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[David Berman]

Another hour or so in and some more thoughts (and SPOILERS):



Looks like you can only use Passage once after you earn it via whatever 'conduct' you max out? I sort of misused the first one I got, I wonder if it could clarified as it is quite important/useful, especially if stuck or needing to backtrack? I think I have a decent grasp of what each is, though Wanderer seemed to rank up by going back through a route I'd been one way before?

I think I've ended up going slightly out of sequence by going Industrial - Garbage - Shoreline - 'Secret Place' (which I thought was amazing by the way, the atmosphere and aesthetics of this section stunned me and creeped me out despite the lack of immediate threat), but now I'm uncertain if I've lost the 'Family' thread? I also lost the 'new' thread as it were, which stopped when I Passaged back to the Garbage Wastes. At this point I want to either a) go back to the Scavenger Toll back in Outskirts, or b) go to Shadow Citadel. Probably way past the point of this being something realistically implemented, but I wonder if ranking could've also/instead have been linked to shortcuts, to make passing through regions less of a battle/get around to have some fun sandboxing areas a bit once you have the lay of the land somewhat.

Scavengers exacting their toll for each time you pass is lesson well learnt! Spent a while milling around in the Garbage Wastes trying to find a pearl, as I think I found a second Toll at the far end? This is where I wish the map were more useful/icon-based.

EDIT:

Wanderer might be registering places explored now I've unlocked it, as I hadn't before? Makes sense.

[Zorg]

I have a suggestion concerning the map reveal.



If you have seen a path to other rooms, it makes a huge difference if this newly discovered path is noted on the map or not, because if i'd like to navigate back there later it may be very hard to find. Unexplored connections could be colored blue to emphasize this.

[jamesprimate]

ohhh these are fantastic suggestions (and cuuute drawings), thank you!

[Anton]

I bought the game and played it very briefly, I loved the intro and the start!
I can't wait to pour hours into this !
Good job guys!
:D

[David Berman]

More light-ish SPOILERS




Something about Industrial makes me zoom through it, so couldn't find any other region gates there yet. Was close enough to Outskirts again that I went for the Scavenger Toll there (though didn't have any karma for the region gate beyond, so had to go back and feed cycle to get it, but seemingly lost my toll having been paid. Scavengers all scampered so none of them saw me pass through, but my Chieftain karma took a big hit?

The Farms are truly magical - atmosphere, aesthetics and the music especially here are incredible. The Raindeer seems hard to get on, and unpredictable - I couldn't pass what I assume would be the first area  you'd logically find it with the pool, and having slightly messed up a spear throw I was completely trapped between the high walls/anemone and the way back, which seemed harsh. Next run I came across something totally amazing and mysterious and something rather unexpected has happened... not sure what will happen now!

[crankykong]

I have some ideas i find kind of cool , what do you think about them?

The Teleporter idea:

There are those hard to reach points in game like a more than 12 screens high skyscraper to climb in the area "Chimney Canopy" or some hidden rooms which have no three striped pipe symbol at their entrance.
I would love it when you could find in those hard to get to "secret rooms/areas" a teleporter which leads fasttravel style to another telepoter in another area, which you can use as long as often as you want and without karma requirements, to switch between specific areas as reward for finding it. So this teleporter locations should be either hard to find or hard to get to (like the top of the skyscraper on Chimney Canopy as said).

Take for example the highest point on Chimney Canopy. How cool would it be to find a teleporter on top of it which would lead to a teleporter in the water level area. And  if you go to the water level first than you can find the hidden teleporter room there and travel to the top of Chimney Canopy. It would not be like dark souls fast travel where you can travel from each savepoint to each other savepoint. It would be more like there are one or more teleporter hidden in the area which waiting that you find them and each teleporter leads only to a specific point in another area and back.





The extended trading and backpack as extended item storage system idea:

Often you throw an important item away per exident and it falls down a cliff or into water.
Would it not be cool if you could trade with the scavengers a backpack for the price of idk lets say 3 green pearls.
A small green backpack which slugcat would wear around on his back and use as extended item storage system where you can store 2 additional spears or 1 spear and 2 pearls or 4 pearls,...
Every item would dependent on its size reserve a certain amount of fixed item slot points. And if you want to put something in the backpack or pull it out, there would be a cute animation in which slugcat pulls the backpack of its back and puts it on the ground in front of it and jumps in the backpack to search for the item or puts its head in it and rummages around in it to pull out the item.

