jamesprimate on January 17, 2014, 01:35:02 PM:

oh geez! thats a pretty egregious typo, i can't believe nobody caught that 

actually... might not be a problem as we already have a build in place so we can very likely have SOMETHING to throw out there in Aug, but certainly wasn't intended to be that early, seriously thanks for pointing it out to me.

jamesprimate on January 19, 2014, 12:35:59 PM:

thanks all for the kind words! we're working hard on getting some interesting updates and new directions up in the next day or so, ill post more then.


very much so looking into those options! we're in a sort of interesting position because the game as it is now, Joar is basically straining Lingo as far as it can go. Many of the things that people are requesting and we'd like to do (especially ports to other platforms/consoles) would likely require migrating/re-building the entire game into another programming language. By all accounts, that would be the best thing for Rain World, BUT its expensive and tedious, so we'd need to make sure that the resources are in place first and its, well, not completely impossible. More on this soon i hope!

jamesprimate on January 20, 2014, 01:26:36 PM:

NEW STRETCH GOALS ANNOUNCED: TO LINUX AND BEYOND! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rain-world/project-rain-world/posts/723027

jamesprimate on January 20, 2014, 05:30:24 PM (Last Edit: January 20, 2014, 05:39:46 PM):

I'd love for Joar to go in some depth here, but he's slaving away at code as we speak, so for now please take my modest understanding of the situation and perhaps we can get him in later: 

there is no intention to move outside of the structure of the game as you see it now. we hoped to make that clear in the update: Joar has a very strong idea of what he wants rain world to be, and the tools currently being used are a limitation to actually achieving that. the reason that Unity was chosen specifically is that Unityscript shares a lot of similarities with Lingo, and thus we will be able to migrate most of the current code (and hopefully all the art assets) with relatively minor tweaks.  were not trying to make Rain World 3D here, just get it so it runs nicely and looks as good as it can! further, there wouldn't be a second programmer writing the game play of rain world or anything, rather someone who is familiar with the things we are not helping with things such as porting and Unity-specific tricks.

I hope that clarifies some!

JLJac on January 21, 2014, 08:53:33 AM:

Hi there! Sorry I haven't been around much lately, there has been quite a lot to do.

Let me clarify a little what we've been thinking about this. Very obviously, moving to another dev environment will set me back. But there are some arguments for it that I find kind of compelling:

* The three years of development has not been full time, rather it has averaged at something like 1 hour a day. Also it's not three years - yes, the first prototypes for character movement etc were initiated a little earlier - but then the project rested for some time, and active development didn't start until early 2012, two years ago. So in the absolute worst case scenario, where it takes exactly as long to re-make the game as it has taken to write it the first time, we get 2 years / 8 which give us about 3 months of full time work. Aaaand...

* A major chunk of my development time goes towards finding solutions for complicated problems such as path finding, through iteration, and fine tuning animation stuff, through iteration. If I'm porting the game, I wouldn't need to spend 4 hours determining whether that jump force should be 1.2 or 1.4 by playtesting over and over, I could just grab the number from my old game and move ahead.

* An undetermined but monstrous amount of time has gone to creating the level editor/renderer. Perhaps we would like to port the level editor too, but it's not strictly necessary. If the schedule becomes tight we can as well use the old one.

* Another sizable amount of time has been put towards making art assets for the level editor, and making levels. Some of this work could also be redone if we have the luxury of extra time, but could as well be skipped. A little bit of conversion code could make the old levels/level editor projects work just fine.

* Anything is better than Director. For three generations I've feared that newest version of windows wouldn't support Director applications. Lingo is a dead language, we need to move to something that we can count on continuing to exist for a few years into the future. Plus, updates, and active help boards on forums! I imagine googling for a problem and finding something else than a post from 2005 with no answer.

* The things we listed in the kickstarter update. I too like the single room layout, and the game idea is pretty much based around it, so it'll probably stay. But imagine how awesome to have these things by choice, rather than necessity! Maybe some rooms in the hub world could be a little bigger, with a scrolling screen, to convey scale? Maybe we could have water? Maybe we could have this really big impressive room where 400 flies are swarming? I don't want to turn this into a gears of war spectacular effects fest - I just want to expand my choices a little bit so I can do the things I want to do without having to worry about how many milliseconds fatter each frame becomes. I've always wanted to have dangling chains and plants that move a little as you pass them, but it's been impossible for technical reasons. I would be super happy if any of it became feasible.

