, ask me "what did I gain from that?"

We needed to skew the main incentive away from movement and towards survival, making survival the main objective and movement the secondary. The solution we came up with was gating movement with survival - if you don't survive, you don't get to see new areas. A nice side effect of this is an automatic smoothing of the difficulty curve - you're only let into the next region when you're able to handle the one you're in, making sure that you don't randomly end up on too deep waters without any way of making it back.

So yeah, each cycle you survive, +1 karma, each cycle you die, -1 karma. Clamped at 1 and 5. Exiting the game or hitting restart counts as a death and takes karma away, keeping you from cheating the system by restarting when in a dire situation - you have to actually play and survive in order to avoid karma depletion.

Region gates have karma requirements - and different requirements in each direction. This means that we can make it so that movement from an easy region to a difficult one has a higher requirement, whereas the other direction has a low or no requirement. That way we can make sure that the player doesn't enter a region they're not ready for, but if they do manage to enter one and find out that they bit off more than they can chew there's the option to opt out back into the easier region they came from and regroup.

The karma system is relative rather than static. By this I mean that collecting 2 karma in an easy region is easy, whereas collecting 2 karma in a tough region is hard. So while the range 1-5 might seem narrow (we might actually extend it depending on how testing/tuning goes) it is actually way wider than it seems, because a 4 in a hard region might represent the difficulty of a 12 or something in the first region.

It also helps build anticipation - instead of finding a gate and immediately going through it, you might find it and think "cool, I wonder what's behind there" and then have to spend a few cycles actually getting there.

One thing we said early on is that we don't want to gate progression like a classical metroidvania, which is effectually more linear than it might look from viewing the map as you have to do tasks in certain orders (get red key to go through red doors, etc). This design principle still basically stands with the karma system. If you're a very good player, you can theoretically farm your karma up to max at the beginning and then move freely through the entire world unless you die. In practice and if you're a beginner you'll die quite a bit though, slowing your progression down and funneling you a bit towards regions that are more on your level.

Addressing Teod's concerns. Yes, we're tuning the regions to be able to infinitely sustain the player on food (although it will get harder as food depletes), or to have a gate without karma requirement that allows you to get out of them. We don't want the player to be able to null their save file by moving into a region that can't support them without a way of getting out.

Yep, the karma system breaks the linear timeline of saving and reverting a bit. Normally in a game when reverting to the last save, the entire game world pretends like everything from that point in time "didn't happen", and at the end of the game you could imagine a timeline stitched together from all the successful sessions that shows the player moving through the entire thing without dying once. With the karma system however, if you die everything is reverted to your last save state except the karma, which is depleted. The karma counter sort of exists on its own timeline. As for story reasons for this, we do have some ideas but don't want to go into it at depth because it would spoil some very key narrative points. All I'll say for now is that the game narrative touches on the themes of re-birth and cyclical life, and this has to do with that.

Having the gates be tied to total cycles doesn't really create the same result. One reason is that it doesn't dynamically adapt to the player performance in the same way - everyone would be let into the same areas at the same time, regardless of how well they're doing. Some players might find themselves in too deep waters, others might get impatient with the game not letting them into areas which they would actually be able to handle, breaking the design principle of "the whole world open from the start, if you're good enough".

This stuff also plays into the planned New Game+ mechanics - the second time you play the game, you'll likely be muuuch better at it, and want to move much quicker. A system dynamically adapting to the player's skill will adapt to your pace and allow you to move where you want to without frustration from arbitrary obstacles.

[JLJac]

And as we're talking, another significant mechanic has been implemented - the creature attraction tool. It allows James to tell certain breeds of creatures to be attracted to or avoid certain rooms. This allows him to create little turfs for the creatures that they will generally keep to. Of course we both think that the emergent aspect of rain world is one of the coolest things about it, and we'd in no way want the creatures to be stuck in their spots waiting for the player to arrive like standard video game enemies. This is more about manipulating probabilities - how probable should it be that these creatures are in these general areas?