So if you can carry four pearls in your backpack , two in your hands and one in your stomach , there should be also some very cool items for the prize of seven pearls so to get this cool items you would first need to trade in 3 pearls for the backpack to get the ability to carry around seven pearls and then you can collect those and trade them for a item like a head flashlight which has batterypower for 30 minute of lighting dark places like Shaded Citadel. And you could also trade for additional battery's for the head mounted light or for some of those grappling worms ,karma flower,ranking up one karma point without hibernation,... the possibility's would be endless.

It could be grounded lorewise by a ball like holographic projectors which one of the scavangers would carry around with him in his hand and if he sees you coming towards him with items in the hand to trade he would throw the holographic ball down on the ground between you and the holographic ball would project a trading menu which would float in the air in the level ,.. a bit like the tips of the yellow worm but with the ability
to scroll around in those holographic menu's and select a item.




The "sacrifice items to the giant statue to change certain area properties " idea

Some people didn't like the karma progression/unlock gates system.
Beside of that i find gates should stay open after you unlocked them once, i do like the karma-gate system in general.I maybe in the minority but i think it adds some additional challenge to the game.
But i totally dislike the timelimit trough the incoming rain.
I have nothing against a challenge and find it kind of cool that some savepoints are farther apart so that you really have to concentrate and get through this level section in one go.But i really want to explore those areas in my pace and really do not want to get punished when i wonder to far away into another level by some timelimit.

But sometimes when im in the mood for it i really start to like the combination of timelimit and karma rankup system.But this state of mind where i appreciate the survival system as it is last only for an hour or so and when i start to get lacking in concentration i would love to switch back to a more layed back exploration mode for the rest of the playtime.

So would it not be cool if you could switch the gamemode from survival to explorer and back in game?
What if there would be some giant stone faces with an open mouth in specific points on the map. And when you hold some item in one or two hands slugcat would lay the items in the open mouth of the statue if you press a button
in front of the statue. The statue would than close its mouth and when it opens it again there would lie a glowing pill inside of its mouth which could be eaten by slugcat and then slugcat falls asleep and when it wakes up again you have swapped from survival mode into exploration mode or the other way around and the color around your karma wheel and maybe also the color of the statues  would change in some way to indicate in which state you are in at the moment.

This statues could be also multipurpose so that if you lie down a combination of certain items together in its mouth it would give you a cool new item with new ability's.
Like for example:

- A giant pearl with a karma symbol in it. And when you consume it you rank up to that karma level without hibernation.
- A special flower which lets you rank up for one karma level
-A blue parasite like worm which you can swallow and if a predator kills you and tries to carry you around the worm crawls out of your stomach onto you and gives your body an electric shock so that you come back to live and
the predator lets you fall of of its mouth because of the electro shock.It would basically be a 2nd chance kind of item
-A flower or mushroom which lets you camouflage like the white lizard for a certain amount of time so that enemy's only see you when they are right next to you,...


It could also be that way that when you are in survival mode you can open special looking karma gates which are not openable when you are in exploration mode. Those gates would lead to idk bonus levels or maybe some teleporter or a stone statue.So that people who like to play most of the time in exploration mode have an incentive to try out survival mode and maybe they start to like it after they played the first few hours in exploration mode and got better.

There could also be another kind of stone statue behind those survival karma gates which increases the difficulty in a certain area for 30 minutes or so by giving the enemy creatures additional ability's like for example:

-making none-hostile creatures like the spidermice hostile and attacking you as a pack, or shooting their spiderwebs at you and try to hang you in a spiderweb down from the wall to eat you later
-making the blue lizards able to send out an area of effect electro shock cloud which stuns you when you get to close to them
-making the green lizards able to spit a green fire like toxic cloud out of their mouth which poisons you when you get in it and take away your food points slowly if you don't eat another creature
-making the explosion of the explosive snails so strong that it kills you when you are to close
-giving daddy long legs the ability to catch a spear with his tentacle when you try to throw one at him and throw it back at you and also the ability to pick up spears which lie around him and throw them at you
You could also use it to your advantage by throwing an explosive spear at him and then he catches it and before he can throw it back it explodes in his tentacles and rips of two of his tentacles.
So when you have one red spear in your hand and two in your backpack you can kill off all his legs and the ball like structure in the middle falls onto the ground and is helpless. Maybe you can even crack its skull than
and in its inside it has an karma upgrade pearl like you can get it from the statues mouth.


