aw tahts very nice of you. id think yall would be sick of us by now!

i love this already. proper "alien-ness" is hard to find. reminds me of Karma: Incarnation 1 and Hylics https://mason-lindroth.itch.io/hylics

oh wow this is pretty!

ohh, very cool tight concept to focus on. lots of potential there imo.

unless youre thinking of keeping it a very short game, id think youll need to introduce some elaborations/developments on the mechanics in order to keep it from getting stale though. this seems hinted at with the star and the green looping dot, but im curious as to how it all develops!

no pressure, but i could definitely see this concept as being almost jon blow-esque in terms of cleverness working within limitations. bust out the tai-chi and goldberg variations, mang!

if anyone is interested, Joar and I did a nice longform audio interview with Erika from big cheshire grin:

https://bigcheshiregrin.com/2017/03/02/clear-skies-ahead-an-interview-about-the-journey-to-rain-world/

she really knows her rain world stuff, so it was fun to talk to chat with someone on that level! i think there is video of it too somewhere, but seriously nobody needs to look at our dumb faces for an hour, lol

eh, yeah, honestly the alpha humble thing isnt something we really wanted to be doing, as we'd much prefer that people experience the game as intended. you'll notice we dont advertise it or link to it or anything, but its there for people who really want to find it. otherwise we'd have people still sharing the old 2012 lingo alpha, which is infinitely worse, lol!

and fwiw the reasoning for the closed beta was similar actually. we really want people going into the game fresh, especially the fans! going in with knowledge of some of the spoilers changes the players whole perspective of the game (imo), so having a QA/beta team thats under heavy NDA and lock-n-key is very nice. this may seem weird in 2017 indie game world, but was important for us!

well this is impressive! seems ideal for the medium too. 

some self-serving publicity here... you guys know this story!


http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/21/14685358/rain-world-game-junk-audio-soundtrack

a wild Joar Jakobsson appears! :O

HYPE! Im so stoked about this illustration. Most platforms require a "Hero Banner" for the store pages and all that, so thats what this is. Has to be able to arrange itself into all manner of ridiculous formats and sizes.

So, kinda random question: will there be a difficulty setting?

I don't think this has ever been mentioned, but I think that it would be a good idea, (maybe as an update down the line).

Yeah we agree. From what I hear its pretttty hard right now. (After playing it for 5 years I have no perspective of course.)

The concept of the game is just unfair sometimes (and thats the point!), but its been a real challenge to hit that balance where it maintains the mood and intended mechanics but also is generally playable. We've spent a lot of time tweaking it in its current state, but it's something that we want to address in future updates in a more clever manner. Some things we definitely want gated behind the high difficulty level, and we dont want an "easy mode" per se where you can just uncover all the map and thats that. But Im considering adding some alternate narrative paths in the current world that would satisfy players of lower skill levels, but also maintains some mystery of what else is out there.

I remember that James once said that they were trying to put in place a system in which the difficulty ramps up if the player has a fast progression, I don't know if it is the global reputation system, but it sounds a little different from it.

That remains to a certain degree, but in testing it was found to be pretty frustrating as the difficulty seemed fairly random from the players perspective. Also it basically broke the whole mechanic of being able to develop relationships with creatures, since you could be playing in a non-aggressive manner but suddenly creatures would be more aggressive just because you made it through a few rooms. Basically it was a good idea in theory, but less in practice, so we opted for just tuning the overall difficulty "better", whatever that means.



On the topic of difficulty, one thing thats really become apparent (and interesting!) in testing the game is that some people seem to naturally just be really good at Rain World, and its often people who you wouldnt necessarily expect given the supposed difficulty. I've seen 12 year old girls who "just wanted to play the slugcat game" get like 10x farther than seasoned gaming bros on their first try. I think it's because the game rewards observation and caution? So if a player goes in guns blazing expecting normal platformer behavior they're going to get destroyed, but if they play like a prey animal, hiding, observing the surroundings and learning about the behaviours of the creatures before making big moves, they will do well. And this might actually benefit players who dont have years of videogame genre conventions under their belt.

I dont know how well that will go over, but Im pretty proud of this actually!

Are you ready, Slugcat?

looks realllllly sweet 

A LOT apparently. For the initial release we have the game in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Portuguese, but doing a Japanese localization would be an additional *6 months* 

From what I understand this is not just the time for translation and the minor adjustments to the way the game sets text for asian fonts, but also because Sony certification in Japan is massively more scrutinizing and arduous process than it is for western release.

So we're holding off on it for now :/ I think the idea is to wait until we have all the planned post-release content updates in before doing a proper Asian language localized version.

"Slagcat" apparently 



for real though they can call it whatever they want for 30k retweets and 40k likes

Thanks Christian!!

So Japan games twitter discovered RW last week and it got pretty wild: https://twitter.com/coder_Rfor8BIT/status/821573477652008960

Hey friends! We'll be hanging out in the Playstation Blog comments section all day, so leave us a Q!



http://blog.us.playstation.com/2017/01/16/rain-world-surviving-in-a-living-ecosystem/

This is all really heartening, because were we expecting to have to do all manner of overhauling for the co-op and it seems like people would be satisfied with the functionality that is already more or less in place. AKA it might not take an additional 5 years to implement 

Anyways, more on that in 2017. See y'all next year, friends! We wish you a very merry slugcat.

Awesome! Yes definitely. We're going to start thinking about this stuff pretty soon, so very happy to hear all this   

its super clunky and alpha, but i can certainly see the potential in the concept of the setting. unfortunately for them i think horizon zero dawn is going to suck up a tremendous amount of the "dismantle large robots in a 3rd person setting" interest. and that game is flat out gorgeous and designed to a freakish level of slickness.


the thing about soulslikes that always bugs me is that they tend to just focus on a specific mechanical aspect of the souls games, such as "stamina" or "rolling", "block and parry", etc., but almost always neglect the thing that was such a huge appeal of the game, which was the huge variety of equipment and spells and builds and upgrade paths you could take from the beginning. The feeling that you could solve problems in a huge variety of ways and experiment to find what worked for you was so awesome.

Other than Skyrim, what other games do you feel like match up to the souls series in that regard? Maybe Im missing out.

thank you, thats good stuff!

and obviously please note that the 2nd player controls in the alpha are totally borked because we had no idea anyone would ever know about it being there, lol. Clearly having 2nd player gamepad support, a system for room movement and, you know, 'not slowing down time by randomly pressing the down key' would be essential elements to the finished product.