JLJac on March 23, 2013, 12:45:18 AM:

Thank you all for being interested!

The game is created in Macromedia Director and written in Lingo (At first I considered writing the game in iron-age runes on stone slabs, but then I settled on going with a slightly older and more traditional development environment).

It's very hard for me to estimate how far through development I am, as I've made the estimation "50%" about seven times already. Today I am definitely beyond 50% though, as pretty much the only things I can think of are: The menu, some more art, four-player support, joystick support and the menu art. If not on the final 10% I'd say I'm somewhere in the final 20-30.

At this very moment I'm living under very african conditions (I can literally see goats outside my window when writing this), which I have taken as an excuse to keep development on hold. Fact is I probably just really needed to take a break from the project, after one year + of development.

Very soon I'll move from the small town to Accra, and start at a desk job and live in an apartment. Then I'll try to get back to a strict minimum 1 hour a day schedule. Likely things will go quicker than expected then, as I'm fully confident in how to do all the remaining things that have to be done, it's just a question of sitting down and doing them.

jamesprimate on April 04, 2013, 09:21:02 PM:

what! i leave town and rain world gets featured on rock paper shotgun??

i should leave the house more often 

JLJac on April 08, 2013, 12:51:24 PM:

Hehe! The universe doesn't work that way ~  

People, I'm slowly getting back on my feet after a mild case of malaria  
And now I bring you update... eh... where were we?

Update 133
Today I implemented saving and loading. The game has two save files, one for co-op play and one for single player. The files are encrypted, so you can't mess around with them. If there's no file the game will create one etc etc.

As you get back to the den after a successfull hunt the game is automatically saved, and when you hit "Continue" in the main menu it's picked up again.

Things seem to be working out just fine. Objects that are moved will, for example, be found at the same place after loading. Lizard are a little more complicated, as I don't want them to be found at the same place after loading. Pretty much the only data I want to save with them is their health, otherwise I'm happy with them emerging from their holes as if they had never existed before. I guess the easiest approach to this will be to just loop through them on save and delete all data that's not health-related.

JLJac on April 09, 2013, 12:59:11 PM:

Update 134
When messing with save files some new problems emerged, because of some special cases that didn't occur if you just played a fresh world every time. So I rewrote the code that loads lizards from memory, in order to be able to be more selective about what to save and how when I save a lizard. This way I can for example save the health of a lizard but ignore it's position. It comes in handy when you end a hunt in world mode and want the lizards to have crawled back into their holes, but their injuries to be intact.

The current system supports the following scenarios:

Lizard has not spawned yet
Lizard has spawned offscreen, and should be generated out somewhere in the level
Lizard is saved as alive, and should be recreated close to where it was last seen
Lizard is saved as dead, and a corpse should be recreated on the same spot
Lizard is saved as dead and not on the screen (for example if it has fallen out of the level), and should simply not appear at all

Seems to cover it, right?

Everything's working out fine in the artificial de-bugging scenarios I've been running, but with stuff complicated as this it's hard to know if something has escaped me.

In short, saving/loading seems to be pretty much done by now. The next big step in getting the single player campaign up and running will be the between-level screen, which should have little animations showing how many flies you've caught and so on.

JLJac on April 10, 2013, 01:48:46 PM:

Update 135
Dear readers, I'm happy to say that single player is up and running!
You go out into the world, follow the flies to where they're swarming, catch as many as are required, and then head back to your den. If you have enough flies, you're brought back to the "den" screen, and the game is saved. From here you can either get started on the next hunt, or you can quit the game. The next time you load it your progression will be saved.

What I did today was mainly to connect huge building blocks that were all done - saving was done, swarming of different rooms was done and so on. But today I could really see the flow of the game for the first time. Still haven't really played it though, so I can just imagine all the tweaking it's going to need.

Aside from that I also sorted out a few quirks and gave some things cleaner solutions. For example, if the requirement for this hunt is to catch 5 flies, and you enter the den with four flies in your stomach and one in your hand, it still lets you in. That kind of stuff.

