JLJac on May 22, 2015, 12:15:27 PM (Last Edit: May 22, 2015, 12:25:33 PM):

Update 429

More rain stuff! First of all, fixed the splashing through walls. But mostly I made the shader able to fade between different rain intensities, and added physical interactions for the rain.

First, very light rain:



If performance permits I can imagine rain at this intensity come and go a bit during normal play, it could even look pretty good with the sunlight out. But it's an entire new grab pass, so idk, I'll see if that works.

Heavy rain:



This is what I imagine to be the equivalent of very intense real-world rain. It still doesn't cause your locomotion any trouble as you can see from the pole climb, but it assumedly makes you wet and cold.

Grade A death rain:



Possible to move through, and it doesn't outright kill you, but certain movements such as jumping and climbing are really hard as you're constantly pushed down. If you're under a roof you're not affected at all though.

Grade B death rain:



Unless you have a completely covered route to the shelter you're in trouble now. It's still possible to move through, but you have limited control and are violently pushed out at the sides and thrown around in the middle. You need some horizontal momentum to go through it, so the charge jump might help you out. This rain should also kill you, although I haven't implemented that yet. I think it'll be a counter that goes down while you're in the rain, which has a constant ticking and is also decreased when you're pounded into the floor. If you're under cover you're still free to move, but in most situations you're probably done for by now.

Grade C death rain:



From here it's basically a death screen. You gradually lose control where ever you are, and everything fades to rain mayhem.

Oh, also, I just divided these into different "grades" for the sake of showing it off, in the game they exist as a smooth continuum. Also I realized looking at the gifs that the grades A and B look very similar despite having different effects, so I'm tuning that now.

Now to hook these up to some sort of progression that happens naturally in the game!

jamesprimate on May 22, 2015, 03:09:18 PM:

impending real deal death rain will have other significant tells as well, creatures hide, the screen darkens, the palette changes, etc etc., so shouldnt be that confusing to have some occasional dynamic light rain. plus, the player SHOULD be nervous about the rain! the initial reaction you describe is exactly the idea! the rain should be this constant looming existential threat, and im hoping that even as the player gets deeper into the game and understands the mechanics, the dynamic light rain instills a sense of dread, double checking to see if the other tells are there, etc. And if/when it fades out, a huge sense of relief is felt. thats the idea at least!


we live on opposite sides of the planet, so you are right: sometimes the first time actually seeing some element implemented is on TIGS! works just as well as slack or basecamp (more reliable in some ways), and way more fun too

JLJac on May 23, 2015, 03:22:37 AM:

@Christian, thank you very much! The encouragement means a lot!

@Teod, that water seems to be tile-based rather than particle based, and something along those lines is not out of the question. Just want to mess around with the visuals and make sure it's actually needed first - it would be a pretty huge project regardless. As for the light rain, there's not really a big risk of mixing it up. The actual death rain announces itself with screen shake and rumbling before it arrives (in the lingo build only that, no rain buildup) so it's probably the shaking you're going to rely on for knowing when the death rain will arrive rather than the slight rain effects.

@tortoiseandcrow, on the rain timer, that's not entirely settled yet, but will be very easy to tune. James is in favor of randomized rain cycle length, but I'm a little more hesitant. Pros are that it keeps you on the edge of your chair, and that it goes hand in hand with the procedural nature that much of the game relies on. Pros for having it be a set time (or randomized within a very narrow limit) is that then you will gradually start to learn how long a cycle is, which feels like you would be internalizing a bit of slugcat instinct, which is cool. We'll just try both, I think!

@Slader16, the annoying dev answer is that everything does, to different degrees. The less annoying dev answer is that I don't quite know yet - so far it seems to be running fine with creatures in a connected world, but I have more water effects etc that I want to experiment with, so I'm not quite there yet.

Also the performance is different between my dev environment in Unity and the compiled and finished executable, which sometimes causes some confusion. My current idea is that I will use the slower performance in the Unity editor as a sort of development "handicap", whatever I do should be playable there in order to make sure that the executable will also be playable on slightly slower machines than mine. However, sometimes the Unity editor has weird slowdowns that doesn't seem to have to do with anything - the game gets framy in just a single empty room with the player in it. It might have to do with how long the computer has gone without a restart or something like that. To make it even weirder, the fps display in Unity doesn't seem to know of these weird slowdowns. Currently I have a little bit of "ghost slowdown" like that, so it's hard to know about the rain performance until I grit my teeth and go through the horrible effort of actually restarting my computer 

jamesprimate on May 23, 2015, 09:55:15 PM:

yep, this is my thinking exactly. i mean, obviously you cant have anything approaching full randomization, that would be unfair and awful to play. the regions are setup in a way that you can find food and navigate between shelters within a certain time-frame, and so the randomization im thinking of would be a fuzzy border around that to keep you on your toes. if we could do it on a bell curve, where every once in a while you get some more extreme effects, that could be cool though. Blend that with the dynamic light rain weather patterns and you've got some potential rain PTSD brewin!

