jamesprimate on May 12, 2015, 01:09:15 AM:

i had the idea to have the water level of the cistern visually decrease over the course of the cycle, acting almost as a clock. you can go in and have an easy visual indication of if the gate trip is worth it, or if you need to rush back and find shelter. as the doors are (we assume) powered by the water, the gates simply wont open after a certain point in the rain cycle when the cistern is empty. shelters will generally be nearby though, so while it may be a scramble, it wont be *completely* unfair if you find a near empty/nonfunctional gate.

JLJac on May 12, 2015, 11:50:29 AM (Last Edit: May 12, 2015, 01:19:50 PM):

Update 426

Did a little touching up on the shelter gates, bringing over some tech from the region gates to make it look better. Old ones were running on a different shader which had a bunch of problems, and suffered from compression making there be a lot of little pixel-wide holes in the machinery. Using some techniques from the region gates I got that back up to an acceptable degree of solid:



Also, little flaps at the entrance! As those of you who played the game at PAX might remember, you were usually blocked until the machinery was finished by some sort of invisible wall, which was obviously not the most intuitive solution. Now there are little hatches that won't open until you are actually allowed to go through. Crazy how this machinery used to seem extremely over-the-top, and now after the region gates it looks really simple!

Other than that, I'm trying to make it so that an AI creature can follow you through a region gate, or be brought with you in the case of portable critters. This is trouble, as all of the AI modules have an idea about what world they're living in, and have to re-adjust. I originally started working on a solution where each module got a NewWorld call and had to adapt and restart its internal processes accordingly, and it was to some success. However, there are maaaany AI modules, and more to come, and if I go with this solution I will have yet another piece of functionality that has to be created, tested and bug-proofed for each new AI module I write, after I have created, tested and bug-proofed it for the ones I already have. So now I'm exploring another option instead, which I hope will scale better. This idea is to just put out the entire AI of the creature and have it spawn a new one from scratch. This does have the side effect that the creature will forget a bunch of stuff, admittedly, but on the other hand most of the information it was storing was about the old region and isn't likely to be relevant again. Social relationships (when I finally get around to them) will be saved in a special data container tied to the abstract creature, to make it last over saves, and should be able to survive the AI switch. More on this as I actually accomplish something!

When this gets too frustrating, I have been resorting to some various poking around. Examples off the top of my head are: Fixing a shader bug where some distant objects would be red. Streamlining the player's in-corridor move set to make the jumps and slides more easy to pull off. Making the light source shader show one-way floors (crudely). Making a placable "garbage hole" object in the level editor for James to distribute through the junk piles in Garbage Wastes, where the garbage worms will later be able to pop out when I get around to it.

jamesprimate on May 13, 2015, 01:51:45 AM:

testing out a Shadow Urban room illuminated by lantern mice. Shhhhh!

JLJac on May 13, 2015, 11:28:36 AM:

Yes! Actually that is sort of why it's there. My reasoning is like this - with this little wait, you already have a bit of a stake in the game session as you go out into it - you have already invested 15 seconds. RW gameplay benefits hugely from higher stakes in my experience, if you care about surviving the nervous atmosphere is enhanced. Also this little wait creates a space for sort of debriefing and calming down before going out there again. "What went wrong, what am I going to do differently now, what route should I take" etc. Basically it's there to make the game not play like Super Meat Boy or similar, where you just throw yourself at death over and over. Not any disrespect to Meat Boy, I love McMillen and think he's an awesome game designer, but Meat Boy and Rain World are pursuing different goals. So the wait acts as ~ not a penalty for dying per se ~ but as an "Okay, you messed up. Here you have another go. But calm down first, think over what went wrong, and start fresh." When playing the game, at least I am enjoing it, and I didn't really hear complaints about it on the PAX floor either which has to be a good thing for something so boring as waiting. But we'll see what happens when we get beta testers on it - maybe I'll have to speed it up quite a bit at the end of the day.

What is it about the background in the shelter machinery you don't like? Should I throw some more stuff in there?


Thanks! Good to know we have some connoisseurs of grate patterns among us, those took me like a day  Actually there is quite a lot of creepy stuff going on in the dark parts of Rain World as well... But then there are also sleeping lantern mice. So it's a sort of sour-sweet mix of both!