Oh, and items your bring into your den at the end of a hunt will reappear on the ground outside the den the next time you start playing. I think this will be neat in co-op, you'll be able to collect a little "armory" outside your den and run through it to collect some weapons before heading out into the world.

JLJac on April 11, 2013, 12:35:24 PM:

Update 136
Today I made it possible to change the screen resolution from the menu. The game's resolution will always be 1024*768, but if you have a widescreen you might prefer black borders on the sides to a stretched image.

Also I wrestled for a bit with a glitch that has been around a long time. When you exit one room and enter another there's quite a bit of data for the game to load, and it's loading it all in one frame. For some reason Director has a thing where it pauses the sound if a frame drags on too long. This messes up James' beautiful music tracks, the beat is broken by the hiccup. Today I divided the load so that some of the heavier parts are spread out over a few different frames.

The hiccup has become clearly shorter, and in some cases doesn't appear at all. The problem is the lizards mapping out what part of the level they have access to, for intricate levels this might take almost half a second per lizard. I'll see if I could possible divide it even more. It really helps the immersion to have the sounds play continuously across levels.

Oh, and here's my sketching up some logos:





Here's the one I'm most fond of right now:




I'm going to travel a little, so things might be a little slow here for a week. See you!

jamesprimate on April 12, 2013, 04:35:46 AM:

ahh cool! im no visual artist, but i personally like these, because of the legibility AND because is looks sort of like some of the in-game environmental elements:





this one the stylization is really really cool BUT its a little illegible... "pain world". I think if its cleaned up just a bit it will look pretty awesome though.

One odd thing that I have an opinion on is having the lizard on the titlescreen. This may be just my silly opinion, but for some reason, I think it might spoil the spookiness of the first few lizard encounters by being confronted with it when you first start up. I liked having the initial impressions being about the bear and the environment and rain, with the lizards being this kind of lurking unknowable death in the shadows. Makes them more terrifying IMHO.

just my 2 cents!

JLJac on April 12, 2013, 07:00:11 AM:

Hm. The lizard thing is a really good point. Perhaps the title screen could show off some more environment instead - it could still feature the "growers"(I hesitate to call them plants) that are a pretty iconic element of the RW environments.

The legibility issue is also something I should look at. The R should read R, for example. I think the type might need to have some more work done on it - it can most likely be made made more legible while retaining some of its graffiti-ish aesthetic. The drooping I versions are much more legible, but to me they look a little to "fantasy" and lack a certain "early cartoon" kind of vibe that I really appreciate in the other one.

JLJac on April 21, 2013, 12:51:14 PM:

Update 137

Today I added a little HUD detail, an indicator on the starting screen to how many flies you have to catch this particular hunt.



Later I'll upgrade it with actual graphics. The functionality is in though, it shows how many flies are needed and how many you have.

Other than this I added a new thing - saving flies in the den. As some of you might now, the basic premise of the game is that deadly rains haunt the place for several days in a row. The... creature you play needs food to survive, so when the rain briefly stops it goes out to hunt for bugs. It knows how many days the next rain will last, and has to catch one bug for every day. The game is divided into these "hunts". As the rain season goes on the rains will be longer and longer, demanding you to catch more and more flies in the same limited time.

The saving bugs feature means that if one hunt demands 4 flies, but you catch 6, you'll have 2 at the beginning of the next hunt. I don't know about whether or not to keep this, it seems a bit cheap. Maybe only half of the excess should be stored? That would create complicated rules that would have to be explained in text rather than visually, which is never a good thing. Hm...

As the creatures are clearly shown as eating the extra flies in-game it has to be assumed that they throw the food up again, especially since in co-operative the players share the same numbers. And then it comes to how long a thrown-up bug would last in a inevitably moist animal den, which is something that's too squicky for me to be compelled to simulate in code.