Also Joar is talking about some some subtle experience-enhancing stuff that could potentially be hidden within that variability too, so i hope it winds up working out that way!

JLJac on May 25, 2015, 01:03:47 PM:

#shelters, I'm basically agreeing with you guys' reasoning - for world building purposes they should definitely close, for gameplay reasons they should definitely not. Like hypedupdawg points out, the idea is that they should not really feel like they're designed for you - nothing in the world is. That said, looking at them it seems reasonable to assume that they are built as shelters, which they can be without specifically being built as shelters for you. This is world building stuff that is a bit fuzzy, and I don't want to explain or make explicit too much about the world. I think though that maybe we can sort of walk a line where not everything needs a very reasonable explanation - one of my favorite games is Matt Thorsons "An Untitled Story" a strange metroidvania where there is a million things throughout the large world that doesn't have an explanation, little hovering sparks that you can jump on for example. It's all very weird and if you start thinking about who placed the little sparks everywhere and why, you can't really come up with anything reasonable except "the game needed to work". STILL, the world feels really good, because it follows its own logic rather consistently. There's a ton of gamey stuff, but that just feels like the way this particular world works.

Rain World is perhaps a world that attempts to approximate physical reality more closely than An Untitled Story, but I think we must count on at least a little bit of lea way like that in this project too. There is a ton of weird stuff going on already, the shortcuts being the most notable example (you crawl into a thing, become a couple of dots and tick away through some kind of pipe until you pop out elsewhere, wtf? Not to mention all of it being 2D!!) and some of these will just have to be made a part of this world - once they feel like a natural part of the world they won't be jarring any more, and might even add to the experience by setting this world apart from ours.

Right now the shelters and the region gates trigger the same way - you run to a specific spot, and have to stand still for a couple of frames for them to activate. This is a little piece of logic, but it obviously doesn't make much sense from a physical or technical point of view. A motion sensor would've rusted, right... This is more the game's logic than anything else, and you could even argue about whether it's canon - maybe in the World of RW it works some other way, but in the Game of Rain World it works this way, similarly to how Master Chief probably will lose the bullets left in a clip if he reloads in the World of Halo, but they've excluded that part from the Game of Halo. Really fuzzy grey areas here!

@easternDragon, maybe, yes, don't know, yes! Saving might depend on how rough serialization etc is, so it's a technical thing. It's obviously going in sooner or later. Spears disappearing should definitely be fixed! Fun bug trivia - actually they don't disappear, they turn into rocks while remaining stuck to the creature, but because most creatures are black and the rocks are also black you don't see them... Vultures through short cuts, I don't know... James and I never considered it a bug and we rather like it, but no one else seems to, so maybe. Region gates should definitely be in, that's basically the big thing with this build we're working on!

@New peeps, hi and welcome! Thanks for being interested

JLJac on May 25, 2015, 01:24:37 PM:

Update 430
Have the rain hooked up to the game now, so it goes through some different stages of death rain according to a semi-random pattern. I don't sweat it too much about a little bit of randomization maybe being unfair, as if you're out and about as the rain timer reaches zero you're on borrowed time anyways - you should basically be thankful for each extra second you get  The rain has two distinct fade in behaviors, the more common being that it simply transitions from normal rain into more and more intense rain until you have the death rain. The other one has a "calm before the storm" moment where everything suddenly turns still and quiet, and then instead of fading through normal rain you will first get singular death rain drips which turn more and more dense until the wall of water strikes. I think this latter one will be really cool with the sound!

Now I have moved on to flash-flooding of underground rooms. The game recognizes three death rain modes, "rain", "flood" and "flood and rain" - the first two are self explanatory, the latter is for semi-underground rooms where you might want to see rain coming down through a skylight or something, but you'd still want to rely on flooding to actually off the player as the room is too underground-themed for it to make sense with the rain drips in front of the terrain and all that.

Flooding is going okay - I have moving water surfaces, which took a bit of work to adapt stuff (mostly the waterfalls) to work with, but now it seems to work. Where I've run into a bit of resistance is with rooms that don't have any water in them to start with - a bunch of things are uncomfortable with water suddenly being added to a room for various reasons. I definitely could add water to all rooms, and just have it hibernate off screen or something until the flooding is about to start, but that would seriously mess with my sense of cleanliness haha!

