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[Atomski]

Really lovin the look of this game and how it plays. Can't wait for release.

 

[More_Badass]

24 hours left!

 

[Rei_Toei]

Cool, just saw the last update. Cute artwork! Really like the music in the alpha footage. I'm really curious though if the game has a 'end'. I mean, with Metroid/Castlevania, you basically have the last boss, destroy the 'base' - fin. I do hope Rain World will also have some logical closure point.

 

[More_Badass]

Cool, just saw the last update. Cute artwork! Really like the music in the alpha footage. I'm really curious though if the game has a 'end'. I mean, with Metroid/Castlevania, you basically have the last boss, destroy the 'base' - fin. I do hope Rain World will also have some logical closure point.

Actually the devs talked about this during the last live stream. There's no final boss or reach the final area and escape kind of scenario. Your only objective is to survive. They went into more details but I don't recall them; I'll ask on TIG

 

[Mondy]

Lol @ that lizard type picture. Great, so the diversity of the enemies literally boils down to the colors of the rainbow.

 

[More_Badass]

Cool, just saw the last update. Cute artwork! Really like the music in the alpha footage. I'm really curious though if the game has a 'end'. I mean, with Metroid/Castlevania, you basically have the last boss, destroy the 'base' - fin. I do hope Rain World will also have some logical closure point.

Here's the developer's response:

The answer to your question is yes and no. The game will not have a "story" like a castlevania game, with characters, dialogue and a pre-written conflict that ends with "last boss, destroy the 'base'". Still, we do plan to have a narrative - but instead of applying the narrative on top of the game mechanics we want to build the narrative inside the game mechanics. The core gameplay will be about nothing but survival, but by adding a few twists to that we want to evolve from that core and create something that makes it less monotonous and gives a meaning to what you're doing in the game world. At the end of the game there should obviously be a sense of accomplishment.

Think of how a game like Castlevania has a pre-written story, and a game like Minecraft has no story at all, but you make your own goals in a sandbox-type world. We want to be somewhere between the two, not entirely giving up the sense of progression that Castlevania has, but neither the feature of creating your own goals and completing them within the frame of the game mechanics that Minecraft has.

Hope that gives you some kind of idea about what we're aiming for Excuse the ambiguous language, I don't want to give too much away

 

[More_Badass]

Lol @ that lizard type picture. Great, so the diversity of the enemies literally boils down to the colors of the rainbow.

Not sure if you're serious or sarcastic

The devs wanted to focus on making an small ecosystem

I early on decided that I wanted few, well made creatures rather than many species with less care given to each one of them.

There will be more animals, but will rarer than lizards. Some might not be hostile to you, but as the dev said in the devlog, hunger has no laws so it's probably best to always be cautious and wary

Like for example, the garbage worms

And then there are the 10 backer-made creatures that will be in the game

 

[Yaoibot]

Neat idea but man I'm getting real fatigued of 16bit inspired "indie" games.

Exactly the same boat I'm in. Love my indies, but I need some decent production values. Hyperlightdrifter being the exception, of course. But that's animated so well that it doesn't look like a "bit" game.

 

[Yaoibot]

Neat idea but man I'm getting real fatigued of 16bit inspired "indie" games.

Double post.

 

[More_Badass]

Exactly the same boat I'm in. Love my indies, but I need some decent production values. Hyperlightdrifter being the exception, of course. But that's animated so well that it doesn't look like a "bit" game.

As someone said earlier in the thread, no 16bit game has like looked this. The game combines the pixel style with modern technology: procedural physics-based animations, advanced AI, etc.

 

[Azure Dream]

That animation just has so much character it's crazy.

It looks like someone just pulled out of the "Design a Creature" slot, so now's your chance to jump into it fast. I know it was filled when I picked my donation...

 

[block tower]

the animation is extremely cute. the graffiti logo is nice too. the game has a nice over all vibe. if i wasn't college broke i toss some cash their way :/

 

[More_Badass]

A nice post-KS interview with one of the developers:
http://thebitpulse.com/2014/02/project-rain-world-qa-james-primate-on-the-weight-of-expectation/

 

[charsace]

This game does things that the 2d systems would have a real hard time doing. All the skeletal animation going on would be impossible for the SNES generation.

 

[More_Badass]

New update:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rain-world/project-rain-world/posts/764730
Surveys were sent out to backers. I must say, I think that's the fastest I've seen developer send out surveys.

