jamesprimate on September 12, 2013, 10:52:02 AM:

im going to go against the crowd here and say that i think the direction is good! [note: i am possibly biased]. the new font is readable and a big improvement on the previous. what might do a good job counterbalancing the "cute wackiness" that people are disagreeing with would be to add some rain and make the character appear more forlorn. "ive seen things..." make him suffer a bit. cute but suffering.

i think what people really responded to in the original concept image was the combination of "cute" "alien' "mysterious"


i still really like the that image, especially the spots of color.

JLJac on September 12, 2013, 11:29:22 PM:

James, what do you mean you're biased?

One of the main influences to Rain World's aesthetic has always been graffiti, believe it or not. In a way the game is set in a graffiti drawing, or in a graffiti world. It's the same kind of urban, abandoned areas, and if you take a look at the "plants" they're rather graffitti ornaments than plants as we know them. The lizards are very inspired by this aesthetic.

My other main source of inspiration is, once again believe it or not, early 20'th century cartoons, like this stuff:



This aestethic is visible in for example the look of the player character, and the choice to keep most levels almost colorless.

There are quite a few things that others have expressed to me that they've felt when they've looked at the material that wasn't really intended by me. I never intended for RW to be artsy, for example, I view it very much as a work of pop art rather than art. It's a cartoon rather than a french film. It's hip hop or electronica rather than a sonnet. I think pop culture can carry as much emotional/intellectual content as fine art, and I think pop culture is more fitting for a game (which, besides of conveying emotion, also should be fun), which is why I went with the pop culture path for this project.

Another one is that RW is dark and grim. This wasn't really my intention either. I wanted to create a sense of abandonment, and part of that was having these creatures live their lifes without any society or supervision. They're just trying to survive, and from that comes the behaviours of eating each other and trying to defend themselves. The game contains no sadism, no sexual violence, no torture, just the struggle for survival. It's not more "darkgrim" than nature is - I've never deliberately added any dark tones.

Of these:
Cute was pretty much a by-effect of having a cartoon character as the protagonist. Also cute is in a way necessary for a good game protagonist, I believe, as it is also "relatable". A cute face is something we tend to project ourselves onto, while an ugly face we tend to objectify and think of as "the other". Alien is good, in the sense "otherwordly" - it is another world: Rain World. Mysterious is good, but I'm going for a certain flavour of it. I want modern mystery, not ancient mystery. Not an old forest, but that time you wandered off and ended up behind an old power station where no-one had set foot for at least 20 years and crows had been living their crow lifes without even understanding what a power station is. Urban mystery, perhaps.

Thus, this:
is intentional and intended. And this:
Is not where I want to go. Still, I don't want it to be goofy, it shouldn't feel like Dora the explorer or whatever.

I guess what I like about graffiti is the contrast. It's loud, whacky, colorful and cartoony, but where the goofy voices stop there's an echo, a vast sense of abandonment. Because where all this whackyness takes place is some kind of no longer used industrial area, and at the feet of the cartoon character a little spruce is growing, year by year, and a plastic bag is slowly decomposing. Nature is cold and lonely, but never as cold and lonely as when compared to the meaningless chatter of our culture. There's no feeling of abandonment and godlessness as when you see pop culture next to a spruce growing, and understand that whatever we say and do, the universe doesn't even care.

I want to convey this, preferably within an area of 1024*768 pixels and with... typography. So I'm in for a challenge.

Sorry about today's post being a little different, I usually talk about what I do not as much as why I'm doing it when it comes to art. At the end of the day I believe these concepts can not properly be conveyed with words, which is why we have art to carry them. If everything could be written, why would we paint?

Still, it might have given insight into why this is a difficult hurdle and not something I've just slapped together already.

JLJac on September 14, 2013, 08:10:11 AM (Last Edit: September 24, 2013, 10:55:58 PM):

Thanks guys!

@heinzius, yeah that contrast is what I'm going for. Thank you for taking your time to create that mockup! I think you're right in that there should be some architecture to acompany it... I won't use blur though, as there's no blur anywhere else in the game. Maybe I could use some sort of drawn backdrop - I'll have to experiment.

Update 175
James sent me a new bach of sounds, and they're implemented! I also added a sort of gradient to the start of each sound the lizards make, so that it fades in rather than starting at full power out of nowhere. Sounds a lot better.