Basically it allows to create little mini-biomes within the regions. Garbage wastes for example consists of a large surface area sub region, and then an almost as large system of underground caves. With this system we can create distinct faunas for sub regions like this, while still allowing bleed and overlap and interaction between the two. Just that cave creatures won't be just as likely to be up on the surface and vice versa.

Another important aspect of this system is that earlier when creatures roamed the world, they'd have an equal chance to pick any room as a roaming destination, independent of the room size. Having 7 lizards in a 6-screen room is good gameplay, but having 7 lizards in a tiny little one-screen connecting corridor was horrible With this system, the chance to pick a room as a hang out spot is dependent on room size as well, making that latter scenario much less likely.

It should be noted that the system mostly is manipulating where the creatures choose to stay, they're still generally allowed to move through any room - making them able to traverse the regions about as much as they previously were (ie a lizard might decide to go hunt 7 rooms away from its spawn position, traversing a third of a region to get there). We do have a "forbid" setting as well that prevents creatures from even passing through a room, but we're treating that as a "nuclear option" and are very restrictive with its use - mostly using it for keeping Daddy Long Legs from hogging tiny little connecting corridors and blocking player advancement completely.

In general James has been keeping a very light touch with this tool, keeping things as open and accessible as possible and only going in with slight room attractiveness alterations where it's really necessary. The changes to how the game plays have been big and for the better though - creatures feel like they have more personality if you can expect them to hang out in certain environments (salamanders like water, for example), and unfair deaths from weird random creature mixtures in tiny rooms has gone down quite a lot.

[oldblood]

Awesome, detailed update! Very well written and makes a lot of sense... Really excited to dive into this game and experience the ecosystem. The karma system seems like a very logical solution.

[tortoiseandcrow]

Sounds amazing! Have you figured out how you will be communicating the karma system in the UI?

One minor quibble, though. I think it is needlessly punitive to have quitting the game equal a death - I need to be able to shut the game down right away if my partner asks me to duck out for last minute groceries or what have you. If i lose my latest cycle if i ever quit in the middle of it the game's real-world footprint starts to get a bit large. How about if the game just picks up exactly where you left off?

[Christian]

Sounds amazing! Have you figured out how you will be communicating the karma system in the UI?

One minor quibble, though. I think it is needlessly punitive to have quitting the game equal a death - I need to be able to shut the game down right away if my partner asks me to duck out for last minute groceries or what have you. If i lose my latest cycle if i ever quit in the middle of it the game's real-world footprint starts to get a bit large. How about if the game just picks up exactly where you left off?

Maybe a Save & Quit a la Dark Souls and some roguelikes?

[tortoiseandcrow]

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I just don't want the game to punish me for having a life

[jamesprimate]

Sounds amazing! Have you figured out how you will be communicating the karma system in the UI?

Joar has a pretty cool functional UI setup now, but I think it's going to be stylized / designed up a bit before we show it. Another controversial bit (that historically I have been really against) is that it also incorporates a really slick stylized rain cycle timer. All of it is integrated into the "Slugcat thinking" map screen, so despite all my protesting before, it works really well and is much needed for overall gameplay now that the rain cycle length has randomized elements.

[Vadinci]

I'm in the middle of writing a 'paper' - as you might call it - about procedural character animation. Obviously Rainworld was a huge inspiration for picking that subject . There is one thing I have some trouble figuring out however, so I figured I'd straight up ask it to the master on the subject:
How do you figure out where and when the limbs need to move? The system I could come up with is moving a foot (for example) once it is too far from the body/hips/whatever. You'd then move it in the same direction that the body is moving in and place it on the ground somewhere. Unfortunately as this is for a paper I need a better source than a personal guess

Do you know if your GDC talk is going to end up in the vault? It'd probably be too late to use for my research (the deadline is coming up soon), but I would love to see it regardless!

Keep up the awesome work guys, I'm really excited for this game!