Most important, since I know I was confused about this:

Q: In preferences, if I choose a Steam Key will I still have access to Humble Store or direct download? If I choose MAC will I still have access to PC or LINUX?
A: Of course! Regardless of what you put for the answer, all $10+ backers will be provided access to Steam Keys, Humble Store Keys and Direct Digital Download, for PC, MAC and LINUX. All of them! The question was more to help us understand peoples preferences so we can set things up appropriately on our end.

 

[More_Badass]

Addictive little game made by the developer as he's learning Unity and C#

Space Worms
Download (PC)

Hi! As some of you might now, I'm working on Rain World. My next big undertaking is porting the thing to C#, so I needed to learn the syntax for that. I didn't want to clutter my real game with my learning process, so the past week I've been messing around with this little test project.

 

[KimonoNoNo]

I really like these guy's attitude.

 

[Rei_Toei]

Here's the developer's response:

The answer to your question is yes and no. The game will not have a "story" like a castlevania game, with characters, dialogue and a pre-written conflict that ends with "last boss, destroy the 'base'". Still, we do plan to have a narrative - but instead of applying the narrative on top of the game mechanics we want to build the narrative inside the game mechanics. The core gameplay will be about nothing but survival, but by adding a few twists to that we want to evolve from that core and create something that makes it less monotonous and gives a meaning to what you're doing in the game world. At the end of the game there should obviously be a sense of accomplishment.

Think of how a game like Castlevania has a pre-written story, and a game like Minecraft has no story at all, but you make your own goals in a sandbox-type world. We want to be somewhere between the two, not entirely giving up the sense of progression that Castlevania has, but neither the feature of creating your own goals and completing them within the frame of the game mechanics that Minecraft has.

Hope that gives you some kind of idea about what we're aiming for Excuse the ambiguous language, I don't want to give too much away

Thanks for sharing! Good to hear they are thinking about how to provide that sense of wrapping up/accomplishing. I don't expect a Castlevania-like final boss to defeat (wouldn't be in the spirit of th game) but I'd be kinda bummed out if there wasn't a logical closure point. You know, it could be something like the Slugcat finding and raising the pups, maybe finding a buddy and discovering some comfy bunker-of-all-bunkers away from the rain and predators and with unlimited amounts of bats . Just something that makes it a somewhat logical point to put down the controls and consider whatever comes sorta 'Game+'

 

[More_Badass]

Addictive little game made by the developer as he's learning Unity and C#

Space Worms

Space Worms was updated if any of you were playing it:
PC | Mac

Added space weapons and space power ups!

Laser - burn your fellow space worms to death with a laser!
Boost - become a super fast space worm!
Magnet - attract space worm parts and become a super big space worm!
Cannon - for the snipers. Without a head a space worm is just some space debris!
Swarm - target seeking little explosives that will quickly turn a space worm into space scrap!
Bomb - disintegrates space worms, space debris and everything else except cold, empty space itself!

Also added some effects and other tweaks. When a space worm dies parts of its body can remain connected and drift away together, and other details. A few sounds added. Changed it so that now you start with only 3 lives, but you're not out of the game until one life later - ie an extra life is consumed every time you spawn, so you can be on the playing field without having any extra lives. The practical effect of this is that now you can gain one more extra life from killing enemies early on.

 

[More_Badass]

Rain World will be published by Adult Swim!
http://www.destructoid.com/adult-sw...ld-and-westerado-double-barreled-273027.phtml

 

[Green Wiggly]

Rain World will be published by Adult Swim!
http://www.destructoid.com/adult-sw...ld-and-westerado-double-barreled-273027.phtml

Definitely keeping an eye on this one. Thanks for the good indie coverage, as always.

 

[More_Badass]

New update: Rain World coming to consoles! PAX! Twitch!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rain-world/project-rain-world/posts/807336

First off, Rain World just got picked up by Adult Swim Games, which is awesome for 3 huge reasons:

#1 They are super rad, of course.

#2 They are 100% here to help us take Rain World to the next level, AKA we can now officially announce that Rain World is coming to PSN, PS Vita and well beyond! Rejoice!

#3 As a result, Joar just flew in from Sweden and we are showing Rain World at PAX East starting TOMORROW, so if you happen to be around for the convention, stop by the Adult Swim Games booth and say hi! We're right by the giant Adventure Time Finn.

