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[fuguelike]

HARD RAIN

ALPHA NOW AVAILABLE.

DEMO: http://hardraingame.com
TESTERS:
Currently in alpha. If you would be willing to test please contact. @fuguelike or email duncan [at] fuguelike.com



Hard Rain is a hybrid pachinko sim / tower defense / puzzle hybrid.


Gameplay:
The basic idea is that drops fall from the sky through the level, which consists of spaces in a hex grid. In the style of a classic tower defense game, your objective is to last the length of the level without too many of the enemy (here the drops) getting all the way through the level. You build your defenses on the spaces in the grid. Each space can contain one of each of three types of defensive components - FIELD, SOLID, and FORCE. You can combine the various types of these components in strategic ways to control and destroy the drops.

Screens:

[Superb Joe]

in holland, the common idiom for heavy rain is "it's raining steel pipes". that would be some seriously hard rain. this, however, is a video game that is actually nothing to do with holland or rain. 3 out of 10

[DanDecarlo]

The graphics and effects look nice, can't say nothing more just from screenshots though.

[fuguelike]

Working on a playable alpha and video... here's a quick gif showing a bit of the gameplay in the meantime.

[fuguelike]

Just released an alpha version for Mac and Windows. You can grab it here:

http://hardraingame.com.

[ANtY]

in holland, the common idiom for heavy rain is "it's raining steel pipes". that would be some seriously hard rain. this, however, is a video game that is actually nothing to do with holland or rain. 3 out of 10

too many "<something> rain" games recently

[fuguelike]

What else is there? I only know of Heavy Rain, which annoyingly comes up on google when you search for 'Hard Rain game'

[ANtY]

Thank God For The Rain, Project Rain World, Risk of Rain

anyways, the point stands that rain has nothing to do with your game, despite sounding cool

[Chuckek]

Played alpha a little, didn't really know what's the diffrence between field types so I just spammed some propellers and destroyers in gathering spots. It looks really good, and the sound balls make when popping is sooooo satysfying :D Game crashed every time I tried to replay level or when I chose that world/stage 0 in the menu, though you're probably aware of all that (windows 8 ). Still, good luck with that, it's really nice now and I will probably play it some more when I will got time.

[fuguelike]

Thank God For The Rain, Project Rain World, Risk of Rain

anyways, the point stands that rain has nothing to do with your game, despite sounding cool

The idea for the name came from the balls or 'drops' falling from the sky, which reminded me of rain. Or really more like hail (hard rain). It's true though the name is mostly cuz I like the way it sounds.

Played alpha a little, didn't really know what's the diffrence between field types so I just spammed some propellers and destroyers in gathering spots. It looks really good, and the sound balls make when popping is sooooo satysfying :D Game crashed every time I tried to replay level or when I chose that world/stage 0 in the menu, though you're probably aware of all that (windows 8 ). Still, good luck with that, it's really nice now and I will probably play it some more when I will got time.

Thanks for the feedback. Glad you like the popping sounds - I spent a really long time tweaking them to get them like that so it's good to hear. Sorry about the crashes - I actually didn't know about them but I haven't tested enough on windows yet - I'm tracking them down and will have a new build up as soon as I can. Yeah the zone 0 is kind of a tutorial that introduces a lot of the things you can build so it's pretty important to have that working.

[fuguelike]

There's an update to the windows build that provides some fixes for the crashing. You can find it here:

http://hardraingame.com/gamebuilds/HardRainWinAlpha0.1.zip

[fuguelike]

So I've been MIA for a while but development is still progressing. Closing in on a second alpha release.

A lot of what I've been working on is further revisions to the way the game is introduced to the player. Less of a strict tutorial and more of a gradual introduction of elements through gameplay. So I'd be curious to get some feedback on it once I get it posted.

Just finished adding a bit of screen shake when a nuclear type drop explodes:

[fuguelike]

Added this music for the title / level select screen.

https://soundcloud.com/fuguelike/hardraintitle

[fuguelike]

There's a new alpha version up for both PC and Mac here: http://hardraingame.com

Mostly what is new is the levels, which are shorter and more limited but also more varied in the beginning, introducing the concepts of the game one by one.

[fuguelike]

Realized I needed to include something suggestive of the kind of game in the logo so I started to go back and look at some of my initial designs:


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[fuguelike]

Settling on something like this for the box art:

Not sure how I feel about the drop shadow.

[fuguelike]

Went through some revisions and settled on this cover:



Oh yeah and Hard Rain is also Kickstarting:

http://kck.st/1l1Mcf1

[fuguelike]

Made some adjustments to the way drops reflect the effects of the field components in their color. Before I used this formula:

Code:

GLubyte redVal = (GLubyte)( 90+(1.0f-hpPercent)*165 );
GLubyte grnVal = (GLubyte)( 20+damageMult*80 );
GLubyte bluVal = (GLubyte)( 90+(hpPercent)*165 );

Each color channel is on a scale of 0-255. So this means as the drop is damaged (hpPercent goes from 1 to 0) the red value increases from 90 to full and the blue channel drops to 90. The green channel is simply linked to the damage multiplier effect of the compromiser component.

I arrived at this after a lot of tweaking, and it was pretty good at reflecting the state of of drop, but I was still getting a lot of washed out pastel colors, which was not ideal. So I made the following adjustment:

Code:

GLubyte redVal = (GLubyte)( 70+(1.0f-hpPercent)*185 );
GLubyte grnVal = (GLubyte)( -50+damageMult*100 );
GLubyte bluVal = (GLubyte)( 106+(hpPercent-damageMult/5)*165 );

The values are tweaked a bit here, but the main difference is that the blue channel is also linked to the multiplier effect, so it decreases by just a bit ( /5) as the multiplier increases. This seems sort of trivial but it has a huge impact on the appearance of the game since all 3 channels never all have high values simultaneously, leading to washed out colors. Instead I'm getting a lot of of neon greens, yellows, and oranges that weren't there before.

[Matt Rohr]

I am worried that this may be too visually "noisy."

I'll check out the version you posted to double check but from a glance it is just messy.

[fuguelike]

I think it improves the readability of the game state somewhat.

But yeah if you have any feedback from trying it out let me know.