Update 427
Yay, got pathing creatures to work while following through a region gate! Was actually not quite as horrible as I expected. Other than that, I fixed the weird bug alpha backers will know of where a lizard carrying you through a short cut sends you flying all over the screen. And made a few more art assets for Shadow Urban. James and I had a talk about the area aesthetics, and agreed that neither of us are big fans of how the effect colors on plants look in darkness, so I made a plant which doesn't use effect colors but is instead intended to look good just with the light sources moving over it. It looks decent in my test setup, but I'll have to see how it behaved in James' actual implementations and maybe do some adjustments later on - it's a heavily procedural beast that isn't always predictable.

JLJac on May 14, 2015, 02:30:13 AM:

Diving into a bit of sound stuff - trigger placement, adjustments etc, so might be a little quiet here for a day or two. Basically we're setting up a powerful infra structure for sound randomization, so the aural experience is going to be really organic. Taking a look in the sfx folder today I noticed that James has SIXTEEN (16!) sounds for the backflip jump, and similar amounts for most other player movements. Minor co-stars such as the snail has to make do with meager 8-12 variation on most of its sound effects though, so don't expect too much  And this is when he had to manually input each variation, now I've made an interface for him where the system will automatically detect a bunch of sound effects with the same name and make a pool for random selection out o them. Who knows what craziness might come out of that!

We also need more sound triggers placed, for example the vulture is silent as a ghost atm, and lantern mice and a few other things also need to have their triggers placed.

jamesprimate on May 16, 2015, 05:05:02 AM:

I'm thinking the Vulture is going to be pretty quiet outside of low pitched wing flaps, and maybe some assorted hisses and shrieks when you are dealing with it face to face. Oh also the gas jets too I guess. Want the ominous wing flaps to be an audio tell similar to how the shadow announces its presence. Something subtle, but makes you scramble for cover when you hear

JLJac on May 18, 2015, 12:29:46 PM:

Hi everyone!

So, on the subject of the devlog thing we talked about earlier, I'm making a creature that I'd rather keep silent about as I think you guys will want to discover it yourself. It's a darkness dweller, and it's REALLY scary, so I wouldn't want to spoil that for you Estimate to be done tomorrow or the day after!

jamesprimate on May 19, 2015, 12:25:02 AM:

Probably! or at least 2 of the 3. Right now were scrambling to get together a build for E3, so audio is taking a back seat for a week or so.

and regarding this creature... not to overhype it or anything, but damn it is LITERALLY my nightmare. as in, i was telling Joar what i hated most in the universe, and... then he goes and sketches it and builds an even more horrifying version in game. *shudders*

not sure if ive ever seen something like this done from a technical standpoint either. pretty cool, pretty cool.

jamesprimate on May 19, 2015, 05:19:38 AM:

EUGHHHHHHHHHH   and i had just forgoten about that worm digestive thing too ick ick ick thanks christian XD




anyway, sad thing about this dark region is that nobody will see all the nice architecture

JLJac on May 19, 2015, 01:11:36 PM:

I'd actually disagree. From a screenshot it looks like the darkness is just boring and you don't see anything, but in-game the entire thrill is moving around and only being able to map out the geometry one piece of a time. It feels like a nice mystery exploration situation, and that would be ruined if you lit the rooms or placed a lot of glowing things that could be used as reference points. I think the dark areas are going to be way better in-game than on screen shots, but let's keep it that way as it's otherwise officially known that Rain World is best in gifs... so let's let the poor actual game have something going for it 

Icky darkness creature is starting to be done. Christian's super gross gifs are on to something, but I won't give too much away ~ The behavior and the skin is done, now to make it work in the connected world. This thing is horrifying! It hates light though, so when you go down there, grab a lantern mouse and run as fast as you can!

jamesprimate on May 19, 2015, 05:17:40 PM:

oh geez youre right huh. right down to the description and everything

well thats what we get for taking so damn long 

JLJac on May 20, 2015, 02:43:34 AM:

Oh, really cool! I wouldn't really sweat it either though. The description sounded a bit similar, but the visual style and setting reminds much more of Limbo, and the gameplay seems quite different as well - more like a fighting/action game where the characters are large on the screen and geometries that are floor-oriented rather than maze like.

Also, there's a lot of room for good stuff I obviously design stuff in RW as I do because I like it that way, so when someone else is doing something similar I generally tend to like that as well haha! I wouldn't suggest that actual game makers that have actual releases in their belts are taking inspiration from me, but I really do like procedural animation and one of my aspirations for this project is that more people will get into that sort of stuff ~ So if it's already getting more common I'm stoked. Hopefully in 5 years the term "game animation" will naturally refer to the creation of body movements that are deeply tied to AI and environmental context, rather than just cartoon animation put on top of a moving block. Every step in that direction is exciting!

jamesprimate on May 20, 2015, 05:54:06 AM:

Nah nah this is just an internal build for adult swim (if I can get the damn thing uploaded!) nothing to get excited about

JLJac on May 20, 2015, 12:41:53 PM:

It's really hard to not give stuff away, I'm so used to communicating with you guys! The last thing I will say is that Chris is on to something - light provides safety only momentarily.