Let's see where to take this feature. It might stay in, and it might not. In either case, catching excess flies will be the way to measure the high score of a campaign playthrough.

jamesprimate on April 21, 2013, 04:22:45 PM:

^ 

JLJac on April 24, 2013, 11:01:51 AM:

Man, never until I had one did I realize how fulltime a fulltime job is... It like... fills up your entire time.

Update 138
Today I worked some on the menu layout to have it make more sense. The most complicated menu screen is no doubt the Custom Game screen, so I started with that hoping that everything else would feel easy afterwards. Now I have the layout:



and also the functionality, so it's just a question of applying one on the other. And draw the actual icons and stuff, of course. These symbols are place holder.

The big squiggle will be the game type title, similar in style to the game's title screen. The arrows on the sides cycle through the game types. Between the two lines are the game type options, complete with level tier. The four little ellipses represent the players, you click them to toggle their participation in the game (four player mode is something I'm hoping to do, but I've not actually tried it so I'll have to see how the engine is able to handle it). Here I'll use the in-game sprites, they'll animate between the standard standing animation and a sleeping animation. Other than that there are some small buttons doing some small but necessary things, such as resetting things, scrolling and so on.

I think that I'll have the "all levels list" on the left dissapear down the edge of the screen when not used, in order to make the whole thing perfectly symmetric.

JLJac on April 24, 2013, 11:08:11 AM:

@Wolfbane
Hey thanks! I really like your stuff. However, I already have a music/sound artist on board, James Primate, who has made no less than 15 (!) awesome tracks for me as well as some sound effects. So we don't really need any more music. But you could always contact James, he's the one in charge of the music and maybe he has some ideas. He's on these forums.

JLJac on April 26, 2013, 01:44:43 AM:

Update 139

Yesterday I did some small but important changes, most notably changing the hard coded "if key is pressed" solutions for input into an actual input system, that I copied straight from my old game block towers. There's still no way to set up your controls, but I should get to that. Another thing I did was to save the options to a file in a similar manner to the save games, though not encrypted.

And I made this mock-up for a pause screen:

JLJac on April 26, 2013, 12:10:03 PM:

Hm... I've been pondering on that and think I'll actually not. I think there's some interesting graphical contrast between the crazyness of the title script and the strictness of the menu texts. Something like this works well, according to me.



The title here is of course not supposed to be "rain world", but a name of a game type instead.

EDIT: And this is when I realize that I've based my menu layout on a 600x800 canvas while my actual game is 1024x768. Well, I'll have to scale it I guess. The proportions should be the same.

JLJac on May 04, 2013, 12:18:44 AM:

Wow, that video was really cool!
As for the graffiti, I'm still kind of searching for my style... I knew from the start that I wanted the interface to have some sort of black and white graffiti, but I didn't know exactly what it would look like - that's what I'm trying to nail down now. I don't want it to be "cute and curly", rather I think what I'm going for could be summed up as "stange". We'll see how I'll get there.

As for the  I plan to release the game for free - that way no one can complain about it being buggy and unplayable hehe! I might put up a donation page though.

Update 140
I'm sorry for not writing here very often these days. It's for your own safety though, as you could easily die from boredom if I put all the things I'm currently doing up here. I'm doing... interface stuff -.- So, basically, I've been implementing stuff like sliders for sound and music volume, different kinds of buttons, frameworks for how buttons will handle highlighting, checking if the pointer is above them, and so on and so on.

The main reason why this is so time consuming is that I'm making the entire interface accessable through both mouse and keyboard. I think that will be a really nice feature in the end, especially for those players who prefer to use a controller (which reminds me that I probably should add joystick input too... but that'll go under the keyboard framework).

jamesprimate on May 04, 2013, 01:26:14 AM:

listen to this man Joar. Its time you embraced commerce.

embrace it.

and embrace gamepad support.