* Personal development. The current idea is that I would read up on the basics on whatever language we're moving too, and then sit next to the expert guy as we port it. During the process of us porting it together I'll learn the new tool. This way we don't only migrate Rain World to another language, we also migrate me. I already have some experience of different coding languages, and I tend to pick them up fairly quickly. So in the worst case scenario, where we aren't able to pay this guy for more time than it takes to port the thing up to where we are today, I can jump in and continue development from there myself. If it isn't the worst case scenario, we could continue to use this guy's expertise to further optimize the game and overcome technical limitations.

Right now I can only have 1000 sprites on the screen at a time, and I've had to cap the number of lizards at 4 because otherwise it ran too slowly, etc etc. I have managed to work with these limitations, and I have a working game. Also I'm kind of fine with it, because I didn't intend for this game to be something with 100 enemies on the screen. But it would be cool if I knew that the choices I made was because of artistic license, not technical limitations. Also I trust myself to not put 100 enemies on the screen just because I can haha!


Hm, that's a little bit worrying. I want to have as few pre-made solutions for game stuff as possible, actually, because it will only collide with my code and become annoying when porting. I've written all my collision logic etc myself, and it's far from perfect, but it's custom made and well integrated. I worry that some misaimed helpfulness would only slow me down.

What do you recommend? I want something that's easy to learn, performs nicely, but doesn't come with a load of drag-and-drop stuff and physics engines etc. Just a good clean development environment. We've been thinking about AS3 as well, do you think that would be preferable?

All of this might not even be a problem though, we don't have the money yet haha!  If we don't raise enough to do this, I'll just continue in Director, and we'll take in a c++ guy to see if he can help us out with some xtras to speed things up or polish them.

jamesprimate on January 21, 2014, 03:54:43 PM:

WOW, utterly astounding! Massive tanks for all your "i would play this" thumbs up, we'll see you guys on Steam!

jamesprimate on January 22, 2014, 07:38:00 PM:

Check out the most recent kickstarter update for new, never before seen alpha gameplay footage! Plus, insight into the creatures of Rain World, gameplay, AI and animation: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rain-world/project-rain-world/posts/726944

jamesprimate on January 23, 2014, 03:28:27 PM:

Not going to spoil TOO many surprises

JLJac on January 25, 2014, 02:07:23 PM:

Haha I for one am not as concerned about spoiling stuff, so I'll just ruin your excitement right away! No, bats don't hunt lizards, but they tend to flock around them because they enjoy picking on them, and because they know the risk of Slugcat ambush is smaller if they're hanging out next to a lizard.

On the questions of the game world layout:
The game world consists of many interconnected rooms, that you can move between metroidvania style. Some of these rooms are "swarm rooms", where the flies swarm and where you go to hunt. The swarm rooms can also be played as stand-alone challenges in custom mode. My idea has been that once you have traveled to a swarm room in world mode, it would be unlocked and appear in the menu of the custom mode game types.

On lizard personalities:
Lizards come in a few breeds, identified by head colors. These all have different abilities and feats. Green is the "tank", big, slow, lazy, stupid, but takes a lot of abuse. Blue is the "ninja" lizard, smallest in the family, with the least health, but with the ability to climb on walls and in ceilings, and with a sticky tongue it can shoot at you. Then there are a few others, and then there's red. If you see red, run 

JLJac on January 26, 2014, 09:46:56 AM:

I haven't enabled playing as a lizard, not because it wouldn't be easily done but because it would be kind of dull - you'd just steer in four directions, no jumping or exciting platforming. I might explore the possibility in the future though

I'm starting to think more seriously about what development environment I should move to, and whether unity is a good idea or not.
So, ever helpful and supportive community, would you mind throwing your advice this way? I know that we did have some discussion about this earlier, but this time around I'll actually spell out what I need from the tool I'm moving to:

* Fairly quick to learn, fairly quick to write in. I need to spend as little time as possible learning the new language, and it can't be 10 minutes just to define a variable or something like that. Development has to be easy and quick. But...

