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[Christian]

None yet. Despite my enthusiasm above, I should note there is still quite a way to go!

How about the early build? (I assume the other guy was talking about the general release date)

[JLJac]

Update 354

Today's gif is pretty monstrous, so I'm actually gonna link it rather than embed it.

http://gfycat.com/EvenCircularDevilfish
http://giant.gfycat.com/EvenCircularDevilfish.gif (gif version, warning! 40 MB!)

Effects for approaching rain!

Other than that, today has included a lot of polish in various areas. Added screen shakes for when heavy objects impact the terrain, sparks when weapons hit the walls, fixed a bug where the player's hands were invisible, and so on an so forth.

Oh, and maybe more important than that stuff - I made the picking up / throwing / putting down of items work. It's a pretty complex system that takes a lot into consideration - the basic idea is that you have two hands and can carry a thing in each (fly, rock, spear), but there are many special cases. For example, you can't dual wield two spears, but one spear and one other object is allowed. And flies have lower priority - if you are standing on a weapon holding a fly, the fly should be released in favor of the weapon, but only if you don't have a free hand to use instead. If you hit the throw button and are holding a rock and a fly, you probably want to throw the rock, not the fly... And so on. Basically a huge amount of special cases where the game should cater to the player and try to be user friendly.

[Howard Day]

That looks amazing. I love the palette changes, and the water surface noise. I retract completely and totally what I said earlier about the sense of scale - you're right, it doesn't really matter.

Though... the first thought I had is that it looks like the whole level is desperately trying to hold in a fart...and isn't going to make it.

[Christian]

It's the little things that adds depth and life to a game...I love how the water sloshes around as the rumbling grows worse. Perfectly sells the coming threat, almost in the vein of the Jurassic Park water ripples. Something big is coming...

[fizmat]

Update 354
Effects for approaching rain!

Looks fun! The screen shake really needs sound to sell itself though. And the clouds look like they're going _up_, like steam. Shouldn't they come sideways, or even fall like a blanket? Or the whole cloud descending on you, but the individual puffs in it moving up, you know, that counter-intuitive cloud weirdness. Having never been in a heavy tropical rain it's hard to criticize.

[Rojom]

Hey Joar, do you think you could post links to gyfcat videos in future GIF posts? It was really convenient for my morning dose of rainworld on my phone, which struggles to load embedded gifs.

[JLJac]

Anyone second switching to gyfcat? I don't think they can be embedded, so I'm afraid the devlog might look a bit boring if all the animations are hidden behind links... Maybe for the bigger ones?

Update 355
Painstakingly re-added effect colors to the Unity Build! This took me on an epic journey through the two things that are my cryptonite - Adobe Director and Shaders. But it worked out in the end!


(that little red stuff along the edge of the wall... No idea what that is! Have to hunt it down.)

Each effect color is actually no less than eight colors:



The upper four pixels of one of these segments are: The color when it's close, and lit. Then close, and shadowed. Below that, distant and lit, distant and shadowed. Under each such block is the same thing repeated, but for the dark palette when the rain is getting closer. Here the left and right columns are the same, because there shouldn't be any light around anyways.

For the distance factor, the shader simply lerps between the colors depending on the depth of the specific pixel, making the colors a bit more washed out if they are further off into the fog.

The difference between the first and the second color here is that the second one is glowing in the dark - its "shadowed" colors are the same as its lit colors. I'm pretty happy to have that amount of control - it means there's a lot of potential to fine-tune the aesthetical experience.

The colors themselves are not tuned yet though, and very much subject to change, but the system is up and working!

Going into the level editor I also fixed a few things in the level save method - now it saves fly hives again. Another thing that made a comeback for the first time in the unity version is that the level recognizes "back walls", ie terrain that is behind the "play layer" but close enough for wall climbers to crawl on.

Other changes include some polish of swimming controls. Now you can get into the "wall slide" position while in the water, which allows you to do a little wall jump. The lack of this feature had annoyed me for a while. There was also a weird glitch where you could exploit the water physics by rapidly tapping the jump button while swimming at the surface, the slugcat would somehow build up a wave and ride it, going faster and faster. I messed around with that a bit, adding a delay on the jump from the water surface, and balancing its forces a bit. While I was in the swimming code, I also added a potentially fun little feature - if you press the jump button while under water, you can get a little speed boost in exchange for a small amount of the air in your lungs. It isn't really worth it in most cases, at least not with my play style, but I always enjoy giving the player some extra options to make choices have even more depth. In some situation it might be just the thing.