JLJac on May 04, 2013, 03:30:13 AM:

Hahaha
It's just that there's this really annoying bug where the player suddenly falls of a ledge at the speed of light, which leads to some really unfair deaths, and which I don't at all feel like tracking down and fixing ~ And that makes releasing the game for free the logical conclusion, as no-one can say anything as long as they didn't pay for it...

jamesprimate on May 04, 2013, 10:20:11 AM:

in a game where you die 10,000,00 times during NORMAL play, you think that an occasional bugged death breaks the game?? Hardly. I've logged in probably 20 hrs of RW and haven't encountered it once.

also, it's not like games are released as some perfect ideal of coding perfection. every single one of them has flaws and unfix able things, but that doesn't stop them from being released and people enjoying them. Fez was for some people an unplayable mess: http://www.bitloaders.com/2012/07/19/fez-developers-will-not-be-fixing-game-breaking-bug-in-patch-re-release/ but that doesn't take away anything from its "worth". It's just a part of what game development is. everybody who buys games understands that. I can't even count how many huge budget AAA games I own that are buggy fuckups, I'm sure that people will understand when you, a lone game dev working in macromedia director, have a few rough edges.

plus, why not just release it, then do a patch or an update when you feel like sifting through? or hell, just get someone to do it for you (I know 10 programmer friends that would do it in a heartbeat!)

you've spent a huge amount of time on a really really awesome game and you are in the final stretch of the race. it's worth it! go all the way!

JLJac on May 05, 2013, 01:05:40 AM (Last Edit: May 05, 2013, 01:51:29 AM):

Hehe thank you James! 

There's another argument against the "pay whatever you want" idea though - it requires people to have paypal or something. For me, the first objective is very clear: I want people to play my game. If I can collect some change in the process that's fine, money is fun. It's just that I don't think it's worth it if there are people out there who go "oh, you have to have a paypal account... nevermind then". I know I would. In that case I get neither money nor a player :/ It all comes down to the golden rule, I think. Do I like it when people charge me for their games? No. Or actually, I feel completely indifferent about it, because I won't even play the game. I haven't payed for (or illegaly downloaded) a game in something like five years - the few hours of playing games I've had during those years are all from the ever depleting pool of "download for free indie" games.

And on top of this I don't even know if it's possible to legally purchase the software I'm developing this on any more.

And And I have no idea about how to implement some kind of copy protection, neither am I very interested in it as I view that kind of programming as counter-productive. Who wants to sit down for 36 hours and code a device that keeps people from enjoyment?

What it all comes down to is that if I use myself as a template for my audience, paying makes the entire difference between actually playing the game and not playing it. Put that next to my priority list - players over money - and the outcome seems clear.

That's my logic, at least. I don't know if it makes sense to anyone else?

Update 141
More menu stuff. Made the game smarter in some regards - for example now it doesn't keep an entire world map in memory while playing a custom game, and it doesn't keep a custom game handler in memory when playing the campaign.

Also the pause menu is now working properly, and I have the framework for a game over menu. Oh, and the game now supports game pad for the menu, if player 1 is set to game pad. Basically the menu can always be controlled by arrow keys and space/enter, but it can also be controlled by whatever input player 1 has set up.



Noticed a bug where when a croc picks up a spear the spear will be displayed above both its upper and lower jaw, making it look like it's just kind of... glued to the side of its head. The correct way for this to be is that the spear should be above the lower jaw but behind the upper jaw, making it look like the lizard is pinching it in its mouth. This has to do with me changing the spawn order of lizards and spears a while back, so I'll just have to go take a look at that.

JLJac on May 06, 2013, 01:33:20 AM:

Hahaha never in my life would I suspect so many people would ask to pay for something!
What about kids without credit cards, then? Or maybe stuff has changed since I was a kid, I guess these days they get their weekly allowance in bitcoins or whatever.

Perhaps I could make the game accessable in two ways: either you pay what you want (even 0), or (if you're a kid, or flat broke) you can send an email explaining why you can't pay for the game, and I'll send an email back saying "no worries buddy" and the game attatched.