What I've spent most time doing, however, is throwing the "egg hunt" game type out, and replacing it with a standard horde mode co-op survival thing. Egg hunt was boring, and it can be created by tweaking the settings of sand box mode.

Waves mode, as I call the new gametype, is the only one where players are cooperating. You're stuck on a level, and the lizards keep coming in waves. There's a function that creates the waves, which uses a "budget" that steadily increases over the waves in order to "buy" lizards that have different "prices" assigned to them depending on their difficulty. So basically it gets harder and harder with each wave.

As it stands the players get spears by catching flies. It doesn't make any sense at all, but I figured it would be fun. So there are a few flies flying around, and if you catch them they turn into spears in your hands. Other than that you have to rely on stunning lizards you've already speared with rocks, and retrieve the spears.

The new dynamic area mapping stuff seems to work OK:

-removed image, sorry-

What I do here is that as soon as the lizards spawn I throw them out of the level to kill them, so we can see how the next lizard maps its turf. The green lizard is unable to climb, and is thus restricted to the three leftmost platforms. Note how the last lizard in the gif, a wall climber, has access to the upper right area where the platform is missing. This is because wall climbers can climb on terrain in the background layer.

At one time it lagged a little bit when 4 blue lizards wanted to map their turfs at the same time, but I can probably do something about that. If I feel ambitios I could slow it down depending on how many other dynamic mappings are being done at the same time.

JLJac on September 15, 2013, 02:43:41 AM (Last Edit: September 15, 2013, 08:23:16 AM):

Update 176
Resolved a lot of small issues. For example I made it so that objects (rocks, spears) can't occupy the exact same space - when they go to "freeze" mode they do a check for other objects, and if there are objects too close they don't freeze but instead moves away and try again. Also, when spears are stuck in the ground close to a wall they tend to lean out from the wall rather than in towards it, in order to make them more visible. Small stuff, but it makes the game more pleasant to play.

Also I've messed around with the menu for Waves mode, so that it has no options or anything, just a list of levels you choose from.

Waves mode is a bit addicting, so I tend to start playing it rather than making progress... I'll have to stop with that. It works OK, but there's some trouble with it very suddenly throwing a very big challenge on you, such as three white lizards and four blue ones or whatever. It feels a bit harsh when you've done well up until a certain point, and then you're just annihilated by an army of four sticky-tounged, camoflauged, wall climbing white lizards. It has to be a little bit more aware of the steepness of the difficulty curves it creates.

Edit: Did the dynamic area mapping speed thing. So now when you kill ALL the lizards on the screen at once, it takes a bit longer for them to respawn because they each map their turfs slower, but it doesn't lag. Also resolved the issue with the difficulty spikes - now when a new color of lizard shows up it is guaranteed to be alone on the level the first time you see it. So for example, from the third wave on there's a chance blue lizards might spawn. Then, during the third wave, the blue lizards will always be alone - they won't spawn unless everything else is dead, and nothing else will spawn while they're alive. In the next wave, the fourth, the blue lizards will be allowed to haunt the level together with one other lizard, whatever color it is. In the fifth wave, it is allowed to co-exist with two other lizards. Etc. This way there won't be any situations where you've never encountered blue lizards, and then surprise mofo, here are three of them, together with a white!

JLJac on September 16, 2013, 07:59:43 AM:

Wasted today's dedicated development time by playing the game instead. Oh well. It's playtesting, I guess.

JLJac on September 17, 2013, 06:53:48 AM:

Hahaha yeah, perhaps. But it's a very different thing for me to play something I'm currently developing, as I simultaneously think about what I want to add etc. That might add a little depth to it, compared to when you guys play. Like, I would obviously not have spent as much time with this game as I have unless I was making it

@artemi - That's a very good point - giving the text a physical presence in the environment! I'll give it a try for sure!

Update 177
Started putting the shelter door animation into the game.
Also added respawning for waves mode. The game has a bit too many random factors in it for it to feel fair if you suddenly die after 10 minutes of fighting. Stuff like a lizard suddenly deciding to walk backwards and pushing you out from a cliff or whatever. With extra lives it feels a little bit more even, as each death isn't that big a deal any more.