Another interesting challenge is that it seems like a Futile sprite with a shader that runs a grab pass will run that grab pass even if the sprite is turned invisible, which creates a bit of trouble. Basically the level sprite and the water sprite use the same grab pass, reading from the same register. The rain effects are supposed to do their own grab pass after that, but also write to the same register to save some memory. This has been working fine so far, but with the post-startup added water the order seems to be jumbled, and the water renders after the rain with the wrong stuff in the grab register, turning it opaque. Fun challenges!

jamesprimate on May 26, 2015, 01:07:36 PM:

Honest question: is there a point where there is too much content? No, right? Like, as long as a good portion of it is optional, then it's there for people who want to explore the world, but doesn't bog down the casual player. Interested to hear your thoughts.

JLJac on May 26, 2015, 01:46:28 PM:

Also the super mega amount of content is mostly in terms of rooms, when it comes to creatures we have a pretty manageable amount - not necessarily by choice but because I can't cram them out fast enough hehe. So it seems like what we're going towards is a very large world with not quite as many (species of) creatures in it, for good or for worse. This definitely creates the risk that people will find the world "dull" as there's a lot of rooms, but not a lot of variation as to what you actually find in it. However I think we have some measures to steer clear of that - first of all the region system, where the regions are not too huge in themselves and they each provide some visual variation. Then to that comes that many of the rooms are interesting in themselves, you'd want to explore them for the sake of it, Knytt-style. And then we have the set-pieces, which will be a boon to the explorer every now and then. So I don't think we need to worry all too much, but hey, who knows!

If it does become a problem that the world is too big, I think you could pretty easily hook up the regions with a few new connections to solve that. Like, if each region has just a few "highway rooms" that connect its region gates, that would effectually make the world smaller, and then the other rooms would exist more in the periphery to be explored or not. That's sort of the idea we're already working with right, just a bit more extreme?

Update 431

Now I have the three game over modes working, rain, flood and floodAndRain. Each of them exist and work, but I don't yet have a system for how to decide which will occur in which room - that leads into a small can of worms which is some kind of interface for manipulating room-specific settings. I've also connected them with sound triggers, so James can get started on that. We have run into a bit of a catch 22 with some of the sound stuff that requires more sophisticated code - what generally happens is that I ask James if I can get the sounds in advance because I feel I need them to tune the sound manipulating code. Then James tells me that he can't really work on them until I've placed the triggers so he can see how they behave in the game... I think the solution we're gonna roll with is that I put in a simple placeholder behavior to get James started, and then when he has some material I can go back and do a bit of tuning. We'll see how it works.

Other project of the day has been hooking the vulture up with sound triggers. Making the woooosh loops for the wings was a lot of trouble, but now I'm pretty happy with how it sounds using a placeholder sound. There's a sound trigger for when the hard (metal/glass?) feathers bump into terrain, which pitch-shifts according to feather length, which sounds pretty cool, I'm really looking forward to what James comes up with for that! There are a few triggers left to be placed, then I'll try to get a few water interaction sound triggers in as well before shipping it to James so he can get started on sound stuff after finishing the Shadow Urban region up.

jamesprimate on May 26, 2015, 11:59:59 PM:

probably rejected RW track 31 https://clyp.it/dwrl0wgk

jamesprimate on May 27, 2015, 12:16:31 AM:

oh there is still plentyyyyy of time left for dev. so dont think ill let him get off so easy on the creature bestiary XD

also, its not like each creature has to be MIT CS research paper level. hes been enthusiastically tackling the hardest ones first, but sprinkling some easy to implement / dum AI creatures that flop around will add a TON to the atmosphere but shouldnt kill us with time.

JLJac on May 27, 2015, 12:32:52 PM:

Oh those are awesome Chris Love the little slugcat face! Suburban, Drainage System, Heavy Industrial and Sky Islands (or Chimney Canopy, but that palette is the Sky Islands palette now, there has been a little switching around). I know them all too well by now!

Today I don't really have a good update for you guys, the work day has not been going amazingly I started out by finishing the vulture sound trigger placement, and then moved on to water sound trigger placement where I got stuck because my sound engine has become a convoluted mess. So I cried to James about that for a while before giving up, had lunch and walked the dog. If I didn't tell you guys, I've moved from NY to the swedish country side, and NY problems have been replaced with swedish country side problems - long story short the dog chased a cat up a tree, in the middle of the woods. It was a really tall tree and it seemed the cat couldn't get down, why I spent most of the afternoon in angst over the cat in the tree, and attempted a very failed rescue mission involving me climbing up with a sports bag that the cat did not want to get in. Don't worry though, last time I returned to the scene there was no cat in the tree and also no dead cat in the perimeter below the tree, so the cat seems to have been able to climb down after all. I basically had the same amount of trouble as I usually have with my digital little animals, just with meat space animals instead...