[Zorg]

I have a question about the karma system. You said that you'll lose karma if you exit the game, to prevent players to exit in a situation they anticitype they are going to die, to save the current karma. But what happens if you exit the game while you are in a safe situation, for example in a shelter (with enough food)? I'd be unfair to deplete karma in this situation, right? In that specific case, a regular exit, i'd expect to be able to return to the game without being punished in any way (for eating, working, sleeping, ...).

[JLJac]

Hi there!

Yep, you got it. If a limb ends up too far behind the body, it extends forward looking for a new point to reach for. It's kind of a shame because this is exactly what I focused the GDC talk on, but as the videos require a $1k pass to view and I signed a paper not to spread anything, I think it'd hardly be popular if I brought it out in the open :/ I'll give you a short version right here though!



So here you see a creature (Daddy Long Legs) moving through an environment. The yellow dots hovering are "ideal grab positions" - if all positions in the room were valid grab positions this is where the tentacles would prefer to grab on. As you said, they are in front of the creature with respect to the body's general movement direction - if you're climbing you want to get your limbs in front of you, in order to pull yourself forward.

However, not every position in the room is a valid grab position, because it shouldn't be able to grab on to thin air. That's what I use this three-tier system for:



Yellow dot is still the ideal grab position. Green dot is the "temporary grab position". What happens here is that I have a method that can assign a score for each position in the room, evaluating how good of a grab position it is. If the position is thin air, the score is negative infinity or something - you never want to grab on to here. If the position is on the surface of terrain though, the score is higher the closer it is to the yellow dot.

So, each frame the leg locomotion algorithm picks a random position in the room. If the random position has a higher score than the current temp position (green) the temp position is moved to the random position. This means that the outcome in a specific frame can only be a) not moving or b) moving to a better position - making sure that over the course of several frames, the green dot will gravitate towards the best possible valid position.

And finally we have the blue dot, which is the "current grab position" - where the limb is actually headed.

So the cycle goes like this: Blue dot (current grab position) is placed on top of green dot (temp grab position) and the tentacle moves there, as the body moves along towards its goal. When the tentacle ends up too far behind the body, the tentacle releases and the blue dot is once again put on top of the green dot, which has now progressed further along. Repeat! This creates a cycle of grab, pull forward, release, grab, pull forward, release.

[JLJac]

@zorg, when you're in a shelter with enough food, there's two options - "continue" which will put you back in the game and "exit" which will take you to the menu. If you chose "continue" you're considered to have bet a karma point on your survival, and have to complete the cycle else you'll lose one point. If you pick "exit" however, you're opting out of the bet and get to keep your karma level where it's at when you start the game next time.

It is a little bit harsh - once you have committed to playing there are only two outcomes - win or lose (the latter including exiting or restarting) but cycles are generally pretty short (MAX 7 minutes or so, generally shorter) so in comparison to the ~40 min commitment of firing up a game of Binding of Isaac or similar roguelites it's not too bad!

[Zorg]

That's what i had in mind, i just wanted to know if you implemented some sort of continue question to tell the player he'll risk karma if he goes on but everything is safe if he quits now.

[fall_ark]

@zorg, when you're in a shelter with enough food, there's two options - "continue" which will put you back in the game and "exit" which will take you to the menu. If you chose "continue" you're considered to have bet a karma point on your survival, and have to complete the cycle else you'll lose one point. If you pick "exit" however, you're opting out of the bet and get to keep your karma level where it's at when you start the game next time.

It is a little bit harsh - once you have committed to playing there are only two outcomes - win or lose (the latter including exiting or restarting) but cycles are generally pretty short (MAX 7 minutes or so, generally shorter) so in comparison to the ~40 min commitment of firing up a game of Binding of Isaac or similar roguelites it's not too bad!

I hope there would be achievements/free-play modes that allow you to modify the exact karma value later on. No need to continually bind the player to a time-consuming (however fast that might be) task to maintain or change the karma after already mastering it (e.g. 3~5 complete runs or maybe some form of speedrunning goals etc.).

[JLJac]

Don't worry, we gotcha! I can't get specific because spoilers, but in the late game we have a solution planned for making you less limited by karma farming.