You start off with three extra lives (no matter how many players you are) and after waves 5, 10, 15 etc you recieve one more extra life. If you're two or more players and run out of extra lives and one dies, the surviving player can try to reach the next extra life, and the teammate will spawn.

Being two players should be a bit better than being one, as you can inflict more harm, but not too much of an advantage as you also die more, and use the same pool of extra lives.

JLJac on September 18, 2013, 02:20:13 AM:

Update 178



I might have over graffiti'ed it...

jamesprimate on September 18, 2013, 12:39:06 PM:

 

JLJac on September 18, 2013, 11:23:51 PM:

Artemi, that's a really good guess!

The first four of the square buttons are lizards - currently one green is active, but you can have 4 reds or whatever, you just click them to cycle through the colors. The fifth button toggles lizards respawn, it's currently on. On the next row is eggs, allowed in holes, many players allowed in the same hole, spears (off, on, spawning at random, or available in holes - the last one currently choosen) and then friendly fire on/off.

See where it says "Levels"? That's the level tier - currently it only has one level on it, confusingly named "Levels" If you move the cursor out to the left a list of all levels pops up, and when you click these they'll appear on the tier. You can have up to 10 levels on there. Under the level tier are four little buttons: clear tier, shuffle on/off, recommended levels (for this gametype), and cycles. Cycles makes the game repeat levels, so if you put it to 3 it will play each level 3 times.

The five circles are match length options - 1, 2, 3, 6 or 12 minutes. Then flies density, and finally the little cross which resets all options to the gametype default. The little bear creatures can be clicked in order to toggle players on/off.

And this whole thing is controllable with mouse, keyboard AND gamepad! The menu truly is my greatest achievement with this game 

Update 179
Got rid of some harsh gradients in the background, to give smooth surfaces and curves a smoother look. Lighter one is new:



Notice how there was previously some very sharp vertical lines on the big pipe in the background? Now they're slightly less sharp, and I think the whole thing is a little easier on the eyes. Also the slightly lighter colors create more foreground/background contrast, which might be good for gameplay purposes.

JLJac on September 19, 2013, 05:05:16 AM:

Yeah, yellows almost always spawn in groups of 2-4. I think they could theoretically show up alone as well, but I haven't encountered it. It should be a very rare occurance.

JLJac on September 22, 2013, 01:34:26 AM:

Barch asked me a question for a lecture - on how I developed my style. Here's my reply. Nothing new under the sun for those of you who have been around a while, but it might be interesting as a short summary of what I'm doing for those of you who have just arrived and are not too eager to scroll through 45 pages of devlog.

The game started with only the player character, as an experiment on how a character could be rendered and controlled more dynamically while still looking like pixel art.

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=22849.0

The game is then built around that character.

Most platformers have characters that are just boxes, and I think that even if you paint non-box graphics on top of the boxes it's still perfectly evident from the movement that it's still just boxes. I wanted to try something else.

The world building aspect came later. As the creatures are fairly complex to render, some of them consists of more than 20 sprites, and as lot of processing power is used for AI, I didn't have much left for rendering scrolling levels or anything similar. Because of that I created a level editor that renders levels as still images. This turned out to be a good thing, because as I didn't have to render the levels on the fly I could make the rendering process as complex as I wanted. The downside to this is of course that the levels are completely static.

I have deliberately not been having a creative deisgn process that's separated from the technical development. This is because if I were to first design a game and then try to code it, there would be a lot of places where the code or my skills with the code weren't sufficient to create what I had designed. The final game would be a watered down version of what I had in my design document.

Instead I've allowed creative decisions to be influenced by technical limitations as well as having technical solutions serve the creative decisions. This is what's fun in making games according to me - having creativity and problem solving work together. Technincal limitations can actually sometimes boost my creativity.

Another important part of what makes my project what it is would be that I don't believe art and code can be separated. Many games work with an artist / programmer division in their teams, but as I'm doing this alone I can float freely between the two roles, which I think has played to my favour.

Programming is creating behaviours, and I think it's a bad idea to keep how something behaves separate from how it looks. How something, such as a creature, looks is what will give you the first impression of what it is. How it behaves is what will let you know it even more, what will make you understand it under the visual surface. But it's still the same creature. Looks and behaviour should be telling the same story, I believe. So maybe it's not such a good idea that they most often are created by different people, in different rooms, at different occasions?