* Not drag-and-drop, no-code user interface, pre-defined behaviours, built in physics engines. I have written behaviors for things like collision physics etc already, and built-in engines doing that same stuff would do more damage than good. They'd collide with the behaviors I already have, and make the porting slower by preventing me from doing straight transfers of the solutions I already have. I'd have to solve problems again, rather than just move solutions. Still...

* Some pre-defined stuff would be great, especially for rendering graphics. Like, rotating, stretching, changing the content of sprites etc. I don't know what's common practice, to have some kind of sprite system or to draw everything with some copy pixels like method to the screen each frame? In either case it would be great if rotating etc would be as easy as possible. Also, drawing simple vector graphics with bézier curves.

* Other than that, I would prefer some pre-defined stuff for strictly technical tasks such as getting keyboard input, setting screen resolution, reading/writing to external files etc. That kind of stuff is not what I'm interested in, and the less time I spend making the screen resolution reset code work on different computers or whatever, the better.

* Good debugging. In director I can pause and look at the actual value of every specific variable, track variables in a window so I can see them change in real time, etc. When I've been working in Adobe Flash I haven't found that stuff, and have had to rely only of the trace function for all that, which has been frustrating. I need better than a trace function.

* Performance! I need to make a lot of calculations each frame, and don't want any slowdown.

* A living community and continuous updates. I'm tired of being the last dinosaur alive working on a software that I'm never quite sure will run on the next version of windows. I want the environment and the community that works in it to be alive and healthy.

So basically, I'm not interested in building everything from the ground up just for the sake of it - I'm super happy with using other peoples' solutions for things like rotating sprites and getting keyboard input. But on the other hand, I don't want something klick&play-like where I just tick a checkbox saying "platformer movement", I need to fine tune more and I want to build more myself. Just a good, clean, easy, fast development environment where I build the game with code. Suggestions? Is unity my match?

JLJac on January 26, 2014, 11:15:34 AM:

Paging my question ~


@JubJub from the looks of it, basically all I'd use would be the 2d graphics stuff, yeah. My friend just suggested C#, SFML + Mono, MonoDevelop, instead, and I've been looking up C# and feel like I kind of like it. There are other technical stuff I worry about though, such as memory leaks etc. Maybe Unity would take care about that stuff for me? As said, I'm not thrilled to spend time creating intricate technical solutions for problems that have been solved a thousand times before just for the sake of it, I'd rather work on the game.

@Christian, that's exactly how it works. Players compete either in lethal combat or in competitive play (catching the most flies and staying alive) and the lizards hunt them as a "neutral" threat. If you hit the other player with a rock so that s/he is eaten by a lizard, you get a kill.

@Bandreus, that sounds cool! How does debugging work with that? Are there libraries for doing stuff such as rotating sprites etc? I'm not interested in re-inventing the wheel here. I do have some experience with ActionScript and Javascript, and I think they are pretty much exactly the same as Lingo, so those transitions hasn't been hard.

JLJac on January 27, 2014, 12:26:40 PM:

Thanks all!
I think I'm leaning C#, I like what I've seen of it. But I can use C# with Unity as well, right? Couldn't I write my game in unity/C#, and basically use almost none of the unity built-in stuff, but instead use unity's debugging, etc? For those things I want, I could use the stuff JIMBERT listed, and the stuff I want to do myself I can do myself. And get the multi platform stuff as well...?

I won't move to XNA, because I don't want to move from one dead language to another.

Noogai03, why do you hate sfml? Is it unable to do stuff, or is it just personal preference?

In the end, I think what I will do is to download 2 or 3 of them, give them a day or two each, and try them out. Mocking up pong or something. But it'd be nice to narrow down the alternatives so these trials can eat away as little as possible from actual development time.



One of the things I've always wanted to have in Rain World is dynamic shadows. Seeing your shadow play over the objects in the background would do soooo much for immersion, because suddenly these things would not just be a flat background image, they'd be part of the same world as you. I'm having ideas about how to implement this, and would like to hear what you guys think about the ideas in relation to the choice of development tool.

Doing it for real
Currently a Rain World level consists of 30 layers of graphics, of which the first 5 are baked together into a foreground image (in front of game sprites) and the remaining 25 are baked together into a background (behind game sprites).