We'll be demoing a bit of multi-player stuff from the current alpha build, so bring 3 friends and viciously spear each-other or toss them into the waiting jaws of hungry lizards, etc, etc. If you let us know you are a backer we may even have some limited edition stickers for you!

Anyway, Joar and I are hard at work polishing the build for tomorrow, so I've got to run. We'll be doing an interview on the main PAX Twitch.tv stream at around 3:30pm EST, where we'll talk a bit about the game, probably act silly from staying up all night, then we will face off head 2 head, slugcat master vs. slugcat master for your amusement. Clearly a must-watch.

 

[Dan]

Sweet, PSN! That's awesome.

 

[Messofanego]

Will tune into the PAX twitch stream, thanks More_Badass for the updates.

 

[Nillansan]

Adult Swim, I love you.

 

[MUnited83]

Nce! I actually sent a message to the devs when kickstarter to know if it was possible to do a Vita version. Nice to hear that its confirmed. Im double dipping this for sure

 

[FantasticMrFoxdie]

lttp to this thread. The animations are so cool

 

[Twinduct]

Ah nice, man that rocks!

 

[More_Badass]

Here's the PAX Twitch channel if you want to check out the stream later

 

[Turnstyle]

So pleased to hear about the Vita release. Had my eye on this for a while - looks like I will get to play it!

Thanks Adult Swim!

 

[Gaz_RB]

Was hoping for more of a 3d open world game when I read the title, but this seems cool as well.

 

[GuitarAtomik]

Awesome! Definitely going to pick up the Vita version.

 

[FunkyPajamas]

Awesome news, thanks for the update! I'm a backer so the PSN/Vita news is music to my ears.

 

[Rei_Toei]

PSN = awesome news! This, HLD and Towerfall are like an indie trifecta of goodness on the platform.

 

[Messofanego]

Here's the PAX Twitch channel if you want to check out the stream later

Thanks

 

[maxcriden]

Oh wow, that is awesome news. Fingers crossed for it to come to Wii U as well!

 

[More_Badass]

Here's the proper link:
http://www.twitch.tv/twitch

RW streaming now

 

[More_Badass]

Well that was fast. Wasn't an indepth thing, did learn that the red lizards can spit acid

 

[More_Badass]

PAX Hands-on Impressions from Twinfinite
---
Two short PAX interviews with the devs Joar and James:
Destructoid
Teh Syndicate
---
And a longer two part interview from March with James:
Part 1, Part 2

 

[More_Badass]

From the devlog, an update on development and the issues with moving to Unity

So I had a talk with James, and we decided that before I got manically obsessed with making this tiny little parallax effect work, I could probably follow through on a fixed-screen approach. Especially as we'd most reasonably want both solutions in the game anyway even if I managed to make the parallax work, so we could fix the screen in performance heavy rooms and save the parallax for cinematic set pieces.

So, I'll abandon parallax scrolling for a while in favor of importing 2D backgrounds. In the final spasms of my parallax obsession, I gave the pixel-raytracing some time, and for a wile it looked bright because a 30 iteration for-loop in the fragment shader actually didn't murder the framerate as badly as I feared. But then some stupid stuff came in the way, namely that in Unity the CG compiler always unrolls all loops (stupid, but necessary on older cards if I got it right) and then if I do some operation in the for loop it assigns new temporary variables for each iteration (STUPID, NO EXCUSE) which maxes out the shader's tiny little working memory and keeps it from compiling.

So there I was, at a road fork, where one option was to learn the thing that graphical C compiles to, and the other was to decide that f*ck it, for now at least. So I'm trying to convince myself that #2 is the way to go.

I'll probably still get some good opportunity to pull my hair over shaders, if I'm going to do the coloration and the light stuff as a shader.

Before we leave the parallax issue, for now, I'll give you the the most current version of the "30 files, 30 sprites"-solution, to give you an idea of what could've been and might actually be if I get back to it later.

Oh, and if anyone here is looking for tutorials or beginner's tips about Unity, the last 19 pages of the thread (starting at page 85) should be very helpful. A lot of good discussions of the advantages and disadvantages of different engines and a ton of coding help and tips that I don't understand but I image many would find useful

 

[Rei_Toei]

Sweet jesus. I'm loving the way this looks so much.