Last for today, I got started on having the game recognize bat hives, grouping them properly etc. After that stuff is done, I hope to get to bat swarm behavior.

[HopelessComposer]

The newest lizard gif is just fantastic. Some awesome AI and animations you guys have going on there. I'm legitimately impressed, and a little jealous!

[Rojom]

Doesn't have to be gyfcat, just whatever image uploader you use. Looks to be imgwiz? http://imgwiz.com/images/2014/10/31/592d3.gif

I definitely don't want you to remove gifs from the devblog, though. My phone runs out of ram trying to load a page full of gifs. Sorry for the slightly selfish request; if it's too much trouble, no need to bother I'll just browse on my laptop.

[JLJac]

Hm, ok... Maybe I'll hide the gifs behind links if they surpass 20 or 30 GB or something? Again, if anyone else has an opinion on this, speak up. I know there are quite a lot of lurkers ~ and as no one has said anything yet I've assumed that people are happy with the format, so I think I'll have to keep it the same unless more than one person wants to change it.

Update 356
James and I have decided to do a push on adding back the core features to the game - we want to "catch up" with the lingo version ASAP. Catch up is a weird wording, as the unity version is insanely more advanced and complex than the lingo version already, but some of the more mundane features have been lagging behind. So, today I present to you: fly eating!



It's interesting how many things you forget has to be implented - for example I spent a couple of hours today adding the ability for flies to be dead, which was pretty necessary to proceed haha. The amount of weird little things like this, that seem to be so obvious that you tend to overlook them, has also increased further with the addition of water. Basically everything I do, I have to do twice now. How does a fly move? And how does it move when in water? How does it move when dead? How does it move when dead and in water?

For most land creatures the water behaviors are reduced to just a couple of lines that basically describe "panicked writhing" so it's not really as bad as it sounds. The problem is that there are a lot of these scenarios. A few days back I made spear and rock behavior for underwater conditions, and the flies and lizards seem to be handling it OK as well though the lizard AI really needs to be more careful not to fall in. The scary thing is that whenever I think of something that was in the old version, or something we've promised to put in the new version, there's also the big question mark of how it'll interact with water. Pups + water? No idea, haven't given it any thought yet o___0

I think keeping most of these interactions simple will be the best route. And despite all this, James and I are super agreed that adding the water was worth it - it does add a bit of extra work, but it adds way more in terms of gameplay depth.

[Christian]

Just curious, what other core features do you have to focus on?

As for pups, I had always envisioned them as kind of helpless. Maybe they can't swim? So you'd have to carry them underwater, or it could lead to some tense scenarios where you have to make a desperate dive to save a pup that fell into water.

[SafetySnail]

I definitely imagine the pups floating along the water in a duck like line behind Slugcat, perhaps they could go into a panic mode if you dive underwater out of their sight for too long and start sinking.
These last few gifs have been insane and I absolutely cannot wait to play, everything's looking so smooth and polished, I just want to dive straight into this world already!

[Christian]

Woohoo, new gameplay!




From the new Kickstarter update:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rain-world/project-rain-world/posts/1053667

[jamesprimate]

As for pups, I had always envisioned them as kind of helpless. Maybe they can't swim? So you'd have to carry them underwater, or it could lead to some tense scenarios where you have to make a desperate dive to save a pup that fell into water.

totally agree!

[JustRadek]

The new water effects are impressive; fit right in and help make the world feel alive, just like the bat-snacks!

Also, the lizard tongue-fighting seems like a promising gameplay element. Are you experimenting with anything along the lines of luring/poisoning the enemies?

[Christian]

And even more RPS coverage!
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/11/17/rain-world-update/

[QuadraTron]

Woohoo, new gameplay!




From the new Kickstarter update:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rain-world/project-rain-world/posts/1053667

This is looking fantastic!

[jamesprimate]

hahah i love RPS! why do they always talk about game maker though??? we've never touched game maker, rofl. (not that im going to complain about awesome enthusiastic coverage though! they can call it whatever they want)

thanks Graham

[ofx360]

Are you guys using a custom built engine? I thought you guys were using Unity...

Wait...how exactly does your setup work because now that i think about it, i don't think I've seen a typical Unity workflow environment. Would be cool to see/hear about what you two are actually working with!

[jamesprimate]

Joar could answer this way better than me obviously, but basically everything is custom Joar work. Engine was build from scratch TWICE, first in lingo and now in C# using the code-centric futile framework for unity (so you are right, no unity workflow at all.) the level editor, also hand rolled, is still in lingo actually and has to run instanced from inside director haha