Sooo, I finally got back to the grind, where I've gotten started on an interface for changing what rooms will be flooded and what rooms will be rained on, and it's going quite well so far. This interface will also allow for some other room settings such as palette fades etc, that are well due by now.

In the mean time, James has been finishing up Shadow Urban, and I've given it my first spin! Don't want to say too much as we decided that this would be our semi-secret region, but I can say that it's quite beautiful and really creepy at times :D

jamesprimate on May 28, 2015, 08:37:12 AM:

ahh thx thx! Yes indeed, the humble will include steam keys!

we rarely post the link, but for people who are interested: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/product/rainworld_earlyaccess_soundtrack/FpSDLkj8s

jamesprimate on May 29, 2015, 04:13:09 AM:

is it that bundle listed above? if so, it certainly should give you access! use this: http://www.humblebundle.com/resender

JLJac on May 29, 2015, 12:21:25 PM:

Update 432
Woho! The last couple of days I've been working on a new part of infrastructure for the game which will be very important for the visual aspects. Basically the game consists of a bunch of rooms, as know. The pipeline was that the macromedia director application spit those rooms out in an incredibly slow rendering process, and generally everything that had to do with that room specifically had to happen in the director editor and then go through that rendering. Now I have set up this new separate system which will mostly be supporting the visual stuff. Basically it's a second .txt file that contains data on what palette the room is using, if the room is considered by the game as an outdoors or indoors location, and other data that will come along such as the placement of cosmetic objects. There's a little editor interface for this stuff in the Unity application, where you can load and save the settings etc. Also there's an inheritance system in place, where you can create setting templates for the regions and have the rooms in that region inherit from the templates. So you can do stuff such as setting up a region template that contains the palette for a region, and then all rooms will have that palette unless you specifically tell a room to override it.

There isn't all that much settings at this point, but the idea is to start filling that stuff in now. Thing I have in mind is for example region-specific fauna of little cosmetic insects, palette fades as you move through the world, and so on. Placement of ambient sounds and different game objects will also branch off of this system in the future.

I've passed all of this over to Prime Content Creator James Primate, so he can start working with his regions. Before sending it over I've been trying it out a little myself though, and already I think there is some cool stuff that can be done. For example I've made it so that the interior rooms in Sky Islands have a different, slightly shadier, palette than the exteriors. There's going to be a lot of little graphical touches like that coming up!

Anyhow, with the system up and running I can now move on to more specific cosmetic stuff. Hope to have something gifable soon!

jamesprimate on May 29, 2015, 07:52:29 PM:

we are *terrible* businessmen

jamesprimate on May 29, 2015, 08:18:54 PM (Last Edit: May 29, 2015, 08:36:39 PM):

oh, we have a website: http://rainworldgame.com

and like everything else it is absurdly out of date. but its like... we could spend a day updating that or we could do *actual work*, and with the crazy impossible deadlines we are slaving for, you can see what our choice tends to be.

but that said, there is a plan! (sort of.) If a couple of things come together we might be doing a re-brand for E3, fingers crossed. If that winds up being the case, updated website stuff is definitely in order. Also, a little bit further down the line once we start showing off the multiplayer build, i'll be gearing things up for streamers, and that will be our big pre-release push so efforts will be made.

for now though, keeping the head down and grinding it out.

jamesprimate on May 30, 2015, 04:48:22 AM:

holy shit! joar sent me a build with functional rain / flood cycle. its IN-CRED-I-BLE O_O

jamesprimate on May 30, 2015, 04:55:30 AM:

i think i want to try to go all out and implement sound for it before doing any vids, for MAXIMUM IMPACT. because it sooooo deserves it.

literal tears of joy 

JLJac on June 01, 2015, 01:38:07 PM:

Further somewhat unexciting stuff - the "effects" framework is working with inheritance and templates and all of that, now I'm moving on to palette fades, a functionality we've been talking about for a loooooong time in which James will be able to make certain rooms or screens have a blend between two palettes, to make soft transitions between regions and sub-regions. Seems to be going well enough! I think I will be butchering the old palette fade code though as that will get in the way, and create a new two-dimensional system where the palette status exists as a coordinate between a palette A and a palette B, and the "lit" sub-palette and the "shaded" sub-palette that it switches to as the rain gets closer. Sounds more complicated than I expect it to be, by tomorrow afternoon I think I'll have this down unless I run into some major unexpected trouble.

JLJac on June 02, 2015, 12:24:58 PM:

Okay, got palette fades working and am now pursuing garbage worms functioning as supposed to. Sorry about the state of the devlog, we're pushing for a new build which as usual means less "adding fun stuff"-mode but instead "getting the previously added stuff to actually technically work"-mode.