I think it's the combination of music in the first trailers + the thrashed industrial look, but at times it really reminds me of the 2300 AD locations of Chrono Trigger. Same vague sense of sadness. As a kid playing CT I hated it and couldn't wait to return to the brighter adventurous periods, but later on I've sorta grown to like it.

 

[More_Badass]

In this GDC 2014 talk by David Rosen, a dev working on Wolfire's Overgrowth, he's discussing procedural animations in indie games and talks about Rain World around the 20 minute mark. The whole talk is really interesting though

 

[More_Badass]

More progress, from the devlog

Little taste of my light engine as of today:

Can you imagine how I went through all that trouble to make that weak little color shift happen? Crazy. Still I think it brings a lot of "location feeling" - the shadow helps you understand what you're looking at as a volume, which enhances the illusion of being in a space.

Love the shadow effect

 

[GuitarAtomik]

Still looking great. That parallax shift is trippy as shit. If he doesn't get around to implementing it, I hope someone else does in something cool (or has someone already?).

 

[KimonoNoNo]

PAX Hands-on Impressions from Twinfinite
---
Two short PAX interviews with the devs Joar and James:
Destructoid
Teh Syndicate
---
And a longer two part interview from March with James:
Part 1, Part 2

Thanks for posting those.

I'm not a programmer, but it's obvious that these guys have got some serious talent.

 

[More_Badass]

It's getting there...

Slugcat animation is coming along! I was stalled a bit because I didn't know how to approach the tail now that I don't have beizer curves. Like always when I'm stuck it was James who helped me get moving again. We checked out the vector graphic options in Unity's app store, and after a bit of research it was clear that they all just used countless triangles to draw the vector lines.

So, then we decided that if that was the case, I could as well move around triangles myself. So today I made a triangle mesh object, where you can define a number of triangles, and some vertices. The triangles are just references to three different vertices, meaning that sharing vertices between triangles is super easy. If I want to make a four-sided polygon for example, a quad, I can just go:

TriangleMesh.Triangle[] tris = new TriangleMesh.Triangle[2] {
        new TriangleMesh.Triangle (0, 1, 2), 
        new TriangleMesh.Triangle (1, 2, 3)
};

TriangleMesh mesh = new TriangleMesh ("Futile_White", tris);

And then when I move around vertices 1 and 2, which are shared by both triangles, both triangles will change accordingly.

The test run of this structure is the slugcat tail, for which I programmed the physics the other day as you might remember. Behold - 4 little balls of physics and 13 triangles drawing a shape on top of them:

Looks pretty smooth right?

Next up, probably a head or something.

 

[More_Badass]

Some details about how the animations work

I thought today was going to be arm day, but instead I ended up doing a million little leg and body touch ups that I didn't really remember were in there to begin with, but are much needed to make things look cool. Now we have legs displaying different sprites if you're climbing, crawling, wall sliding etc, and also different body positions for a bunch of stuff, such as climbing a pole, sliding on a wall and more. There is a lot of hooking up the upper body's x-position to a 3 pixel wide sinus curve over movement and such, which maybe isn't very exciting. But the animation is what many people like about this game, and that consists entirely of those little quirks, so I feel happy about going over them again. Even more so now that I have a template to look at, and don't have to spend 30 minutes deciding if that sinus wave should have an amplitude of 2, 3.5 or 4.

This is what the animation system of rain world essentially is - it's actually not as procedural as you might think, because it's not just a magic formula that makes everything look cool. Instead it's heaps and heaps of special cases, hand crafted "animations" that are made more or less frame by frame, but not by drawing sprite sheets but by deciding what force should affect what body part at what time. The cool thing about it certainly isn't that it saves a lot of time, but that combinations of animations and smooth transitions between them can exist. If one body part is for example animated to do something, those motions might be defined in relation to the overall alignment of the body, which will make it look a little bit different each time depending on what else is going on.

 

[More_Badass]

New update on the Devlog

The player animation is now up and running in Unity! Huge milestone!

The dynamic "look for somewhere to grab" engine used to be only for lizards, but now when I'm making stuff more general it's accessible to players too. So for example, instead of balancing awkwardly, the player will prefer to just grab something and chill out if possible:

For the climbing, little hand sprites are rendered on top of the level graphic. Those are not in the grab texture, so they don't have a shadow, but you would totally not have noticed that if I didn't tell you

There's still some stuff to do, for example the player being able to look at things and not only stare blankly into a z-dimension where nothing really exists. But looking at stuff requires ... stuff. So that has to go in first. Also there's a lot of little details that need more polish, as always.