What if you can find special items which spawn randomly in the area as long as the difficulty of an area is increased which you can only find in those 30 min of increased difficulty. To reward you for the hazard.

[David Berman]

Bug/issue:



Having worked out how to make Deer more reliably helpful I promptly got a little too friendly with this one and got completely stuck in a non-shortcut pipe entrance whilst it nuzzled me. Couldn't move and it wouldn't budge.

This is actually the first time I've been stuck in a region generally - this corner of the Farms seems quite remote and hard to escape.

EDIT: Persisted and made it through - amazing combination of all the elements of the game coming together along the way. See, I think the sequence of gameplay I just experienced is so similar to Souls-like design, where you struggle various elements of the environment/creatures become almost a puzzle, you try things out and the immersive elements of the game come together to provide a solution.

[Rojom]

Here's an idea I haven't seen yet: Add more of those "karma-life" flowers. Instead of adding more shelters, have these flowers distributed evenly between shelters. If you reach that point and you die, the penalty wouldn't be that harsh. Perhaps when you eat a flower, your map would update as well (could update the map partially too, like everything up to the last three minutes? So it's not overpowered if you run and gun into a new region and eat the flower to map new locations. Patient play would still be rewarded). The flowers could act as checkpoints, while not actually progressing you to a new region since if you die you'd still end up in the previous shelter. Additionally, they could be a reward for reaching hard-to-get-to areas. For example, the top of the sky region could have a field of three or four.

Edit: Or eating them (or some other food) might increase your time limit.

[Zorg]

ohhh these are fantastic suggestions (and cuuute drawings), thank you!

Thanks!

The situation i sketched above actually happened to me at exactly that place. Just in the game, it occured again. This time i took a screenshot:



I was in a hurry and ran along the orange path to the shelter in the last minute. But only one of the two room connections were revealed on the map.

[oyog]

I have some ideas i find kind of cool , what do you think about them?
-snip-

Don't take this the wrong way, you have a lot of cool ideas, but the game has been in development for the past five years and I expect the devs won't be making major changes to their game now that it's released.

I might be wrong, I don't mean to speak for Joar or James. Just something to consider.

[crankykong]

I have some ideas i find kind of cool , what do you think about them?
-snip-

Don't take this the wrong way, you have a lot of cool ideas, but the game has been in development for the past five years and I expect the devs won't be making major changes to their game now that it's released.

I might be wrong, I don't mean to speak for Joar or James. Just something to consider.

Yes i totaly understand that they dont readjust the whole game only because i have some ideas.Just wanted to share them with you as kind of "fan-fiction"

But that been said, it would not be too hard for them to code a bunch of teleporters in, at hidden locations.I kind of wonder why they decieded against it , i mean they must have thought about that in development. They already wrote the code for a fasttravel and the game would benefit huge. I went for example in Chimney Canopy direct after Industrial Complex and after i had climped the highest spot of the map i really wanted to swap the area and i had no teleport-karma Option left.... so for me it would have been a bless if i had found up there a teleporter which would lead me to another area without spending karma. And many others also wrote about the problem of getting into "endgame" levels early in the game and then beeing stuck in them because they have no teleport left, because of the nonlinear open world like Progression(which i love dont get me wrong there).But having secret teleporters would be best of both worlds.

[boen]

Hey Rain World thread and developers, long time lurker here, I've been very closely anticipating this game for years like many others here... I absolutely love almost all of what this game is going for, but there is also a lot of what i feel is unnecessary frustration and I just wanted to give my two cents.