Thanks and welcome! Yeah I'm also a big fan of Nifflas stuff, used to play a lot of Knytt back in the day. What's really fascinating to me about those games is how effectively exploration is used to propel the player - if I remember correctly most of the games had some collectibles scattered that sort of motivated you going all over, but those were really secondary, mostly you just kept going because you wanted to see more. And it was pretty much only about the environments, the enemies were simple and few. If I remember correctly there was one or two of the games where the enemy/danger aspect was toned down almost to zero, the game was only about the joy of exploration and some light platforming challenges. It's pretty awesome how a lot of hand-made rooms can acquire that degree of value or "aura" just by you having to move between them and explore them. If you had screenshots of all the rooms in a folder you'd just flick through them pretty indifferently, but because you had to find them yourself in this huge sprawling world they each felt like a discovery.

Rain World is not as conceptually tight as those games though, it can't as easily be reduced to a core like that as it has lots of other stuff going on as well (AI, emergent interactions) for better and for worse. But we'd definitely like to harness some of that joy of exploration from the Knytt games if possible! And I think James has been doing an awesome job so far in making each room unique while still tied to its region, which is in turn stylistically tied to the game's general atmosphere as a whole. If we could pull off the stunt of having Knytt-style joy of exploration and then add the AI stuff etc on top, I would be really happy!

In progress news, I finished up creature X to the degree that it works in a connected world, reacts properly to the rain cycle, etc. Which is more than what can be said about some of the other "finished" creatures haha  Garbage worms still don't have a solid functionality for placement in the world, for example. But I'll get to it! In the mean time, I'm doing some sound stuff that James has been asking for - fixing a few errant sound triggers, adding in new sound triggers, etc. The next big challenge is water sounds, that's going to be a big one! Either it proves easier than expected, and just firing off random somewhat-contextual watery sounds will blend together and work really well, or, well, we're in for a ride!

jamesprimate on May 20, 2015, 04:07:27 PM:

Just going through some numbers, so here is the terrain report for Rain World so far: 7 regions (well, 6.5 really), 270 rooms, 359 screens.

As you know there are 12 regions planned, plus additional set pieces and transitions. So its gonna go be deeeeep!

jamesprimate on May 21, 2015, 05:57:43 AM:

finally getting to design some proper RUINS!



(well, arguably its all ruins, but you know what i mean...)

JLJac on May 21, 2015, 12:10:14 PM:

Update 428

We have been talking for a long time about how the black death screen doesn't really hold up to the visual/interactive standard of the rest of the game, so today I finally got to work on some actual in-game death rain.



Obviously still a lot of work to go, but it's a start! What I've got going so far (aside from the start of a rain shader) is basically a texture that shows what parts of the level is sheltered under terrain, and doesn't render the rain there. Basically the texture is the same size as the room's tile matrix, with pixels that represent solid tiles or tiles beneath solid tiles as black and others as white. The shader then grabs from that texture, and my usual eternal enemy the automatic smoothing of scaled-up textures actually helps me out this time by softening the edges a bit.

A concern is the water splashes going through walls, as you can see... I'll have to figure something out with that. Maybe instead of having a radial splash I could have a directional, and aim it upwards from the surface being hit.

There are a million tricky design choices that go into this. I was hesitant to even get started on it for a long time because the plants and wires are static, and it feels weird that they don't move in a situation like this. For that reason I still want the rain to be pretty binary - on or off - instead of a gradual transition, because if the rain is intense enough to mess up the image completely you are less likely to notice the adamantium ferns standing strong against the pounding.

On the other hand, we want to have some rain-related gameplay going on, fleeing from rain and the like, and that speaks for a more gradual approach where the rain can be there, but you aren't instantly dead.

Currently my idea is that the rain first comes in this stage shown above, where you can actually hide under terrain a bit. If you go out into it you should be thrown around pretty badly and drown/get crushed quickly, but scurrying a few tiles through it should be possible (if you can do it in the blind, it's impossible to see what's going on out there).