In my game I've tried to make the gap between graphics and behaviour as narrow as possible. My ideal state is when the graphics and the behaviour of an object are inseparable, how it looks is how it moves.

To underline this ideal further (and for technical reasons, of course) the creatures in the game look very simple on a still image. Most of them have only one or two flat colors and consist of fairly simple shapes. What gives them character is their movement and behaviour.

In the end I think my goal is to create the illusion that these things are alive. I'm fairly certain that I share this goal with most people making games, as it's an important factor in immersion. Working with behaviour to create that illusion is a path I think is worthy of experimentation - and rain world is my take on such an experiment.

Update 180
Quite a lot has happened, so much actually that I don't quite remember everything I've done since last time. Mostly little details, like adding small spark effects when throwing a rock at a wall, and little bug fixes. The big change is that the shortcuts now look different, in yet another attempt to make it more clear where there are shortcuts, and where they go.

Also I've been changing a few things in how waves mode work. Now if you die, every lizard will go back in its hole and then you'll respawn to an empty level. Then it will initiate the same wave you were already on, again. This is because earlier you'd respawn with lizards still on the screen, and in quite a few cases they would be hanging around way too close to your spawn hole for it to be fair.

JLJac on September 23, 2013, 12:26:34 PM:

Here are the new, bigger shortcut holes. I hope they'll make it a bit easier to follow your player with your eyes when you're moving through the shortcuts.

The little spark that moves back and forth is there to show where there are shortcuts. It's not usually this frantic, as it mostly have other shortcuts as well to randomize through. But this level has only this one shortcut, and thus the spark is making the best of it.

jamesprimate on September 23, 2013, 01:16:45 PM:

yeah that looks really nice, especially on the larger levels! its something that would never have even crossed my mind (hey thats why im not a visual artist!) but somehow subtly  adds to the atmosphere. the result feels more techno/"city-like". same with the slight change in gradient you used for the backgrounds.

JLJac on September 24, 2013, 10:40:02 PM:

I've been avoiding yellow for some reason... don't quite know why  

Mostly it was a matter of conveying what's going on to the player, with the big difference being that the new holes show direction, as they're not perfectly square. Hopefully this makes it a little easier to piece together what's happening from looking at those pixels.

Are you talking game engine-wise or in universe-wise? To the game engine the shortcuts are objects you interact with that moves your body out of the level, and then it walks tile by tile looking for another tile with the shortcut property until it hits an exit, then it reintroduces the player to the level.

The in universe explanation is more fuzzy... It's obviously some kind of pipe that the creatures move through (physically, it's not a teleporter). It's one of those places where game design meets world building, and the most obvious parameters of world building has to give way. I don't think those places are necessesarily akward though, they can give a touch of surreal quirkyness to the world that actually enriches it.

jamesprimate on September 24, 2013, 11:55:46 PM:

hey, we'll take our pcgamer features where we can get them 

JLJac on October 05, 2013, 01:34:58 PM:

Thanks you! And welcome to the forum! Be sure to check out the devlogs subforum, there are many cool projects going on over there

Update 181



More fighting with the typography...

jamesprimate on October 05, 2013, 05:58:35 PM:

ahhh so good!

JLJac on October 07, 2013, 01:01:15 PM:

Thank you people! Good to know that I'm on the right track, even though I might not be all the way down it just yet.

And thanks to jubjub for re-uploading the movement prototype! Appreciate it

Update 182
More typography...



This is the raw vector art, before the pixel art touch up you've seen in the previous one.

JLJac on October 11, 2013, 09:33:14 AM (Last Edit: October 11, 2013, 09:38:35 AM):

Yeah, I prefer the vector art too, but the game isn't vector graphics... However, I could go with the solid color approach for the pixel versions as well.

Update 183


This typeface I've got going works a lot better with some words than with other. "Paused" and "Sand Box" I'm happy with, because they have a lot of chubby letters where I can but my X's. Words like "Death Match" and "Complete" are hopeless though, as they just end up a mess of spindly tentacles...

Edit:
Just spotted a comment on one of the youtube videos simply stating "slug cats". I will never call them "bear creatures" again.

jamesprimate on October 11, 2013, 11:45:30 AM:

I like "death match", a lot actually! but "complete" and "competitive" don't work for me.