What if I didn't paste all these together, but kept them as 30 separate sprites in the game? And had them all cast shadows on each other, in real time. Then it would be as simple as implementing the sprite layer as one of them, between #5 and #6.

Maybe shadow calculation could be done as it currently is in the level editor, with a "light image" which is used as a mask for each layer to decide where it uses the sun/shade palettes, and to which each layer adds its silhouette in black so as to cast a shadow on layers behind. But each frame, rather than in a minute long rendering process.

Built-in dynamic light stuff
Or maybe there is some kind of built in shader for this kind of stuff in for example unity, that runs much faster? In that case, would it work with my resolution, no anti-aliasing, exactly the colors I want etc?

Depth map light
This one is really theoretical. I save a depth map for all pixels that are sunlit as I render the level. Say that the light source is top-left. Now say that we want to know if pixel (432, 122) is sunlit. The depth of (432, 122) is 7. Now we step seven pixels to the left and seven pixels left, and see if this specific pixel is occupied by a sprite (because we have drawn all the sprites to a bitmap each frame, I guess) and if it is, we color pixel (432, 122) according to the shade palette rather than the sun palette. Stuff that is further back in the depth map is shadowed by things that are further to the left/up, making the shadows play over the objects as supposed to without having to bother about the static elements that are the same each frame.

Could maybe be made less processor intense (but more RAM-demanding) if you had one mask for each depth layer, and just applied the sprite silhouettes to those with different offsets. There would be 25 masks... Idk, this one probably wouldn't work.

Other ideas?

JLJac on January 27, 2014, 02:36:07 PM:

Thanks so much! I'm absorbing all this like a sponge. Or the things I understand - I don't have much experience with this stuff and I'm not a native english speaker, so sometimes I run into trouble trying to decode your helpful advice. This for example:


What exactly is an "editor"? Dragging and dropping sprites/polygons/objects to the stage? Why would I do that, when I can just place everything with code? Or are you talking about code editors? Why would those be different for 2d/3d? Once again, excuse my ignorance.

JLJac on January 27, 2014, 02:56:16 PM:

This is waaaaaaaay too much pre-defined stuff. That stuff would get in the way and become a huge problem for me. But you say it's possible to just turn it off and use only the things I like? Having sprites in different layers for example would be kind of neat.

The camera stuff as well - I don't want that. If I need that I'll do that myself. I worry that it'll chip away at performance simply by *actually being a 3D camera* though I don't use any of that functionality.

Edit: like, it runs slower because it could do a bunch of things I don't actually do. Like, the fact that it has the potential to zoom slows the rendering down compared to if that function didn't even exist, which would be preferable if I never use it.

jamesprimate on January 30, 2014, 01:37:19 PM (Last Edit: January 30, 2014, 02:02:03 PM):

Julie from Cliqist wrote this really nice little mood article (poetry? first person narrative?) on Rain World. I dunno, maybe I'm just a weirdo art type, but I thought the style of it was very thoughtful and cool: http://cliqist.com/2014/01/28/existentialism-in-rain-world/

jamesprimate on February 03, 2014, 03:56:10 PM:

hey do you guys remember when a bunch of us hung out on twitch and it was a lot of fun? Well we're going to try to do that again tomorrow (Feb 4th)!

Join Joar, myself, and our host Michael (Pandara) for a new video launch and chat party on http://twitch.tv/rainworld at 10am PST / 1pm EST / 7pm CET

Links and stuff are in the new update:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rain-world/project-rain-world/posts/737473

jamesprimate on February 03, 2014, 09:05:41 PM:

you guys are da best!

jamesprimate on February 04, 2014, 09:41:34 AM:

in 20 minutes! you can catch us at http://www.twitch.tv/rainworld 

jamesprimate on February 04, 2014, 06:05:59 PM:

nope! only a certain breed

jamesprimate on February 07, 2014, 03:52:55 PM:

this is a very good point and thank you for bringing that issue up! we will keep it in mind.


"RainWorldISAwesome" awwwwwww, thank you! responded in email, i liked your idea so maybe we can figure something out!


YES! Getting close to growing Linux Beards! http://linuxbeard.com/