Then obviously the rain need to step it up a notch from there, or you'd be able to survive by just waiting it out in any old spot such as in the gif, which would undermine our entire game mechanic with shelters etc. What this second step should look like I don't quite know yet, currently I'm thinking about having it just gradually fade to some sort of all-encompassing complete rain mayhem. That could sort of make sense given the ambiguity of the 2D/3D aspect of the game ~ are these rooms completely closed, or are they open in the front? The answer to that question changes according to what's convenient for us haha, and in this case I'd probably say that they're open and as the rain gets really intense it gets in there and smashes everything with general watery violence.

Then comes the question of the rooms that are very obviously completely underground, what to do there? The current idea is flash flooding, just a water level that rises quickly, and maybe underwater currents that smashes everything into the walls and wreck mayhem on whatever wasn't quick enough to swim to safety. But I'll have to get to that when I get to it - outside rain first.

Another concern I have is that rain like this should generate a whole lot of water, that should be washing around and dripping/pouring everywhere. Currently I don't really know how to animate that, but it'll have to happen through shaders somehow. The super realistic scenario would be that the water has an actual fluid simulation going and is just washing along in the corridors, but I really doubt I will be able to make that happen, at least at acceptable performance. So I'll have to wing it somehow. Stay tuned!

jamesprimate on May 21, 2015, 12:54:02 PM:

Oh god I love this so much!!! It already looks better than I imagined! You guys don't know how long I've been waiting for this 

Complete agree with Christian, the radial spray through the walls looks great, adds to the perceived intensity and depth. Feature rather than a bug! Also, maybe it's hard to tell from this pic, but the rain seems to blur and obscure the exposed terrain so much that I wonder if the plants will be seen as anything but a vague outline, which would be perfect imho!

A few months ago I did a survey of literally all instances of rain in videogames, and it was pretty bad, even in modern/next gen games. This is already better than any of them, so if that's one day's progress then HELL YEAH. 

I mean, it's called Rain World, we had some expectations to meet!

jamesprimate on May 22, 2015, 10:19:12 AM:

@mark: Lydia went to last weeks! She said it was super boring other than your game, which she couldnt even get near due to the crowd of people XD I do need to make it out though. Next time!

JLJac on May 22, 2015, 11:58:48 AM:

@fizmat, that idea of a potential pause or at least slight dial back of the death rain is kinda interesting! I'll try it out!

@Teod, yeah I think so too, today I implemented some "inside" rain, or maybe rather "in front" rain, I prefer to just call it "everywhere" rain haha. It looks good in an open level, but I'll have to come up with something else for rooms that are, say, more or less underground but with a skylight where there should be rainfall.

@oldblood thank you   Yeah this doesn't make sense at all. Also I think that the terminal velocity of falling water isn't all that high, so I doubt you can get a fire-hydrant sort of effect from rain even if you have a lot of water. But, this is art here - I try to chose my moments when to attempt at things making sense and when to go with more weird expressionistic stuff, and this is definitely the latter.

@tortoiseandcrow, I think there will be a lot of flash floods, as there are a lot of underground and underground-ish rooms, but I don't want to flash flood everything. If you get flooded while you're all the way up in a Sky Islands antenna that'd mean that there is an entire ocean coming and going with each cycle, and that's more hyperbole than I can sign up for  

@darklight, welcome! I might attempt something like it, but it would be quite difficult. As RW has lots of fluid animations it wouldn't really do to have some square stuff going on for the water, it would be super Jarring, so if I do try to get water washing around it would be ~~~coooomplicated~~~

@Gimym JIMBERT, Christian, Woodledude, Nope, I have not actual fluid dynamics running. The water fall is just a square with a shader. The water in the game does have a water surface simulation running, but that is a very specific thing where it is assumed that the surface is just a curve in 2D space with water below it and air above it. Actual fluid dynamics where the water can go all over would be something completely different. I haven't really seen many examples in 2D (or 3D) games, McMillen's "Spewer" would be the exception. But if the water were to match the other water stuff visually I'd have to go crazy with shaders on top of it, and doubt the computer would be able to do millions of water particles all interacting and then the shader stuff on top. Granted, it is CPU and GPU so the burden would be split, but for the GPU I'd have to work with blurring and render textures etc (on top of grab passes) so I really think it'd be too much there, aaaaand the CPU would most likely not be able to handle the amount of particles I'd need to be happy either (which would be about 600 times more than in Spewer). So, if anything I think I'm gonna fake it some other way.

@Osteel, hi, welcome! On Rain World is James, who posted right above you there, and me! Feel free to hang around and talk, we're really nerdy and technical but if you're into that sort of stuff we're happy to answer questions etc