Another cool thing happened - I actually managed to port the build! The problem where the shader's attached textures wouldn't stay bound after building was averted by making the palette and the noise map global textures instead. A hack, yes, but it'll do for now.

Then another problem came along, which was THE WOOOOOORST. The palette loaded but everything was a mess. After debugging by doing different palettes colored in different ways to see where the shader actually picked its colors, I got it. Buckle up, because this is horrible:

THE SHADER ROUNDS DIFFERENTLY IN THE PREVIEW FROM IN THE ACTUAL BUILD.

Say that I wanted to fetch the sky color of the current palette, which would be pixel number 7 from the bottom. I used to sample at 7/theHeightOfThePaletteTexture which worked fine. Of course this actually samples on the edge between two pixels, but in the editor I got the 7th pixels color, so I was happy. In the build though, I got the other color. Easy enough to fix, I just made sure to sample at 6.5/theHeightOfThePaletteTexture. But I shouldn't have to deal with this! If Unity keeps the level of inconsistency between editor and build that I've seen so far, it's real trouble. Like, you need to have the testing environment be somewhat the same as the real deal right? Otherwise it's like building a car on the moon and having to look at it crumble under gravity every time you try to drive it for real. Hm.

Anyways, mostly a good productive day!

And here's from the original build, for comparison

 

[More_Badass]

New KS update:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rain-world/project-rain-world/posts/857615

Summer Update!

Hey friends and slugcat fans! Hope you all are having a fantastic summer! We've been inside slaving away at Rain World, and that's EXACTLY where we want to be Anyway, its been too long since our last update, so I think its about time for a progress report. And this is a huge one (well, for us at least), so drum roll please as we present...

RAIN WORLD IN UNITY!!!
http://youtu.be/AT32_HVi6ms

AMAZING!! Now I know some of you are probably saying "hey it looks just like it did before, what the heck were you guys doing the past 2 months", but let me tell you that is actually an EPIC achievement. Initially, we were (perhaps naively) hoping to be able to re-use much of the original Lingo code in the new build. But, for like infinity tedious reasons that wound up not being possible. Joar then had to recreate the entire game engine, physics, everything, from scratch (and trigonometry!) in C#, while still having it be able to use original assets from the level editor, which of course is still in Lingo. AKA: a coding nightmare. But as I'm sure you have come to realize, Joar seems pretty capable of doing the impossible.

New features
Even though it was pretty tedious, its 100% for the best that we had to rebuild it from scratch, because its letting us do everything in a more organized fashion right from the get-go, taking advantage of the powerful modern development tools now at our disposal. This build may LOOK similar superficially, but its actually waaaaaaay deeper in functionality even now at such an early stage.

The first thing to notice in the video (beside the fact that its running at a blazing 120FPS), is that we have the beginnings of a dynamic lighting system implemented. Creatures, clouds and objects cast pretty shadows, and we can vary the lighting and weather for the time of day or for any number of artistic or aesthetic reasons (probably not with the crazy colors in above gif though haha.) This dynamic lighting system has been a dream of Joar's from the beginning, so its amazing to see it start to come together.

Secondly, check the slugcat tail physics. Look how squishy and wiggly!!!! This is just scratching the surface too. We're going to be able to do much more with procedural and physics animation for all creatures...

... such as more detailed limb animations for more natural looking creature interactions with levels and environment. Notice how the cat uses its arms and tail as counterweights, then uses the vertical pole for balance. Not a huge thing, but adds a lot to the immersion in our opinion!

And here is a neat thing I've been saving for last:

How cool is that? Each level is actually made up of 30+ layers stacked on top of each other. We're experimenting with some interesting use of parallax and faux 3d effects. Very exciting to see what comes of that!

So anyway that's what we've been up to.
There is obviously still a huge amount of work to do so I'm going to get back to it, but if people seem interested we can probably keep these updates more 'up-to-date' now that the build doesn't look like, well, this.

Also, I should note that we're finally beginning to get into the territory where we can start reaching out to the those of you with in-game content tiers, so get those creature ideas ready!

Thanks again and best regards,
--James

 

[KimonoNoNo]

Thanks MB for the updates.

Great to see they're making good progress.