The main issue for me is centered around the karma system. I think I understand the intention, where it means players need to learn the lay of an area and spend some time building competency in it before moving on to the next, but the effective problem is that it only serves to make the game harder when a player is already struggling. It creates a very demoralizing domino effect where you're new to an area and you die repeatedly until you find the exit and realize you can't even leave this area you've been having so much trouble with. and on the flip side, you circumvent it completely if you're skilled enough, breezing past these doors and not really having to worry about foraging or doing anything off the beaten path at all. So I don't think it even succeeds in what it sets out to do in manipulating player behavior to be more in line with the slugcat. And if I'm wrong in assuming that intent, it only makes the whole mechanic feel even more needlessly punishing. In a game where you largely learn through death, It seems unfair to punish the player in a lasting way for doing so. They already lost their progress and map discovery, is that not enough of a punishment on its own?

Another, more minor complaint I have that relates heavily to this is the lack of clarity in the fast travel mechanics. For at least my first 5 hours with the game I didn't even realize there was a fast travel option, and I'm definitely glad that there is to some extent but at one point after using it the option suddenly disappeared? The lack of understanding in how the fast travel's availability works could be my fault, if I missed something fair enough. but I feel like this is something that should be explained directly to the player, as this seems like an integral mechanic, especially with the way the karma system works right now.

Just so this isn't completely negative I wanna say again that I love so much about this game, and also I think a lot of the reviews I've read missed the mark on exactly what the source of their frustration is. I think the controls are great, the enemy placement is great, the time limit is fine, the safe room placements and actual level design are fair. from a fellow indie dev I wish you and rain world the best, and I hope you find this post useful in some small way!

[tortoiseandcrow]

Yes, I really hope you don't mess too much with creature placement or AI. If you do anything for consistency, don't do more than give them specific "homes" that they consistently emerge from and return to, and otherwise let them roam as they please.

[Manray]

Yes, I really hope you don't mess too much with creature placement or AI. If you do anything for consistency, don't do more than give them specific "homes" that they consistently emerge from and return to, and otherwise let them roam as they please.

This is already the way it is. They have their own dens and they hunt and such.

[Manray]

Does Shaded Citadel have more than two region gates? I would like to know before venturing back into that serene hell hole. By the way, I just wanted to say that Shaded Citadel is fucking beautiful. Like wow, it is insanely gorgeous. I also love the "spiderpedes"/"Mimicpedes". Thank you for this amazing masterpiece.
*Just a side question, does everything have at least one thing that it eats?

Shaded Citadel seems to have an outside section with miros birds, did you encounter that area yet? You can see it on the trailer but it may be another location.

Is there an outside to Shaded Citadel? It seems to be very much so underground, and if anything beneath other regions, but that would be interesting to know.
*0:45 of the video... Um that red lizard though... that is big lizard

[Carrotca]

By the way, could you add support for higher resolutions? It's too low to comfortably play for people with 4k monitors.

The art is generated for 768p so there is no benefit to running at higher resolutions. The "mid-res" look is deliberate.

Depending on a monitor if you have 4k, 5k or 8k resolution monitor that isn't 16:9/4:3. You may be forced to play on a tiny window. That's not comfortable at all and upscaling on high resolution monitors looks terrible anyway. This game isn't real 2D so adding higer resolutions should be possible.

[Zorg]

This game isn't real 2D so adding higer resolutions should be possible.

As far as i know it's layered 2D pixel art. Changing the resolution would actually mean reworking all graphic assets, which is possible by definition, but likely an imagineable amount of work and would change the appearance of the game completely.

[Dinomaniak]

Has anybody else Looked to the Moon so far ?
Those of you that did, will know what I mean ( it's in the game ).

[Carrotca]

Has anybody else Looked to the Moon so far ?
Those of you that did, will know what I mean ( it's in the game ).

Yeah, it's the location past Shoreline.

[Carrotca]

This game isn't real 2D so adding higer resolutions should be possible.

As far as i know it's layered 2D pixel art. Changing the resolution would actually mean reworking all graphic assets, which is possible by definition, but likely an imagineable amount of work and would change the appearance of the game completely.

Apparently it's layered 3D but developers would have to comment on that to explain it in more detail.